Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker

by Richard C. Cabot

"Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take

And stab my spirit broad awake."

We are not awake. We are half asleep, dreaming over our plans, our worries, our visions. That is why we are preoccupied; looking over the head of the immediate fact, we miss the amazing beauty of face, word, and character tempered and enhanced by suffering.

Much as I hate the fault of never going beyond the fact that we see before us, I hate just as much the opposite error of not getting the full vision of the foreground. We ought always to be able to feel, at the end of any single home visit, that we have done something, accomplished something. Well: one of the things that we must make every effort to accomplish, and to feel ourselves a failure if we have not accomplished, is to find and to give pleasure, to enjoy ourselves, and if possible to give a little courage. The little embellishments of our work, the smile, the tone of voice, the jokes and courtesies of our fleeting contacts with individual patients, should be just as precious to us as any of our far-reaching plans and deep-plunging attempts to study into cases. How poignantly, how intensely Christ put this to us in saying that inasmuch as we did any good thing unto the least of his brethren we did it unto Him! I believe that He meant this not only of human beings, but of days, of moments. The least of these opportunities is infinitely precious and we are making a grievous mistake if we do not take it so.

I have known a few social assistants who make each little deed and each little moment a perfect work of art in itself. Art at its best this work is. It was my greatest single experience in 1917-18 to admire the French art for finding joy in little things, and of making beauty in little things. I asked recently a group of Americans what they had found the most admirable in their contact with the French people. Everybody present had had the experience of finding in his own hotel or pension, a femme de chambre or some other domestic who, though starting to work at five o'clock in the morning and working until late at night, nevertheless always kept joy or the appearance of joy in her work. On the first night that I was in Paris I went with a friend to dine at a restaurant very late. There was but one waitress, who had nearly finished serving an enormous number of people. She ought to have been near the end of her day's work, which our arrival prolonged still more. But I never can forget the welcoming look and tone with which she said to us, "Now I shall have the pleasure of serving you."

We need the artistic spirit, the spirit of beauty in social work. It is not opposed to, but surely very different from, the spirit of science which I have been emphasizing in the earlier chapters of this book. I must confess my impression that, on the whole, thus far, social work has been ugly. Social workers have not kept beauty and the sense of beauty in the foreground of their work. Beauty and joy always tend to drop out in social work, but this must not be. There is an old story of an inspired social assistant in Boston who had been working for a long time with a needy family who were at that time much discouraged. One day she had an idea: "What that woman needs is a blue dress. She is extraordinarily fond of that color. She has not had a new dress for a long time." And it was true. She was given a blue dress, and the history of that family afterwards began to show signs of the sort of change and upward constructive effort which had long been lacking. We cannot neglect that sort of thing, slight or sentimental though it may seem.

I remember another family in which flowers, and money spent on giving the children a chance to grow flowers, played a beneficent rôle; and still another discouraged family in which a canary bird seemed an essential element in the social work done.

There is something certainly very divine about the present moment. We shall never have it again. We are apt to think that next year we shall do something great. Then, we think, at last we shall gather up all the forces of our soul and do something worthy. But I do not believe we can tell ourselves too often in social work that now is the time, and that the opportunity of the present moment is priceless.

Hence, after trying to exemplify the backgrounds which we ought to seek out when a fellow being comes to us in trouble, I must now correct that overemphasis by paying homage to that state of mind which sees foregrounds. What we want is presence of mind—a very familiar and hackneyed phrase, but one which may grow precious to us after analysis. My complaint against the preoccupied, solemn look in the social worker's face is that the person's mind is not there with his fellow beings; it is aloof with his own troubles. He is not "in it," not all there on the spot. The necessity of joy in one's work, and the necessity of seeing the momentary and infinitely precious opportunities, come to the same thing. If you are "in it," you get your chance. To have sufficient presence of mind to seize one's chance is surely the crucial act in social work or anywhere else, for that chance does not recur.