The positive effect of project-related conversations on mental well being

My brother Earl, would never hurt anybody, and not only because he comes from the best family in the world; but also because he installs floors for a living. It’s not just the measuring, cutting, laying, nailing, and other things that he does, that makes him a good person; it’s the conversations he has about doing those things.

Try being an asshole with other people when you are talking to them about installing new floors in their house, putting a new roof on it, or mowing the grass around it. Sure, you might get away with not being nice a little while, but pretty soon it will destroy your name - the word of mouth around you and your business- and you will find yourself looking for another line of work, one that does not involve conversations with people. But it is not simply an image or personal-brand issue, there is more to it than that.

Try this. Catch yourself mad about something and then while you are still mad, go to the hardware store and talk to someone who knows a lot about a project you are trying to complete around the house, let’s say, repairing a ceiling after a water leak in your attic. See if you can stay mad. No cheating. If the person you are talking to is angry or unreasonable, that does not count. But if the person is concerned about your project, offers good advice and shows you where to find the tools and supplies you need, I would be shocked if you did not leave the hardware store calmer than you entered it.

No disrespect to my friends who work in the field of psychology as researchers, professors or practitioners; but I would be willing to bet it is hard to find any better therapy than a conversation about doing something useful, particularly something with your hands.

How many accounts have you heard of a self-employed electrician spending all week solving household and commercial electrical problems, only to find himself shooting up a crowded theater on Saturday night? He might wind up falling in love with one of his customers, which of course, is a problem in itself; but he is not apt to hurt one of them.

I am not sure what to call what I am talking about, maybe something like: the positive effect of project-related conversations on mental wellbeing. 

The effect I am speaking of, starts when you walk into a hardware store. Just getting out of your truck or car and making your way in the door, calms you down. Then when you ask a clerk how to find something or how to do something, and you get the information you needed, you are reminded the world is not so bad after all.

A couple of years ago, around midnight during a winter ice storm, a huge tree fell on our house – actually our house was largely spared, but it hit our screened porch pretty flush and cut gashes in our siding and tore off the gutters. During the ensuing three or four months, I must have had a dozen or more conversations with various people on getting the tree removed from our yard and the repairs done to our house. Several times I felt like one of the contractors could have done his part faster or better, but every time I caught myself wanting to get angry or impatient, we would have another conversation and I would be peaceable again.

The guy drives into my driveway and gets out of his truck with the radio still playing and a younger assistant waiting on him, and walks up to my front door. I greet him and he tells me he is there to talk about getting the tree removed from my fence. We agree it was a big tree, although not the biggest one he has seen. In fact, he says he had one a few weeks ago two men together could not wrap their arms around; that fell on a house and took out part of the roof. We agree I was comparatively lucky. He tells me they will probably take a backhoe through my gate and into the backyard and have a guy stand in the shovel while they hold him up to the roof and let him use a chainsaw to cut through one of the big limbs keeping the tree up on my roof.

And sure enough, in a few days time I am standing in an upstairs family room window and there is a guy not two feet from my face, standing in the shovel of a backhoe with a large chainsaw, cutting through the limb. When he makes it all the way through the limb, the tree falls to the ground and the limb he has cut, swings wildly, but he is out of harms way – just barely- and the guy operating the backhoe lowers him down to the ground. I am thinking, better them than me.

Drawn like a moth to a flame, I go out on the porch and I hear them yelling above the sounds of the tractor and the chainsaws – there are other men with chainsaws cutting other parts of the tree – and during one of the breaks in the noise, one of the guys waves at me and smiles. I give him a thumbs up and say something like: “That’s a pretty rough job.” And he yells back, “Nah, all in a days work.”

Then he yells to one of his coworkers to be sure to steady himself on the limb he is on. A couple of the other guys are on the ground watching for a minute, taking in what they have accomplished so far and planning their next line of attack.

When the tree fell that night, and it did not come through our bedroom window and end our lives, it brought with it a lot of rigamarole; but it also brought the promise of weeks of project-related conversations. They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That may be, in part, because recovery is a social process.

Thinking back to the good old days when people had better memories

People don’t remember things the way they used to. When I was growing up, if somebody went to the store, they by god came home with what they went for. Nowadays, you never know what people will forget when they go to the store.

Back in the day, remembering things seem to be people’s second nature. They would just be sitting around thinking about the past and all of a sudden something important would come into their minds and they would tell you a story and you would be like, yep, that’s the way I remember it too.

I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody forgot something important around me in the last few weeks. I would be a rich man. I blame it on the internet, calculators and GPS systems. People used to take pride in remembering, now they are ecstatic if they can just put one thought in front of another one.

I remember one time I was trying to remember this guys name. It was on the tip of my tongue. He was somebody famous and I swear, everybody in the room where I was at the time, piped right up and gave me the answer almost in unison. I was blown away. I thought, now this is the good life. I got all my faculties, I am young, and everybody still cares about remembering stuff and can do it when it counts. I would be afraid to try something like that now. Everybody would be rushing for their phones to see who could Bing it first. Half of them would get the wrong answer from their search and the other half would be asking me to repeat the question.

I can remember remembering things that nobody else could remember. That always made me feel so proud. They’d be like, “Oh snap, I just can’t remember” and I would be like, “blah blah blah” and they would be like, “Yep, that’s it. Damn, how did you remember that?”

If you think about it, you know what I am talking about. Try to remember back to when you were a little child. Didn’t people remember things better then than they do now? Now, if you ask people to remember even important things they will look at you like you lost YOUR mind.

Try this little experiment. Ask somebody to remember something and see if they can remember it. Chances are, they will have forgotten it. You know I am telling it like it is. Now ask them to think back say ten years ago. Ask them if they could not remember better back then. I bet you a dollar they will say: “Hells yeah, I could remember so much better back then.”

I think part of it was people did not have to remember as much stuff back in the day. When I was a kid, if I had to remember five or six things a day, that would be a hard day. Nowadays, adults and even little kids, have to remember fifty or sixty things on easy days.

Nobody expects older people to remember much these days, but I can remember my grandma… Remember? My goodness, remember aint no word. She would remember things little kids can’t remember this day and time and she was getting along up in the years. When I was little and me and my brother and sisters would stay at her house for the weekend, she would remember every one of our names and if we went out somewhere and somebody who knew us would see us, she would look at them like they were crazy if they could not remember our names. Let’s see your average grandma do that today. She would be like: “Who you are little boy?”

I honestly believe things will only get worse. I think the day will come when people will no longer remember anything. When that day comes, you might be talking away and all of a sudden forget what day of the week it is, Monday, I believe; anyways, where was I, oh well, but you get the point.

I think people are going to regret not trying harder to remember things. Back when we all remembered every little thing, people were happier. Oh, sure, you had the occasional suicide or somebody going crazy and blowing up a church or something; but for the most part, people were happier back when they could remember things. And why not, if you think about it.

Part of the problem now is that people take their memories for granted, present company excluded. I know how valuable my memory is and I work hard at keeping it strong. Sometimes I will sit around for hours just remembering things. I will even occasionally write down the things I remember. If more people would follow my example on this, it would be a better world.

Another part of the problem is that in the future, when people cannot remember as well, they will not remember how good it was back when they could remember better. That will be a sad time. There they will be, forgetting right and left and not remember this that and the other thing and they will not even know how bad it is to not remember, because they will not be able to remember back when they were able to remember so much better.

Maybe we should all just tell each other things when we remember them. Maybe that would help. If Jack told Jill something he remembered, there is a chance Jill might remember it, but even if she cannot, Sally may be standing nearby and she might accidentally hear it and remember it. And suppose Sally happen to tell Jim what she had heard. Who knows, Jim might remember it or at least, he would have a better chance of remembering it if he heard it than if she had not bothered to tell him about it. You get the point.

Anyways, I guess I am in one of those nostalgic moods, longing for the good ole days when we all remembered things and took pride in doing so. I will leave you with this thought-provoking question. How would you like to be the last person on earth who could remember anything? See, what I mean? That would not be too pleasant now, would it?

If you came over today

If you came to our house right now, early on a Saturday afternoon, August 8, 2015; you would find me but no Tanga Bea. You and I could sit and talk in our living room, after I picked up the clean clothes we have yet to put away, telling you: “It’s because our damn house has virtually no closet space.” I would offer you a cup of tea, but you’d say you don’t drink tea. I’d say, well I would offer you some coffee, but Tanga and I don’t drink it, so we don’t have any on hand right now. You would say that’s okay, but probably start thinking how strange it is that neither of us drink coffee.

You’d probably also notice we don’t have cats or dogs and there’s no TV in our living room. Before either of us brought the subject of - "how the hell do we spend our time then" - up, I would probably start telling you how we usually sit around reading on our phones, or that and we look at Facebook or videos on youtube. In their seasons, we watch a lot of college basketball and some baseball, but that is about the only thing that ever comes on our TVs. "We have one in our bedroom and one upstairs in the family room."

I would not likely take you on a grand tour of the house. It’s old to me now and it's been a long time since we thought of it as a “showplace.”

We would sit in silence a while and then you might see the picture laying on the table between the love seat and the wall and I would say: “That’s our daughter, Stephanie. She’s our only one.” I might offer too: “The picture is laying there because we had termites and the lady who came in to check for them took it down and found holes in the wall where it had been hanging and we have just not put it back up yet, sort of waiting on the wall to be repaired, which is waiting on us repainting the living room, which is waiting on our handy friends to visit Labor Day, so they can do the job for us.” And I would tell you how it cost fifteen hundred dollars to exterminate the termites and we would both allow as to how we had gone into the wrong line of work if we really wanted to make money.

Crickets.

“You want a drink of water?” I would ask.

“No, I’m good,” you’d say.

Then I might start in about our - Tanga's and mine- distant past, how we were youth directors at two churches early on and how we had met in college before that and how we both had grown up poor…and I would probably talk until your eyes glazed over and then I might say: “Tanga will be home around four o’clock.” I would then likely explain how unfairly work was treating her these days, not giving her enough assistance in her job, to the point she had to work occasional Saturdays, when the usual person was sick or something.

I would tell you about going to work with Tanga this past week and how it was: “A real eye opener.” I would say how Tanga was like a firefighter, constantly putting out little fires. We would agree with smiles, it was probably better to put out small fires rather than big fires. Ha, we might both add.

I would say this past Thursday had been our thirty-eighth wedding anniversary, waiting just briefly for you to reply with something like: “Really, you don’t look old enough to have been married that long.” But then, when you did not say that, we would move on.

I might say how the only thing that seemed to make it possible for Tanga to get through her day was to ever so often get a phone call or visit from one of the people she confided in, so they could have a good laugh at the absurdity of the place. It would be possible to tell, I would say, that what they were really doing was figuring out how to stay sane together, rather than trying to get done whatever it was they were supposed to be getting done together. I would notice how you would have lost interest at my philosophizing about "The meaning of Tanga's work" and thus another subject would have run its course.

We would sit in silence a little while longer and then I might launch into how I used to be a lot busier at work and that in fact, I had gone through three eras thus far in my career and was currently between eras. The first era had been the early years as a junior faculty member in North Carolina, that lasted from 1988 – 1994. I would then talk about the second era that went from 1994 through 2003. That era was the one where I coordinated the MBA program at our university.

The third era, I would explain, had left me a little bitter, saying how it had run from 2004 into the middle of 2012. This was the time when I had been responsible for civic engagement activities on our campus. The funding for that effort had been cut and so we had not continued it. That is why, I would say: "I am currently looking for the last era. I might say I hope it has something to do with writing," as if it were not up to me what it had to do with.

I might listen to you talk about your life for a little while and then I yawn and say something, like – after checking the time on my phone- Tanga will be here soon. "Would you like to go out and eat when she gets here?"

If you said yes, I would go into how Tanga and I have a little difficulty finding places to eat since I am vegan.

You would joke that you would be on Tanga’s side and so it would be two on one for where we went. When she got home, you two would greet after all these months of not seeing each other and I would become, once again, the spectator.

We would most likely wind up at a steak house and I would get a bake potato and salad with the oil and vinegar dressing on the side. The lettuce would be a golden brown and the potato would have been baked before daylight and reheated in the microwave.

But at least I would have done my part, babysit you until Tanga got home and we could go out to a restaurant and I could listen to the two of you talk about life - normal stuff, of kids, of repeated attempts to lose weight, of knowing how it hurts to lose a parent, of what it is like to have the boss from hell, to be afraid of heights, to not be able to wait until retirement so you can finally take it easy.

I would pick at my potato and salad, drink my ice water with lemon and marvel at how sane you both are, in the middle of all the craziness in this world.