Building

The United States was once a nation of builders. No longer. My father's generation were perhaps the last of the American independent builders. My own father, a veteran of World War II, built our family home with his own hands during the daylight  hours while working night shifts as a policeman in the early 1950s. He had earlier taken a second job for a year as a carpenter's helper to learn the trades on construction sites. There were no Youtube videos to show him what to do. Some of his friends did the same thing. It was a way to exit poverty and enter the middle class.

My easiest connections with other people over the years have occurred with the children of builders and manual laborers. We understand the value of labor. We know what it takes to raise a plumb wall or plumb a sink. We know the difference between a joist and a plank. There is a language and culture of building and maintaining. This culture is being lost in the wider American cultural soup. It has become devalued by the covert exploitation of immigrant labor. It has been corrupted by the greed and exclusivity of union labor.

There are many D.I.Y. shows on television, but I seldom meet an urban person who knows how to handle a hammer or screwdriver. Labor has become a vicarious pleasure of snack-munchers in home theaters, constructed by "the help". Virtual labor produces imaginary expertise and product.

Part of my own humanist practice is curiosity: How are things made? How are things fixed? How can I repair something that is broken? The careful accomplishment of small tasks in my home is tremendously rewarding, both financially and psychologically. This is part of being engaged with my environment in a creative and constructive way. Helping others to do small projects is an extension of that process. The bond of working together at manual labor trumps many social barriers.

A consumer culture is destructive to the environment, as we have seen fully in the past decades in the U.S.. Big cars, electronic toys, stores and homes jammed with junk. Home owners mortgaged themselves into bankruptcy to buy things. Rather than building equity or their own environments, they sacrificed their financial security at the altar of consumerism, the actual American religion.

Any personal practice must be built, not bought. Buying expensive yoga mats for trendy classes in chic studios is not an effective way to personal practice. Taking fifteen minutes a day in a quiet room to meditate lays a foundation on which to build a personal practice. Understanding how to build things helps build any practice. First, the foundation. Then the skeleton. Then the external manifestations. It takes years to intentionally build the foundation of a personal practice. Maintaining it conscientiously, like maintaining any structure, is a never-ending process.