I Am Alive
Work, Vocation, and Savoring the Serendipitous
I have the evening to myself and, were I a more disciplined man, I would be focusing on my homework. The class is a subject by which I am quite fascinated and have long loved - Spirituality - but I find it difficult to read and think on this abstract subject at the moment. Rather, I have sensed in my chest this entire day a bubbling brook of nostalgia and have been following its rolling rivulets as I reminisce on the long string of serendipitous events that have led me here. Precisely here. It has, indeed, been a spiritual journey, so perhaps I am not so far from my subject as I first thought (and yet this will not count towards my grade: c’est la vie).
And I owe you some writing! It has been quite a stretch since the last piece. I have already written about my journey into the blue collar world here and here, so what I offer you now is not exactly that.
Instead, I am thinking about the intricacies of my interior world along the way. The desires. The dreams. The uncertainties. The knowledge. And how all along that way, I have had the good graces of a kind God always with me. I have recently found myself saying aloud multiple times to multiple family, friends, and colleagues, “I have never felt more in my wheelhouse than I do at this moment of my life.” Each time I say it, it is with sincerity and diamond clarity. I have never felt so energized.
Be warned: what follows meanders as aimlessly yet purposefully as water from a new spring.
I am a plumber by trade but I am no longer in the field turning wrenches for customers (look for a forthcoming essay on that word, “customers”). It has been so since the beginning of 2023. January of that year I jumped out of the frying pan and into the cookware manufacturing plant, doing my best to instill in a class of apprentice plumbers the skills and knowledge that I had acquired in my years as a residential service plumber. And not just the specifics of which directions your Channellocks should be facing when you are wielding them in each hand, or that you should wrap painter’s tape around your masonry bit at the depth you would like hole in the concrete to be, or the skill of identifying arcane faucet stems from manufacturers that no longer exist and what might replace them. But also the art of communicating with customers, the necessity of becoming an animal person, the ability to recognize one’s emotions, the job-saving skill to enact what
has called “the motherfucker process.”1 All of this and more was divulged to the greenhorns over the course of roughly five months, at the end of which my co-instructor and I took about a month to reflect on our class, fully transition them into the field, give ourselves a brief pat on the back, and then tweak the curriculum as needed.Since then, I have had the time and opportunity to swan dive - a reference more to the reckless abandon than the pleasing visual aesthetic of the plunge - into the science of adult education, the study of leadership, the deep necessity of a growing business to have a strong sense of identity and a strong culture. I have, to the scandal of my younger self, stood unironically before the Business and Self-Improvement shelves at Barnes & Noble looking for titles. With our president’s approval I have waded neck-deep into company culture initiatives, I have acted in company commercials, I have started (and since paused) a company newsletter, and I now teach a three-day class to our field technicians on how to properly structure and run a service call, with an emphasis on communication and customer experience.
I am, in my current role, using nearly every ounce of every skill that every job I have ever had required me to have. And I am alive.
In a conversation with my wife earlier today, she thanked me for choosing to be practical rather than passionate when we were younger, when I had been faced with a fork in the road. “Look,” she said, “you chose to literally shovel shit for ten years, and now you have the career of your dreams.” In addition to being exceptionally beautiful, my wife is encouraging and wise. I reflected on her point for a moment.
Millennials are not lazy. In the twenty-aughts it was in vogue to proclaim the opposite. Those lazy, mamby-pamby, wantin’-everything-for-nothin’ Millennials. Early in my plumbing career, I was so fed up with the idea that I started a, a…a thing, called “Those Lazy Millennials” as a sort of middle finger to those media outlets that consistently shat on my generation. I knew and could count on both hands (and at least one foot) folks with whom I had graduated high school that had gone on to be notable. Sports. Music. Photography. At least one K-Pop celebrity. Aerospace engineering. Politics. Law. A Forbes 30-under-30. Some truly outstanding people with whom I wandered halls and local haunts. Millennials are many things, but lazy is not one of them.
For goodness’ sake, we invented hustle culture. And if “invented” is too strong a term, then we at least received the baton from the 90’s/00’s entrepreneurial boom. No one is quite as good at turning a beloved hobby into a side-hustle as a Millennial. No one can go from home-brewer to local-brewer like a Millennial. No one can go from raising sourdough to raising sourdough starter prices like a Millennial. We are not lazy. Far from it.
But we are inconsistent and impractical.
Often I have commented that, at least in my observation, success takes ten years. Ten years of shadow-enveloped labor. A decade of one’s nose being best friends with the grindstone. Many Millennials lack the endurance to put ten years into a career and see it become truly fruitful. When the job-soil doesn’t produce a harvest in two years’ time, we pack up and move on to the next best opportunity. In fact, this pattern is encouraged. Different but related is the pseudo-serial-entrepreneur mindset, cyclically recognizing a passion, stoking the fire, doing the work to create a business out of it, hitting the first wall of failure, and moving on to the next passion. Entrepreneurial conquest is the new Hollywood, and serial entrepreneurs are the new celebrity.
Internet virality. What a brainworm that has become. It appeals to Millennials (and maybe even more to Generations Z and Alpha) the way the lottery did/does to Boomers and Gen X. The windfall success. What those who have never won the digital lottery of “going viral” do not realize is that the virtue to withstand the weight of that virality and the success it sometimes brings is cultivated not by the success, but by the work required to become successful. It was in the very shadows in whose enveloping embrace you were willing to labor that the strength to well-use your hard won, enormous earnings is cultivated. Those unfortunate enough to win treasures beyond their comprehension by mere chance often live with regret just as big.
I have shoveled shit. I have pulled handfuls of used tampons from clogged sewage ejector pumps. I have forgotten to unplug sewage ejector pumps before working on them and received the Brown Baptism. I have been bit by dogs, mosquitos, and stray 110v wires. I have dug holes and repaired sewers and waded through corn-garnished crap cocktails. I threw my whole self into this trade when it had nothing to do with what I was passionate about.
And in the process I discovered that it did not quench my passions, nor again did it keep me from them. It cultivated them. It prepared me to use them often and well. It tutored my interior life in such a way that I found an increased capacity to engage with the activities and matters in which I find the most enjoyment, the most meaning. Meaning that I encountered in other ways this side of a spud wrench.
On a daily basis, I now get paid to do what I would do - what I do do (plumber pun intended) - for free. What I already spend my leisure time doing.
Thinking. Reading. Writing. Conversing. Teaching.
And the talents I have the opportunity to grow and exercise at work, the skills I flex and knowledge I am exposed to while on the clock, I get to deploy in service to my church. My residency as a postulant runs uncannily parallel to my role at work: reading, teaching, listening, conversing, writing, training.
I won’t tax your patience any further. I don’t know that I have a particular point in any of this except to think on and savor the serendipity of my life thus far. I am a blessed man: a wife that I love, children that I adore, work that engages my whole being, a church that tends to my soul. Chickens that give me fresh eggs. What more could I want?
Would that every person felt as fortunate as I do. I pray it is so with you.
Continue in well-laboring, friends.
“At this point I’d exhausted my entire lexicon of ‘motherfucker’-based idioms, and was running perilously low on slurs against the Japanese [Crawford was working on a Japanese motorcycle]. I was nearing a familiar point where I’ve descended through every level of madness and despair, and a certain calm takes over. I was reduced now to a more or less autistic repetition of valve cover manipulations I’d long ago determined to be futile, when suddenly the cover just fell out of its trap and lay free in my hand. This is a common experience, actually, and in an effort to save time in assembling and disassembling things with an inscrutable Oriental fit to them, I used to try to hypnotize myself into a Zen-like state of resignation at the outset. It doesn’t work, not for this Grasshopper. I have my own process, as they say. I call it the motherfucker process.” Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), pg. 119.