Take a Chance

"I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come."─Abraham Lincoln

Chance. When I think of chance as a part of human actions it applies poignantly when someone trusts someone else or their ability on purely intuitive assumptions. "I'll take a chance on you" or "there is a good chance your idea will work out" would be two statements that could illustrate actions based on "chance."

Recognizing the "chance" factor is crucial in developing powerful personal characteristics such as self-esteem or personal confidence. The old adage that you can give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day but if you teach a man to fish you will feed him for a lifetime" is in essence, taking a chance. Taking a chance that the person will take what you are offering and use it for betterment. Taking what you offer and planting it's seed to grow into a harvest that can be appreciated down the road.

Chance also goes hand-in-hand with trust. A level of trust needs to often be established before a chance will be granted. We tend to evaluate and judge who will be granted our "chances based on appearances, dispositions,  or other frankly personal preferences. I often think about how it seems to me that it is much easier to trust someone who is similar to me in ways that are applicable to the circumstances. They work in the same area, they have similar economic backgrounds, share my political or religious beliefs. A level of trust needs to be assumed to ask another to take a chance on "Me" as well. Haven't we all experienced those moments where something was offered to us but we were somehow unsure of the intentions behind the offer?

I am glad that people took a chance with me. I think of those moments before I make my decisions about people these days. It makes it far easier to exercise a generous and loving support of my fellow human. Maybe someday you or I will give a chance to someone as great as Mr. Lincoln. I like to think of that as a true possibility.

Why Do I Have To Fix It?

There was a time when Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase saw President Abraham Lincoln shining his own pair of shoes in his office at the White House.  Secretary Chase asked, "Mr. President, why are you blacking your own shoes?"  Lincoln responded to him in his own clever wisdom, "Whose shoes would you have me black, Mr. Secretary?"

I try to remember this little story when I tackle odd projects in my life.  I feel a great deal of satisfaction with the act of creating things.  And by creating, it doesn't have to be art or music or the building of new things. It can be giving new life to something old and broken. It can involve fixing something with my own hands that I may normally have asked a professional to do. Our family cars come to mind. I have become somewhat of a fix-it person and have become courageous at attempting repairs that I encounter.

I recently ran into a problem with a chainsaw, it just didn't run. I tried all the obvious stuff--bad gas, spark plug, air filter--to no avail.  It seemed like the problem was one of not getting gas to the motor. I had never torn into a small engine such as this and by the time I realized I may have gone to far, I had a workbench entirely covered with little, big, rubber, plastic, and aluminum parts. I discovered a few deteriorated rubber hoses that had grown brittle with age, (after all the saw was 20 years old) and a very dirty carburetor.  I cleaned the carb but I had to get some replacement gas line from the hardware to replace the bad stuff. Unfortunately it had grown to late to get to the store, so it would have to wait for the reassembly process to begin.

Then I forgot about this project for a couple weeks and moved on to other things (at least that's the story and I'm sticking to it).

I had put the gas line on a list of some other things that I needed to pick up from town, and I came across that while out and about one Saturday and picked it up from the local Ace Hardware Store. Which I might add, we are fortunate in Mason, to still have a hardware store, even two of them that darn near sit a block apart.

My first thought when I took the hose to the bench was "How am I going to remember the places all these parts go when I get ready to re-assemble it?"  I felt a large bit of frustrated fear, though the chain saw was already broken, I had now furthered that cause along even more. I also thought I could have just bought a new saw for $150 bucks and not had to worry about tearing this one apart and putting it back together again.

Ah, but where is the satisfaction in that?

Well, I tore into the job, slowly, looking at each part that I picked up like it was a new species that I had just that moment discovered. I began to make sense of the job and was able to put it all back together right the third time (twice I had to stop and back-up to put in a part that I overlooked). To my amazement, the darn saw fired up with just a few pulls and ran as good as it ever did.

When I look at my need to fix broken things, create a bit of new life in old, worn objects, I believe it stems from the basic fact that we grow fond of the landscape of our lives. And that landscape includes those items that have serviced you for a time. Cars, tools, bikes and even clothing become part of that very fabric (no pun intended) of the world we live in.

And right now, I am not ready to trade in all the stuff that I work and play with. Things now may be improved to be lighter and stronger and shinier, but they don't have the captured soul of "Me" dwelling inside them. This may be why Super Glue, JB Weld and Duct Tape are so popular, it holds our soul together as well as our old fishing pole.