Valuable Work

I was out for a walk the other day, and passed a man working on his truck. The pickup was missing both passenger and driver side windows, which had been replaced with plastic held in place with duct tape. The front left fender was badly dented, and rust had begun a viral creep along the chassis. He wasn’t fixing the engine, but was toiling away on the passenger door, jerry-rigging something, it seemed to me, that had broken beyond normal repair. From what I could see of him, working seriously, grimly, irritation simmering under his frayed cap, he looked every bit a match to that old truck. He may have been living in it.

I was on a quiet residential street, and at that moment we were the only two in sight. I had no worries for my own safety, but my relatively intimate proximity to his depravation and struggle stirred a familiar mixture of pity and fear in me. I imagined myself owning that truck and fixing that door on a hot summer afternoon, and as I did so, I felt the tendrils of all that was broken and difficult in my life wrapping around my heart. I resented him a little at first for infecting me in this way, and briefly wished he and his conspicuous troubles would disappear like the heat and ache after a fever.

This only made me feel worse, vulnerable to anything less than tidy and thriving and happy. Poor guy, I thought, hoping to cleanse my mind with a little compassion. I glanced his way again, and he was still working, so focused he was likely oblivious to me. I felt I recognized that focus. I knew what it was when something had my attention, particularly a story or song I’m writing. The unfinished piece is like a problem I’ve assigned myself to solve. I don’t like problems, except when I’m willingly giving them my full attention. Then they become something else.

I walked on, thinking it did me no good to believe that truck and that door was just a problem, that this man’s whole life was just a problem. There were days my whole life felt that way, and I have never lived on the street or out of my car. But there have been far more days when I’ve experienced the miraculous transformation that occurs the moment I give over completely to whatever is before me, when I stop calling it good or bad, wanted or unwanted. How innocent and forgiving the world becomes, and how meaningful whatever job I’ve taken on. Any work can be a portal into something new, showing us in its completion the power we always possess.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com