Work Brings Life to Masses

I am not sure how many of us can carry on working when our jobs rely on office buildings remote from our homes, fellow staff and then too machines that anchor us to a workplace of commerce. I am not sure anymore how many of us can actually handle the stresses of home life as well as we can a place away from home to work. This is the product of culture. Culture is evershifting and redefining who we are and what we do you see. And when I say all I really mean ALL -- the things we eat the way we talk and the speak of life that we do. But more men and women are now forced into what was once a very normal thing to be, a home worker with family life surrounding them. People say they will be glad when things get back to normal, yet go back a hundred or so years ago and working from home, growing your food, animals, making things to support a modest agrarian life, all of this was once very normal indeed. Oh my, how life has changed.

Glitzy glam people with pristine dress codes and accents address us with punchy, sometimes quite aggressive tactical information content to show that they are highly informed and in the know and we forget to look around as the power-source comes in via the internet as if actually in the combat zone. We all know now that we are all at risk and the outcome facing danger is more unpredictable than usual. Such cultural shifts through the decades have transformed the way that we both receive and digest the incoming minute-by-minute information and inside somewhere there is always something to make us feel sad, possibly self-pitying, depressed, anxious, happy and upbeat and much more. This method of supplying the need for the consumption of information knowledge of course, leaves us very little time for that which makes information palatable. Too much information always leads to a dearth of what is essential to our wellbeing. Information needs attention. With so much information and then too its entertainment value, we cannot engage our attention to really focus on what we really need to know. Taken down many rabbit trails then, we ultimately find that everyone broadcasting as experts are sometimes equally as confused as those try to find out the right information and to do what is right. But then there comes a point that we realise that we didn't actually choose this or that and that we have passively allowed change to happen simply by a detachment from the real things that actually surround us.

I often have asked people why they chose their occupation. I mean they go to work every day in their car and drive to a square box building, extricate themselves from their car and then unload themselves to do their occupation. Usually, they tell me it just, "sorta happened, you know. Usual scenario, college, courting, and kids. Well, I just needed a job!"

Rarely do I ever meet someone who followed a definitive career plan mapped out with steps of intent. It is also difficult to 'do our own thing' when work and the work we have has greater validating impetus on us in the eyes of our peers than us finding contentment in our jobs of ordinariness. Somehow we can end up living up to the expectations of others. If we don't get to university and get that universal degree into future security and that 'good job', our parents cannot boast in our (their) success even though we are unlikely to actually use that degree we gain in any future work that we do. University and college certification is now the common filter into finding work and even being accepted initially for even just the interview. Most people, degreed or not, actually learn from the job they do and not the degree they paid thousand upon thousands for to actually own. Often people just kind of stumbled into what they do to. And more, people rarely return to their roots once the separation is successful and they take up residence away from the family hub and exchange it for a single dorm room they pay too much for but gain their independence. The famous song of old pegs it: "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paris?" This, of course, referred to men returning from the 14-18 to the farms across the USA. How on earth could they find farm life interesting after the sophistication of Paris and Europe and all that that had had to offer? It can be something like this for anyone, even makers.

Working from home or should I say working for yourself from home and being self-employed takes a goodly amount of self-discipline. I have never been able to drift too far from the anchor of my workbench and vise for too long without knowing every minute I spent in the workshop meant food for my children and clothes to wear. Utility bills must be paid and customer-demands are ever at the forefront. Being self-employed is not "freelancing" as many seem now taught to say in uni. You are self-employed in only one sense of the term and that is that you work to pay your own wage and then too your taxes. No cheques magically appear in your bank account every month. If you are off sick there is no bottomless pit and if you did try to claim some kind of benefit you would be back in work a year before the hoop-jumping stopped, so benefits were no benefit at all, even though you actually pay into the benefits system as I did for 55 years. But the important thing is that you understand that you are not self-employed at all but your customers often become your short term employer week on week. It takes courage for a furniture maker like myself to keep going without the benefits of a long-term employment contract and all that goes with it, be that six weeks mandatory holiday pay and sick pay for if you are of sick. Nope, in the art industry (not service industries like plumbing and air conditioning repairs or electrical work) like woodworking you need gutsy pluck to develop and grow but I realised one day that overcoming difficult times would help me to develop character and that character is best formed on the anvil of adversity and not in living a cushy, risk-free life with guarantees.

It's not surprising that we have seen a rise in domestic abuse between partners and spouses since the lockdown from the pandemic.This is the saddest outcome when people become isolated away from the ability to go to the freedoms of work. The saving grace for some is going away to work and not remaining within the hub of the family day in day out for weeks. I would that every person could find the respite of handwork in some crafting or other. The reason for building vegetable growing boxes is not merely to grow things. It is physical manual dexterity in multidimensional tasking, but then too it's developing the mental acuity to overcome all of the complex issues surrounding making.

To build a veg box is simple enough, planning it and doing it is just a little more complex. But growing! Now that's a completely different dimension. 95% of people reading this have never grown a veg in their life and yet the ongoing benefits released in the brain can calm the most savage beast inside each of us. So too the benefits of owning a craft. I mean mastering it and making it yours by your own determination. Something changes us inside when we make, grow and cook. and these three things are fundamentally innate to our wellbeing and very much a part of who we are. They can lie dormant for decades, but something stirs deep inside of us when we start to just 'do'. Try to find some way to go make, bake, cook and grow. Let those creative juices form new furrows in your brain to shape, redefine and mould your life. Don't be taken too much for a ride by quick talking suits. Measure what's said and make adjustments accordingly. You are your own person with decisions to make, decide what you feel is right to do and what to own and go do it. It just takes one step.