Chapter 91424
We had been discussing an issue involving my work, which I don’t care to share in the interest of not wanting it all out there. Something about my responses must have seemed out of the ordinary. The friend asked a simple question:
“Besides work, how are you? I mean I feel you are not OK; I might be wrong.”
It was a perceptive observation. I wondered how they knew.
The following day, to be transparent as well as to lay out the thoughts going through my head, I jotted down and shared 15 points to elaborate on that conversation. The last three were these:
12) I don’t know that I’m “sad”. I am burdened, preoccupied, in deep contemplation. As a result, I become less talkative, less free to relax. Being in a happy relaxed state makes me talkative. I am not feeling happy and relaxed.
14) These are ugly American problems.
15) The fact they are even “problems” in my mind is annoying to me.
The friend responded to a few of the items on my treatise, which led to this comment:
“I am talking about your rewards as well. You are Brent the human who should and cannot not be selfish, you are not Jesus."
To which I responded:
“Thanks for clarifying I am not Jesus.”
And then the friend gave me this treasure of a summation of what I stand for:
My generation doesn’t know enough about the “process”… The process of reading a book and coming to a conclusion. We have Instagram and YouTube summarizing the book that gives us the final conclusion. We don’t know the process of cooking a nice meal, we either buy fast food, or when we cook, we buy ready cut vegetables, ready to boil pasta, mix them together and eat in 10 minutes. We don’t know the process of fixing a shirt, we send it to someone to fix it for five dollars or actually we just drop it off and buy a new one. We don’t know even how to process our thoughts and feelings. We also drink cola with food to digest the food faster. We don’t appreciate the concept of a process.
Why am I saying this? The kind of work that you do is rare and weird for someone like me. You take care of the measuring, the materials, the design, the layers, the planning, step by step, and then achieve the final result.
Why am I saying this? Because people like you forget the value of their work.
Why am I also saying this? Because when you engage me to choose what color to put in your kids’ play yard, it is super useful for me…to remember the details and small choices of life.
In a nutshell, whatever you do in the coming year, it should be documented somewhere, and shared with people like me, to (help me) remember that there are difficulties in the things I take for granted, and to remember that life is all about making small changes/decisions every single point of the day.
People like you…. nobody knows them because they live the life instead of talking about it.
Whatever happens during the year, let’s start documenting the small projects, that’s called simply... life.
In other words, all the “ugly Americans” problems that you just described are not digestible all at once. Let them be digested slowly, and let’s let the process work itself out.
Let’s keep reflecting.
What is the value of my work? Remember when you told me that you spend time with elderly people feeling lonely? How would anyone in my stupid shallow generation go to this point of life?
Impossible.
We need your help, I mean it.
We forgot how to live a normal life.
It’s a super fast crazy world, and a project you have that takes a week or two, could help us to remember that behind our two crazy weeks, there is life happening, naturally, slowly.
I think you get the conclusion of my long speech.
Needless to say, I was touched. I responded with the appropriate expression of appreciation:
It’s a beautiful speech and I appreciate it so much.
The conclusion is that I am an old slow man.
