I'm in my late fify's,despise present employment,working to build up my second job as a Private Investigator, 3rd year.Very frustrated.In process of networking for clients,etc.I'd like to rely on for full time but unfortunately its a matter of $$$$$$. Any words of wisdom that I could surely use.

-- Manuel Amaral (Manita@prodigy.net), November 24, 2000

Answers

Manuel, my father was an immigrant worker who worked 17 hours in a soot filled rubber factory in the early 60's. He worked 17 hours a day and shared a home with other immigrant workers, all of whom lived together for one purpose, to forge their dream. They worked with heavy sheets of hot rubber, their faces covered with black tar and their lungs unprotected so that most of them look forward to a lifetime of asthma and breathing problems. If you asked me if they despised what they did, the answer I would give you is that they did not spend any time despising it. All of them had something in their minds, a reason why they left their families behind. They had a greater plan than their individual selves, they had a future in mind. Whether it was to send back money to their homeland or whether it was to raise a family and create a new future, despising their job was not something that would have been helpful to them.

I am a son who appreciates every second my father gave to create the life I have today. I can not replicate his effort or his sacrifice or his scars, what I can do is to take on board his unbreakable vision and humble spirit, the one that never despised the moment or the work or the conditions. Sometimes we forget how we ever got here, sometimes we forget what it took to let us have what we have.

Even when we have nothing, there is something if our spirit is looking further than the short distance our eyes can see. Even in our respective lives we sometimes do not notice the invisible people who contribute to us. We flush a toilet, not realizing that people are out there every day fixing the sewage pipes and keep the system moving. We have newspapers delivered to our door in the early morning as we sleep in the comfort of our beds, never knowing the name of the father and son who drove to our front door. We have people who built our house, created bits and pieces that exist in our house, people whose work you and I will never personally thank for. We drive roads that are repaired, snow that is cleared, and garbage that is tidied but never see any of these invisible people, for all we ever get to see is our own hands and what they do.

We never sit back to realize that everybody around us are doing jobs that maybe we ourselves would not want to do, but because they do them, they are assisting us every waking day. So we despise what we do, because Manuel, we have forgotten where to look. We think what we see as our lives is worthy of our judgement, so much so that our first mistake is to forget what is important. We despise our work when we have lost our focus, forgotten the invisible people and fail to pay homage to everyone we have ever loved.

It is at this moment when we see our only selves that we must remind ourselves of what is really important, to look up and ask what is it that we despise, Our work? What we have become? Or what we choose to be?

At that moment Manuel you look up at the world and you start seeing the world through someone else's eyes and suddenly you realize that our work is not the problem. It is not the job that we have to do, it is a greater meaning in the work we do that we have to find.

-- Mark Zorro (zorromark@consultant.com), November 24, 2000.