"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man."

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man.
    "After escaping slavery, his first job was loading coal onto ships. It was new, hard, dirty work. Here's how he describes it:

"'I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own.
"'There was no Master standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and my newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.'

"Dirty, backbreaking work—and he describes it as rapture, pleasure, a new existence. 

    "Next time you struggle to find meaning in whatever it is you do for paid work, think of Frederick Douglass."

~ Gena Gorlin, quoting Frederick Douglass from his Autobiographical Writings