February 20th, 2007

After he retired from the Canadian army, my former army officer dad eventually settled into his own printing business. He always seemed to be on the brink of disaster to me before I understood that that is the natural order for business. You are either on the edge or you've slipped off into the abyss.

Anyhow, because he was always looking for ways to minimize costs, he employed his kids, such as myself, as fairly reasonable labour. So I would do mostly bindery work, glueing, stitching, running the paper cutters or scoring machines, the collators and folders, or sometimes doing those truly trivial tasks such as hand-numbering items that couldn't be run through the numbering machine.

And another cost-cutting measure he employed was to contract out some work to suppliers. One such supplier was a home-based business run by three sisters. They did some sort of bindery work.

They did this for a few years and then one day two of the sisters quit and opened up their own acupuncture practice! Yes, acupuncture. They had no previous experience, but they just decided it was something they wanted to do. Personally, I never wanted to go there to get needles stuck in me by people who just decided to do that sort of thing apparently spontaneously. I mean, would you want to go volunteer yourself as a pincushion to amateurs learning their trade?

Well, those women were middle-aged at the time, and I was young, so I just did a head-shake and fell into disbelieving wonderment that people would do something like that. But now, in a way, I sort of understand their motivations. I mean, they looked at the life ahead of them and suddenly realized they could see the path leading from their present time to their graves. There was no longer "all the time in the world" for them, and they probably had that realisation while loading up another 500 glossy brochures into a temperamental folding machine, or taping shut their 17th box of numbered invoices.

They took a U-Turn once they realised that their youth was over, and middle-age was beginning. And they panicked. And they decided to make grand changes to their lives out of, I suppose, some sense of desperation. Their lives thus far hadn't given them anything they thought they were promised, and they suddenly saw the light that if they didn't like what they were getting in their lives, they should probably stop continuing to do what they were doing.

Like I said, I can dig it—even though I am not that old, and not at all unhappy with the road I can see before me in my own life. But then, I don't work manual labour jobs like those women ... or shovel horse-shit into buckets, wash windows on scaffolds, paint the sides of buildings, detail cars, wait tables, diaper other peoples' babies, or deliver pizza brochures, either. I'm not in a hurry to change anything, even if someday I do.

But, even folks with good solid careers (like my army officer dad) sometimes make sharp turns in their lives. The classic example around these parts is the "ad executive" (who are these so-called "ad executives" anyway?) who breaks from formation one day and gives it all up to go live on one of our local Gulf Islands, becoming an "artisan" who makes "sculpture" and smokes pot and suddenly starts quoting long tracts from Jonathan Livingston Seagull between sessions of just sitting on a rock overlooking the ocean and "taking it all in" before peacefully strolling back to his combination artist's studio and ramshackle bungalow (the ex-wife got the house in West Van).

And speaking of strolling, the point I am meandering towards is the fact that we as humans have a natural tendency to always look to the hills. People like me—those who are able-bodied and university educated, professionally employed and blessed with enough spare time to need amusements—are Just Not Happy unless we are pining for something else. Take the ad executive I just mentioned: He had as much as he was ever going to need, certainly as much as he could reasonably expect in life, and he decided that it wasn't what he wanted after all. He traded it in on a slower more Bohemian model. And though he probably wasn't much happier, he wouldn't change it again anyhow, since that would admit the futility of all of his existences, and that would pose a thought to him that was too awful to contemplate.

The truth of the matter is that we get stuck into ruts and think that we can jump out of the ruts, not realising that what we are facing is one of the basic truths of our lives:

If we define ourselves by our professions, we will eventually reach a stage of panic where we are compelled to redefine our professions in order to redefine ourselves.

Like my dad, like those three sisters, like Mr. Ad Executive, once you start letting the work you do dictate the kind of person you are, you don't just get stuck in that rut, you become the rut.

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