6 DECADES ON…

Construction laborer, carwash attendant, cafeteria worker, surveyor, furniture mover, water well driller, beer truck stocker, Hershey/General Mills/General Motors warehouse worker, humanitarian, graduate school teaching assistant, structural engineer, business owner, business director, paper delivery boy, home builder, home demolisher, urban search & rescue volunteer, Amway salesperson, natural disaster preparedness/responder/recovery/mitigation advisor, multiple volunteer positions, Lyft driver, construction & engineering instructor, exam developer, writer, and even a certified drone pilot.  Shortest job - 2 full nights in a “part-time” job – stocking 4 trucks with 750 cases of beer each, by myself, just before a July 4th weekend… case of strong back and weak mind.  Worst?  Difficult to say, because many were physically or mentally challenging, but the difficulties were offset with valuable life balance learnings.  The best?  No single one stands out. But those that afforded the luxury of helping others always filled the soul and felt most worth doing.

The mind has the peculiar ability to recall mere thoughts from 6 decades past, while the synapsis fail to fire to recall the morning’s breakfast.  At the end of this summer past, that most amazing God-given mass between my ears recalled 7 words from a passing thought many moons ago… I wonder if I can carry two?   The answer came quickly that hot day in July 1961, as I squatted, knees slightly bent, first one hand and then the other, gaining firm grasps on the widow-maker ends of two upright concrete cinder blocks.  With the straightening of the knees, each block barely left the ground, scraping against my pant legs as I carried them to my father, where he laid them on perfect mortar beds to continue the vertical rise of the wall.

Granted, not another trip to the block pallet that day resulted in carrying two blocks at a time.  At the spry age of 7, my muscle mass was limited to scrawny sinew between under-developed tendons and the wee body simply wasn’t ready for such repetitions of the kind.  But, it was my very first job in the line of many listed above and provided me with valuable tools and lessons I would draw upon in other jobs in the next 6 decades.  Each of those jobs provided life lessons that stacked onto the mountain of knowledge, experiences, mistakes, and decision-making survival skills that form the basis of the player I was, and still am, in the game of life.

With that said, I ponder… what valuable tools and lessons are young people learning in their jobs today?  It certainly is a different time.  Climate change, pandemics, X-boxes, “smart” phones, social media, x-gen, y-gen, z-gen, non-binary, them/they, and insurrections against the very foundation of our democratic government & processes with minimal punishment, have shifted life away from analog to digital.  On the other hand, we can communicate with anyone almost anywhere in the world at any time, with audio & video… a dream suggested at one time by the creators of Dick Tracy.  For what it’s worth, the shift has certainly moved many people away from cleaning the dirt off the hands with soap and water to a world of clicks, social withdrawal, depression, opioids, hacking, and insecurity as evidenced by the rise in home security systems and public surveillance cameras.

So, what tools and lessons are young people gaining today, living in a world of instant information access, be it truthful or misinformation (something referred to as “lies” when I was growing up), that will provide them with survivability skills.  We’re still human, we still have the same needs that drive the sustainability of our species, and we still have “dominion” over the earth and animals.  Apparently, but my cats seem to have the upper hand at times. Will current and future generations, largely without the dirt in their hands, be capable of successfully evolving the sustainability algorithms that got us to this point and in a positive direction?  Change happens.  I get that.  For the sake of my grandchildren and their grandchildren, I truly hope they grow up with some dirt on their hands, sore muscles at bedtime, restful sleep that enables their bright minds to learn skills to survive their life challenges, and truth without all the confusing lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.