The Rev. Neil O’Farrell wants you to take some control of your life and learning.
—
Learn how to do things.
I’m all for learning for its own sake. That is great. But you absolutely need to know how to do things.
A carpenter, without much invitation from me, taught me how to hold a hammer and how to drive a straight nail. If you don’t know, hold the hammer at the end of the handle, not next to the hammer head, and look at the nail and not at the hammer. That was one of the most invaluable lessons of my whole life.
You should realize that on the sissy/football player dichotomy, I’m well on the sissy side. That I can do many of the things I do comes as a big surprise to many people I know.
I set up our electric generator, bought after we lost power for the better part of a week, and I said I’d never throw away a freezer of melted food again. I know a fair amount about electrical house wiring. For the first three years in our house, my favorite gardening tool was a chain saw because of how choked the yard was with weeds and sapplings. It took me three years to clean up about an acre of land so I could start laying out flower beds. I wore out two chain saws in the process. Most everyone definitely would not see me as the chainsaw type.
A couple of weeks ago, after discovering that our cold, long winter had split open a couple of copper water pipes running under the porches, I learned how to sweat copper joints. I had a head start because I used to watch plumbers when I was a boy. The internet provided me with written instructions and some videos.
I bought the stuff I needed (including an essential pipe-cutting tool), quelled the butterflies in my stomach, and tenuously cut out the first busted piece of copper pipe, and started crafting the new joints with copper, flux, and solder. The first few joints looked very unprofessional and leaked. Undaunted, I kept working at it. By the time I hit the tenth joint, the joints weren’t as tidy as a professional plumber, but no leaks. Compare: at least $300 for a plumber, against my spending only $50 for supplies. The butterflies have all flown away.
As an adult, I’ve always lived in old houses that “needed work.” “Needs work” is one of the most pernicious, dangerous phrases in the English language. “Needs work” is a conflation of words that only Satan himself could spawn. “Needs work” is a catch-all phrase that can mean that the foundation is cracked, the roof leaks, and everything in between is dodgy.
I have learned the dividing line between what I can learn to do and when I should hire someone who knows what he’s doing is safety. I taught myself how to refinish hardwood floors. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything on the roof. Good sense trumps my sense of adventure. In the “learn to do things” paradigm, the danger-factor is a big component in calculating what you can do, and what you should leave to others. Safety is a crucial dividing line.
Learning to do things is not limited to men, by any means, but oftentimes being physically stronger is helpful, maybe sometimes essential. I try not to be sexist, but I’m practical enough to know that brute strength can be a necessary success factor. Yet, I don’t know any trade that I’ve not seen women do with great competency. I just wouldn’t arm wrestle some of these ladies.
When I was young, I remember people who could do all sorts of things from making their own soap to killing a hen for Sunday dinner. My father (a dentist) built an oversized kitchen table for a family of six children and assorted friends that doesn’t have a wobble after 50 years.
We live in a world where we throw things away. It’s because we no longer know how to fix a broken toaster. Parts used to be made of metal and appliances were worth fixing. Now they are made of plastic, and predictably break after a few years, causing us to throw them away, clogging up landfills. The planet cannot sustain our throw-away society. That is one of the reasons you need to learn how to do things.
I’m convinced that anyone who’s willing to read, who will shell out some money for the right tools, and who will take the time necessary to go slowly, can do a lot. The more you do, the more you will be willing to do in the future.
We live in a world in which there are a lot of little jobs (fixing a shaky dining room chair), but the professionals don’t want to take little jobs. Either you choose to live with that dining room chair, or you learn to fix it so that it doesn’t fall apart one day when you sit down on it.
In two houses I’ve rehabbed, I’ve used a torch to blister and scrape off all the paint on the front porches down to the bare wood, so new paint would glide on wooden columns like they were crafted only yesterday, not a century before. Old-timers knew exactly what I was doing because they had seen it done before. Younger persons thought I was out of my mind and I would burn the house down. This sissy smiled to himself.
I can walk around my house and say, “I did that. And I did that. And I did that, too.” My next door neighbor, a strong and dauntless woman, built an entire back deck. Her spouse, another strong and dauntless woman, put in a fish pond beside the deck.
It feels really good to look at something and to take pride that you did it yourself.
Yes, by all means, learn to do many things.
Like The Good Men Project on Facebook
–Photo: stephenliveshere/Flickr