We must take care of our garden – Voltaire, Candide

Despite never having read Candide, I was familiar with the main character’s famous pronouncement from the end of the story. Not knowing much about the context, I had taken it to mean that you should focus on your own, local sphere of existence and influence rather than try to take on the larger world. The garden, however, seems to be a very deliberately chosen image and to suggest something more than just the immediate environment or home. A garden is a creation that requires maintenance and cultivation. Thus, in response to Candide, Pangloss says: “[. . .] for when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it.” The garden is a work in which we subdue the forces of nature that lead to chaos and concomitantly create something or enable something to arise.

Having been in more or less the same role for several years, I encounter many repetitive tasks in my work. The same things come up each year, and similar questions and problems arise again and again. Recently, I was dealing with just such a recurring issue, and updating the spreadsheet that we use to keep track of that particular breed of issue. In addition to the common spreadsheet shared with my teammates, I had, over time, developed a personal system of note-taking and emailing to deal with all of the associated steps. As I was filling out the sheet, making the notes, and sending the email, I felt a peculiar sense of satisfaction, peculiar because it wasn’t based on a feeling of efficiency or the contemplation of tidiness. Rather, it was based on the sense that in doing that work I was looking after my domain, a little area of the world which, through a combination of chance and deliberate choice, I happened to be in charge of. My role was to keep it thriving, holding the inevitable forces of disorder in check and allowing the things in this little area to exist with ease. I was, so to speak, caring for my garden.

‘Caring’ seemed to be a redemptive transformation of ‘managing’, a word that conjures up the more uninspiring feel that work can often have. To manage is to deal with mundane and monotonous problems. To conceive of work as care creates the potential for more meaning. In the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, care is essentially another word for human existence. Though his concept encompasses much more, it suggests the idea that in our existence we are, at a fundamental level, involved with the things around us. Our life is structured by them and the possibilities for action that they present. Work, thought of as care, might be seen as expression of this existential structure and an affirmation of our nature. We are meant to take care of a garden.