I met a man recently who was built like a bodybuilder whose work for the last 30 years has been maintaining the casted dies in an aluminum extrusion facility. His job: check the dies to ensure everything is within tolerance so the shapes created by the dies are to customer specifications.
I visited with him in his shop for close to forty-five minutes. He wore a huge smile as he talked about the love he has for his work because of the new challenges it brings everyday.
His shop was inside a bustling factory, heated to uncomfortable levels by the furnaces that soften the metal prior to forcing it through the dies like the $500 million Play-Doh shape factory it is.
The late author Jim Harrison wrote, “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,” then followed that with a need that we have to seek “jolts of enormous electricity,” to “freshen up your feelings about being alive.”
In an elegant essay that quoted the same thoughts from Jim Harrison, John P. Weiss writes:
In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do things you used to.
It’s the case for many people that work consumes more than half of our waking hours. If you’re one of the lucky ones who manages 8 hours of sleep in a night, you might spend more than 50 percent of your awake time for 35 years working.
I don’t believe that most people love their jobs. I think most people work the job they can to provide for a family, to make ends meet, and to hopefully save a little for a rainy day. I think most people also have the cards stacked against them making escape from their current employment situation seem impossible. Fortunately, much of the time, people find fulfillment and happiness outside the workplace.
I believe it’s also true that the harder a person’s job is on them mentally, physically, and emotionally, the more difficult it is to expand the “portfolio of enthusiasms” at one’s disposal. Commercialism and consumerism have also made Western society, in particular, unsustainable. That is especially true as the cost of living in most places has far exceeded wage increases. Translation: you’re doing less with more money.
For almost every person caught in the consumerist tide, income will never keep up with the insatiable desire for more stuff.
Pursuing stuff diminishes our ability to expand our portfolio of enthusiasms in a meaningful way.
Imagine investing your time, energy, and resources in experiences that lift your spirit rather than in accumulating more possessions that do the opposite.
The man I met, drenched in the heat of his small die shop beaming with pride, reminded me that it’s worth chasing those “jolts of electricity,” and refusing to let enthusiasm be withered by things of little value.
In the end, our passions shape and define us in ways that possessions never will.
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