Work

A Student's View


Study can be really hard work, as anybody who has felt exhausted after a day spent thinking will know. Conversely, a period of work can be a kind of rest for a student. There can be reflection: a chance to put into action principles learned, and to offer a practical expression of love and service. Balancing both work and study is crucial in any course given at the Beshara School. Work can be meditative, devotional and a sort of study in itself.

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a student of Beshara, it’s that I am my own teacher and am consequently responsible for the quality of my experience. In a wider definition of the word ‘work’, I interact with the physical and practical world that supports my life in all sorts of ways, including making a living. And that physical and practical world responds to my attention and to the quality of that attention.

Through work I’ve learned respect, humility, human interaction and maybe most satisfying to me, practical skills. At present I’m on a placement at the BBC, learning how to make factual radio programmes. Before that I was a cook.

Skills acquired come about through interaction with the raw materials of work: the people, the music, the computers and software, the sound of words recorded and their meanings. The same applies to the knives, vegetables, seasonings and heat of a busy kitchen. Learning by doing and by relating experience to what is happening in the moment: being ever curious – that’s respect for life.

We as humans inherit so much – I study in order to get a sense where that bounty comes from and the best ways to engage with it. It is possible to bring beautiful human order out of existing natural order, working with how things are in a way that maintains respect for that original way of things. That is how I wish to live, how I wish to love and how I wish to work.

Hester Levack, 2012