For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself - Shakespeare – Love's Labours Lost, Act IV, Sc. III
Shakespeare's comedy has entertained audiences for more than four hundred years. Of course, the "Love's Labour" whose loss he writes about speaks of romantic setbacks. Labor Day celebrates the dedicated (if aging) American workforce, not the metaphorical cemetery where all lost loves have been buried.
What of the labor "lost" by a caregiver who has worked for weeks to save a patient's life only to come to work one day to find the patient has died? Even more poignantly, we all know caregivers who have spent their entire careers loving their work and their patients in ways that have required sacrifice only to be pushed into retirement or, worse, laid off. Suddenly, all their labor can seem as if it was for naught.
Like Shakespeare's "learning," labor is "but an adjunct to ourself." This does not mean it isn't crucial. It means that we are not our work. This seemingly obvious truth is often hard to grasp. So many of us, including me, have identified ourselves so closely with our life's labor – our job – that we feel adrift when that job vanishes.
The practice of Love is never a wasted effort. Living Love is the only labor worth doing. For, Love shines through in the doing, not in the saying. Our labor as caregivers is how we show that.
There is no "author in the world" can teach the value of what we do each day. It is the gratitude we occasionally see in a patient's eye that heals. It is God's Love, seen in the hard labor of our colleagues and felt in our remembering hands, that tells us that caregiving is sacred work.
Love's labor is never "lost."
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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