Vince’s Daily Journal – Day 7
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Something for Nothing
Mr. Santos’ newsletter today begins with a quote from Warren Buffet, exhorting us to “find a way to make money in [our] sleep, or”, he ‘warns’,”[we] will work until we die.” I suppose that’s intending to use the horror of working my whole life to scare me into investing early and often. There’s nothing wrong with investing, nor with building a solid base of wealth to allow one more flexibility in life. But it seems that, as a culture, we’ve elevated getting the most cash for the least effort to the ultimate measure of someone’s level of success. To the point that the only value we see in work is what our cash payment will be at the end. But work gives us so many more benefits than that. As an illustration, I’ll present an example from my own life.
The summer after my first year in college was weird. At this point, I’d had a warrant served on my dorm room that April, which would eventually lead me down this road, but I had yet to be charged. I knew I wouldn’t be going back to school, but I had absolutely no idea what might be coming for me next – anything from switching to a new school to being in prison lay before me, and I had little control at the time. I was completely adrift, struggling with a ton of depression, anxiety, and uncertainty about my future, living in my parent’s home, trying to figure out what to do next. Now, my Dad’s always been good at keeping me busy around the house, lots of to-do lists with handyman type projects around the house. That summer, one of the list items Dad put out was ‘Fix Pond’. Considering that, at the time, the ‘pond’ was 3’*5′, 3′ deep hole in the ground, lined with rubber, with a stock tank perched on cinderblocks above and beside it with a pump and overflow spout to act as filter/waterfall. It was… kind of sad, if I’m being honest. But it was a gift that I created as a younger teenager (with Dad’s help) as a Mother’s Day gift to Mom, so we weren’t going to just fill it in. Well, with my need to keep occupied, and especially to keep my mind occupied from the fear of the legal issues I was facing, the pond project began to morph and grow at an incredible rate. It was only a day or two before it went from ‘Fix Pond’ to ‘Replace Pond’. What started as a 350 gallon hole in the ground, was now completely open to my imagination. I began to do some research, looking at articles on designing and building water features and rock gardens, buying landscaping books, going to demonstrations at local landscape supply stores, emailing companies to ask questions (often having to fend off offers to just do it for us)- in short, learning everything I could about pond-building. I drew up a bunch of different plans to make the pond work better where it was and mostly as it was, but the whole time I was having a lot of fun drawing out these ‘dream’ designs – landscape designs for my parent’s yard that I’d love to create if I had infinite time and resources. I don’t remember quite how we went from there to Mom and Dad hiring me for my first ever landscaping job – one of my dream designs – but it changed my entire world. Over the course of that summer I designed and built that entire landscape – which now included replacing the old pond with a large perennial garden, and installing and ~3000 gallon, multi-tiered pond with a variety of perennial plants in and around it, as well as a biologic filtration and oxygenation system that sends the recycled water down a waterfall and a 50′ long babbling brook through my parents’ backyard before dropping over another waterfall into the pond. My only tools were a pick-up, a handful of shovels and rakes, a hatchet, wheelbarrow, a few 5-gallon buckets, and a standard toolbox of hand tools, because the only way they could afford such an extravagant piece of landscaping was to do it at cost – which meant no renting of tools. Primarily, I had to rely on the abilities of my own brain and body, which forced me to confront my own self-confidence. But there was something about doing everything by hand, about every single shovelful of dirt passing through my hands, that gave me a deep sense of investment in the project which, once it was completed, grew into a profound kind of assurance in my own capability to figure things out. I didn’t work on the pond every single day (a big piece of why it took so long), and I began to notice that on days I put a bunch of work into the pond, I went to bed sore, lightly injured, and exhausted, but that I also felt immensely better about myself, was able to deal with my anxiety and fears about my legal issues, and slept well.
It took me the entire summer to build that pond, and I can still point out a good handful of scars that came from it.
These days, it’s a center point of my parents’ home. It brings a ton of wildlife into their suburban yard, a stone’s throw from the Minneapolis city line. This year they’ve seen a family of deer, a pair of mallards, a pair of wood ducks, countless songbirds, a heron or two, and even some wandering turkeys if I remember correctly. But for me, it stands as a reminder, not only of what I’m capable of when I put my mind and my back into it, but that, sometimes, the harder way is the right way, and that hard-work has a value all its own.
