Most of the important things in life don’t have finish lines.
This is fairly obvious for personal things like feeding your family – or simply being family – and things like staying healthy, maintaining your house, and looking after your garden.
Most of the jobs we do, the tasks we tick off as finished, are actually done in the service of these things that don’t end.
When you feel fed up with the treadmill – “I can’t believe I’m doing this again,” – it can help to ask yourself what the job you’re resenting enables you to have, do or be, and to remind yourself that the main reason you’re doing them again is simply that you’re alive, and that doing them is part of the deal.
If you read Pope John Paul’s theology on work, the key to being human seems to lie on what you described
as unending or part of the deal.