A Simple Ask

I routered the edges of a piece I was working on today.  I'd never used a hand held router before.  A friend helped me set it up and showed me how to use it.

It occurred to me at the time that I had no trouble asking for help.  I'm familiar with tools.  That familiarity gives me a confidence that makes it easy to admit when I don't know something, and to learn it quickly.

Adolescence is a time of low self confidence.  Kids are trying to fit into an adult world where they are simply not ready to perform.  Why are we not showing them how to DO things, hundreds of things?  Knowledge may be power, but skill, almost any skill, is confidence.  Confidence enables a person to go to the next square, to believe that they can accomplish the task at hand, and so to perform in the real world.

Isn't that what education should be?

Passion

One measure of a person’s passion is his willingness to dispense with excuses and make do with whatever lot he’s been granted.

Seizings

I'm overwhelmed with the learning that is happening in this photo.  We're rigging out Niagara.  The kids are putting seizings on the rig to keep the masts in place.  Real work, no joke.  The kind of work that not only demands they turn a tight seizing, but that they remain comfortable aloft while they do it.  It demands commitment and courage both on the part of the kids in the photo and the crew who assigned them such an important task.

Have our 21st lives become so shallow that we no longer have important, demanding tasks that we can ask of our youth?  Or are we as adults hording these tasks for ourselves to give our own lives more meaning?

Touchstones

Having a skill in your hands is a settling thing.  I was trained as a rigger.  Although it has been many years since I rigged professionally on our recent trip to Erie to work with the crew of Niagara I was asked to make a seizing.

Something almost magical happened when my hands took that spike.  Suddenly, and for just a moment, I was complete.  Or was I simply the person I had been 25 years ago when the most complicated thing in my life was the seizing I was turning?  Muscle memory?  Do your hands ever forget the tools they know so well?

As I turned my first marlin spike hitch I wished with all my heart that I could give that comfortable settled experience to all my kids.  Not possible unless they decide to pick up the spike, the wrench, the running shoes, the oar for months at a time.  When they do it will become to them a touchstone that they can visit for the rest of their lives.

Work

Station Maine's kids are normal teenagers.  Nobody is born wanting to bust their hump working, but we are born, hard wired, with the need to fit into a community.  On Niagara that community valued work highly.  The crew of Station Maine flowed with that expectation, buoyed up by older crew members who demonstrated a work ethic that found lateness for muster unacceptable, and who often worked well beyond "quitting time" because the work needs to be done.

Our society has separated work from the life of our youth.  Mom and dad work outside the home where the kids can never see or appreciate the value of those eight hours.  How can we expect them to value what they have never seen?

Self Reliance

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.  Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

                                                                                                                               . . .  e.e. cummings

A Mind

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
. . . Oliver Wendell Holmes