What is the mentality of “free”? It’s the belief that “free” means there is NO cost! Take the lunches I mentioned: sure, they’re not asking the kids who come to hand over some cash to get lunch, but that food doesn’t just materialize out of nowhere and the people there cooking and serving aren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. SOMEONE is paying for this program — in this case the federal government, which translates to the taxpayers!
Rhonda Hetzel at Down To Earth Forum has an interesting essay examining the idea that unwarranted concern over food safety has made us all dependent on pre-packaged foods. I think there is something to that.
For one thing, marketing has long focused on showing how a product fills your needs, and they’re not above creating a need where there is none, even if it means scaring you to death. I remember a friend of mine years ago trying to sell me on a vitamin program based on this apocalyptic presentation that did its best to convince us that we would all die terrible, awful deaths without their vitamins. I didn’t buy it, or the vitamins.
For another, though it may have gotten its start in marketing, the anti-germ crusade has taken on a life of its own. We are so concerned about germs that we are using stronger and stronger products whose only real effect is to force-evolve more potent germs while simultaneously weakening our own natural defenses.
Now, I’m not an un-hygenic person, but I often observed at work how many people would take their paper towel they had just dried their hands on and use it to open the door out of the restroom so they wouldn’t have to expose themselves to the germs on the door handle. I don’t know if this helped them any, but I suspect all it did was make the door handle moist, thus extending the life expectancy of any germs that were there. In any case, I didn’t do that, and I was, if not sick less often, not sick any more frequently than they were.
At the same company we had executives who would spend months at a time at our India office, living amid conditions that would make most of us shudder. Invariably they would all get terribly sick within a few weeks of arriving there. Yet they all observed that the Indians themselves were very seldom sick–and they (the executives) seldom got sick again.
Now I’m not recommending we all start living in squalor or abandon basic hygiene in order to start building up immunity to common germs, but I do think we could relax a bit and not insist on surgical-theater cleanliness for every room in our house.
Smithville Post has a good entry up for getting ideas on how to set up a garden. He doesn’t say much about it (I’ve invited him to do so in the comments–feel free to add some pressure of your own 😉 ), but the pictures alone are worth consideration. Take a look!
Tonight I was reminded again that self reliance, while a worthy goal, is sometimes at cross purposes with other values I hold to. As a Christian, I also believe in looking out for my fellow man. While I do not believe in just giving a man a fish, I sometimes may need to allow a man to fish in my pond. Allow me to explain.
There is a person in our church who supports his family by cleaning buildings, mowing lawns, painting houses, and any other odd jobs he can find. He works hard–a lot harder than I do, most likely. He knows how to fish, so to speak, but then so do I. Very little of what he does is something that I can’t do for myself.
Self reliance says I should hold on to my money by doing those tasks myself. My Christian values say I should reward this man’s industriousness by paying him to do some work for me, at least now and then. Which one wins when my values clash in such a manner? Which one should win?
Right now it’s not an issue. I don’t have the money to pay him, because I am still struggling to support my family. My business, while showing some signs of progress, is not yet putting our bank balance on a positive trajectory. But someday I will have enough money to meet my family’s needs and perhaps some to spare. At what point do I decide that while I can take care of my lawn myself, it is my Christian duty to give this man the opportunity to do it for me and thus allow him to take care of his family?
Technically, self reliance doesn’t mean you have to do everything for yourself, you just need to know how to do as much yourself as makes sense. Should I ever fall on hard times again I’m pretty sure I won’t have forgotten how to mow my own lawn. I doubt I’ll have thrown away my mower. But since my my desire to please my God is more important to me than my self reliance, I suspect I need to be taking a careful look at my finances as my business becomes more and more successful. At some point I will need to switch over from securing my own self reliance to helping others achieve it for themselves.
The deck removal/garden bed project is pretty much complete. After clearing away the decking we dug up the area. I quickly found that someone had devoted a great deal of concrete to making…I don’t know what. Every few feet I’d dig up another inverted gumdrop of concrete that served no purpose I could ascertain other than to annoy me. I now have the world’s largest concrete gumdrop collection!
The lot, when cleared, looked much like this:
In digging up the area, too, I came to realize this was not going to be choice garden soil. Much of it hadn’t seen water in years, and was little better than packed clay. I spread what compost I could get from our composters over the area and dug it in. It still looked rather rough and clumpy, but I started putting in dividers and marking out pathways before the final attempt to condition the soil a bit better.
Today, while I had my father-in-law still here to help (thanks, Dad!) I went to the home improvement store and bought 21 bags of compost. Two-thirds of it actually went around various trees in our yard, but the rest got spread over the new garden area. The kids joined in, and were actually rather helpful. It’s amazing how quickly five rakes can smooth out a garden.
Of course all we’d really done to this point is just cover over the clumpy, clay-ish soil. Next we dug it all in. Amazingly enough, it worked! The dirt smoothed right out! It’s still not perfect, and I’ll be surprised if anything grows all that well in it this year, but it’s a start. We’ve got leftover seeds we can use, so it won’t be that costly to see what we can get to grow. If it does well, every bit will help.
I’m glad the project is finally done–well, except for getting rid of the rest of the scrap wood and the concrete gumdrop collection. There are plenty of other things I can focus on now, like thinning the peaches.
I was flipping through some ads from the Sunday paper today when one caught my eye. It was an ad for Ball, the canning supply maker. That’s a company you don’t see very often these days.
It turns out that Ball is trying to appeal to a new generation of Americans. The ad focuses on two things. The first is their Ball Canning Discovery Kit, complete with a plastic basket for immersing the finished product in hot water, three canning jars, and an instruction/recipe book. The other is a completed jar of what appears to be spaghetti sauce surrounded by fresh ingredients.
Out of focus in the background is a young couple, casually dressed, cooking something together. We assume it’s the sauce. The message is fairly clear: forget grandma and her pantry full of peach preserves. For the new, hip generation, canning is all about preserving your handmade culinary masterpieces. Canning is sexy. Canning is clean and simple (the couple are both wearing spotless white shirts, which means they can’t have come near any sauce, and in a clean, featureless, airy kitchen). It’s a shared experience.
In spite of my usual cynicism toward advertising and products trying to re-image themselves, I have to give them a thumbs up. Canning is in danger of becoming a lost art, and if someone doesn’t find a way to get the younger generations interested again it will disappear with the last of Aunt Eleanor’s peaches.
What I do find interesting about the ad, however, is that thrift is in no way addressed as a motivator. With only 44 words (only a little too long for a tweet), they don’t have much time for unnecessary words. They hit such keywords as easy, simple, fresh, new, variety, delicious, and discovery. Not a single word I would normally associate with the canning I was involved in as a child (okay, maybe delicious). Not a single reference to any old ways of doing things. It’s almost like canning hasn’t existed for over two centuries as a means of storing food.
No, it’s like canning has sprung unbidden from the farmer’s market as a trendy new concept in epicureanism. It’s not old, dusty bottles of peaches and jams anymore. It’s fresh primavera sauce in single-meal bottles–a recipe no doubt easy to make, yet impressive nonetheless, and not likely to change its nature in the heat-sealing process.
I hope they succeed, in any case. They’re working on it. Also included in the ad is a coupon for two dollars off their “Discovery Kit”, and $1.50 off a case of jars. Hopefully all the trendy young couples out there who try this kit don’t get discouraged when the sauce splatters on their clean white shirts. While canning is a great way to preserve food, and it can be fun, I’ve yet to have an experience that wasn’t at least a little messy.
In any case, if you would rather dive right in instead of sticking a toe in the water, I recommend my good friend Tonya’s site, Country Home Canning. She’s got the recipes, techniques, and equipment for those who want to get serious about canning.
While this is not entirely on-topic, this essay by Rick Johnson really caught my attention and pulled on my heart strings a bit. It is well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the bottom line:
I am convinced that the greatest, most effective way we help other people is through mentoring. Being mentored or guided by positive role models is also the best way that people, especially boys, learn. Males are extremely visual and so the need to actually see an example is imperative to our learning and development process. If we continue to produce angry young men that kill each other and prey upon others our culture is doomed to collapse.
If you are a man, someone needs you. You won’t have to look far to find a male younger than you are who desperately needs what you’ve already learned. Open yourself to the opportunities to be used. I promise you will not regret it. The satisfaction you will get from seeing how you are helping to change lives with such very little effort on your part will be a magnificent blessing in your life. It will make you feel like a man!
I have been an employee in Corporate America for most of my career. I put myself through college by cleaning a department store in the mornings before school and by selling housewares in the same store at night. I got my first “real job” in a software company helping troubleshoot customer technical issues. My next job was as an internal consultant, helping create IT solutions for other departments.
Last year when I lost my job I briefly and only semi-seriously considered becoming a consultant on my own. Then I got a part time job doing data entry, and there went that. I didn’t have the flexibility needed to be a consultant, and it would mess up my unemployment benefits if I made any money at all doing it. Around the same time a friend and I started a side-business which, so far, proved to be more a distraction than a real prospect for financial independence. I enjoyed the idea of being a business owner, but the reality was…well, less than fun.
So I continued looking for a chance to get back into a nice, secure job (even though there is no such thing). Eventually I found it, or so I thought. I would be required to sell business services. I could do that, though I don’t like selling. The idea was that eventually I would bring in enough clients that my boss would need me to step up to a different position to help take care of all those clients. So I took the job, neatly overlooking the hints my boss dropped about sales being the place to make money. I didn’t care. I was working for someone again. Back in my comfort zone went I! This would be SO much better than being self-employed!
Except it wasn’t very comfortable. Even when I proved I could do the selling part it didn’t feel right. It took me the better part of a week to put my finger on it. I was pursuing security that just wasn’t there. I had no promises from my boss that another position would open up for me, or what it would even pay. I would make money only by closing sales–not just doing the work of selling, but closing sales. And if I wanted to keep eating I would need to do it again and again, month after month, and maybe someday get to move into something more stable, but may not pay well.
This was no less risky than working for myself, and perhaps more so! Here I would need to sell a certain amount, month after month, indefinitely–whether the market supported it or not. I would not have any control over the product I sold, nor would I get any benefit from any ongoing revenue from customers continuing to subscribe to the service. I would be relying on someone else’s product and rules to be able to feed my family.
It got me thinking. If I could find my own service to provide I would still have to sell, but I’d be able to keep whatever I brought in. I would have control over the quality of that service. The game would be to sell a customer once and then keep them coming back rather than bringing in an endless stream of new customers. If I sold for myself, successful sales would mean I would get to slowly transition into work I enjoy. Sales would always be a part of the job, of course, but it would not be the main activity.
Pretty soon it became obvious. If the risk was at least equal–I had to sell something to live, regardless of whose service I was selling–then I would rather sell for myself. Something had changed inside me. Unlike a year ago, I was now ready to accept the risk of failure in exchange for the greater benefits of success. I was ready to own my own future.
Who knows. Perhaps someday I’ll by desire or by necessity go back to working for someone else. But unless there is something specific I need to accomplish in doing so, I’ll likely be intent on getting back out on my own as soon as possible. I’m not going to rely on the corporate comfort zone any more. The “I’ll pay you this much to do that work” agreement lasts only as long as the employer’s desire to continue it. You can take steps to mitigate the impact of losing your job, but you can’t control when it will end.
Am I trying to justify my decision to take the risky step of entrepreneurship? Probably. I could very well be trying to psych myself up for a hard road ahead. I have no delusions of overnight success. For every day like yesterday, when it seemed a contract was all but assured, there will be days like today when the prospective client calls back and cancels the next appointment. I’m going to have to toughen up in a lot of ways.
But I do feel more engaged than I’ve felt in a long time. My first efforts to gain clients have been encouraging. I’ve been able to connect with them and open their eyes to possibilities. I do have skills and experiences that are useful to others. I’m excited about my work, and the only problem seems to be that there is just so much of it to do in starting a new business.
It’s empowering (gah, I hate that word, but sometimes it just…fits) to not be sitting around hoping some company will see my resume and want to interview me and hire me. It’s a bit intoxicating flying solo without a corporate support system to rely on–and not entirely in the “pleasant buzz” sort of way, but far too often in the “urrrp, why is the room spinning” way. It’s forcing me to face down some of my demons and bad habits which, while certainly good for me, is not overly pleasant. I am about to learn a great deal about myself, including some things I’ll probably wish I hadn’t.
But I can’t help but think that I will come through this a better person. I’ve been playing it safe for a long time, letting things happen to me in my career rather than making things happen. I’ve followed the path of least resistance for most of my life, and I think I’m tired of it. It served me well for awhile, but to quote Rodgers and Hammerstein, I’ve “gone about as fer as [I] can go”.
It is my hope that the path I’ve chosen is the path to self reliance. It’s the conscious decision to act and not just be acted upon. It’s the notion that I have a say in where I’m headed. It’s the idea that I can do what I set my mind to; that I’m capable of a great many things. It’s the realization that I can make for myself a life far different than what society tells me is the norm.
You know what I’m talking about: “Carpe Diem” and all that feel-good twaddle they crammed into “Dead Poets Society”. Except we believed it for awhile, because the movie felt right–the young men climbed onto their desks to salute Robin Williams at the risk of being expelled, after all! Then the Live Mediocrities Society beat reality back into us, and when we found we couldn’t sustain our extraordinary living long enough we decided it had to be twaddle, lest the problem be found to be us all along.
That was me. Being mediocre was okay. It was safe. But then the recession came along, and we mediocrities found ourselves in the unemployment line. Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrities everywhere, had neither succor nor absolution to offer. (Woo! Another movie reference! I’m on a roll!) It turns out he was never actually canonized.
So the time has come to choose. Do I choose to follow the failed saint or the twaddle-peddling English teacher?
Mr. Keating, may I have a heaping helping of twaddle, please?
Certainly! And Mr. Anderson! Don’t think that I don’t know that this assignment scares the hell out of you, you mole!
