I wear a suit and tie these days but I once worked in construction for a wise hermit who lived in the hills. He taught me rough trade with a daily wisdom. It was rough in the sense that I learned roughly how to do many things. He was a master of these things and in the time I worked with him, I learned skills and a thought process, a sensibility, that has served me constantly since. It has made me a better dad, a better partner and a better man.
If I have to I can frame a house and its trusses. I can build and finish a pitched roof in asphalt, tile or aluminum. I can do rough electrical and plumbing and I have a fair hand at drywalling, mud and tape. I took my work with him as an apprenticeship in that I sought to learn all the skills I possibly could in the trades and a fair degree about myself and life in general. Today I refer to what I learned as “Skills for the Apocalypse” and I make sure to add a new skill every few years. Over the years, I learned how to grow my own food, I learned how to pickle vegetables, how to break down a harvested animal, then how to cure and store my own charcuterie. In the last year, inspired by my master, I learned the skills needed to build basic wooden boats.
My friend the hermit earned a masters degree in sociology in the late sixties and he spent some years as a social worker before transient years of hippie wanderings. He settled down with a desire to built a house for himself and his young family with his own hands and effort.
On a leg of a trip between here and there he found a century-old cedar timber house abandoned on a farm property in Eastern Ontario. If you drive country roads these days in the region, you can still find them dotting the farmscapes. He bought himself a piece of land outside of Ottawa, read a book on masonry and build a cinder-block foundation before dismantling and relocating the old farm house.
After he was finished, people gave him more work, and over the years he taught himself how to design and build magnificent country homes and cottages with unique architectural features, nestled into the landscape, finished with the fine hand of a master carpenter.
My master was a stickler for lunch. He was protective of the kind of time that people share over a meal. Every day we’d take our half hour by the woodstove in the winter, or by the shores of a lake with our feet in the water in the summer. As a ritual he brought meaningful and sometimes sacred conversation.
Sometimes we would talk about the issues of the news we’d get on the CBC and he’d reframe questions about those stories around human nature and motivations. More often he would bring philosophical questions about the nature of happiness, the role of religion in society, and the nature of freedom and of truth.
One day he asked me if I could give him examples of honest work in life. My mind immediately went to a contrast with dishonest work and so I suggested that having a job and paying taxes was honest work. Then he asked me; “if there was a career or job that one could work in that would allow them to be totally honest, that a person could put their heart and being into and fully express their natures?”
”A stage musician maybe?” I ventured, “An artist… Probably not a politician?”
”Consider this,” he responded, “At the end of the day, when you put down your tools, and you step back and look at what you’ve done, did you meet your own standards? Did you create something? Did you improve something? Did you make a contribution? Did you share your talents with the world in some way? That’s honest work”, he said. “It’s about caring what you’re doing and about doing it well.”
“It sounds like a privilege” I said. “Not everybody gets to have that kind role. I mean, grocery baggers and garbage men don’t get to have that kind of honesty. No-one would really WANT to do those jobs”
”It’s very true,” he said, “but you can have all the money in the world and miss this aspect of life; and I’d argue that you can find honest work in just about anything you do in life, especially if you aspire to this kind of personal integrity and you put in the honest effort. This kind of honesty is the source of the great treasures of the philosophers and it’s lost to those who chase materials, status, recognition and external rewards.”
”The key to honesty is also tied to a Latin phrase we learned from the philosopher Nietzsche, amor fati, it means to love ones fate, or Love of Fate. When we HAVE to do something because of circumstance, like work as a garbage man, or we have to do the dishes, or we have to act out the role of a soulless cog in a giant machine, we can do it with resentment and occupy our psychic selves with our frustrations while doing it; but when we do this we embody a type of dishonesty, our energy is at odds with our other interests. “
“Instead we can accept that it is our fate that this must be done, that this is our option, that we chose to do this and we can chose to accept it. We can fully embody that this is the path for us - in the Hindu traditions, this is called Dharma, our sacred duty and the stories of this tradition tell us that those who can fully embrace their dharma have access to spiritual gifts of performing miracles, translated from Sanskrit as Acts of Truth. Even the untouchables have access to this power.
When we can accept our situations, we can find meaning in them. When we engage with something with our whole selves we become it, and what we produce is an expression our true selves in the same manner as an artist might create a magnificent sculpture, painting or work of literature - and we can chose to do this, with gratitude and grace even in the most menial tasks. When we find the nature of Amor Fati, we become capable of honest work.”
Since those days I have spent twenty years in finance starting in banks working with business owners and moving into complex planning, business finance and financial analysis. I’ve worked with hundreds of families, business owners, executives and trades people. I miss the days when I could stand back from the work and see the transformation of a space and feel the feeling one can only get from what one can accomplish with their hands.
A secret I will share is that learning and applying a trade is a key to a magnificent life. It’s hard work. It’s long hours. For those with the aptitude and desire for this career, empires and vast fortunes await, and the ability to create things, circumstances and knowledge that can be passed down from generation to generation. More than any other group I’ve worked with in my career, people in the trades are the happiest, the most grounded and the most fulfilled.
That’s the end of lunch today he said, tossing the wax paper from his sandwich into the wood stove before picking up his tool belt and putting on his gloves. It was a cold and beautiful sunny day outside. The wax paper flared in the stove. Even at ten degrees below freezing, within a half hour we would have our jackets off as we fell into the rhythm of hand-nailing the asphalt shingles to the roof of the cottage we built, all with the backdrop of a wide frozen river in glimmering white.
”Find honest work,” said the master. Amor Fati.