SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT :: MID BOOK REVIEW

The days following the gift of SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT have been fortunate in terms of opportunity and perfect timing. If given this book 8 years ago, I would have thrown it on the ground and made hast in the opposite direction. But 8 years later I'm still in the same body yet not of the same mind.

Getting on in years has put my brain through many stages. While in college my focus was to escape a life of work, to somehow buy a house then pay it off and retire before age 35. These were the kinds of thoughts "college" and some of my luckier friends would fill me with. During college I held a number of jobs that neither paid well or required much attention. At the time I thought this was the door to the easy life. What I have found through my march toward the future is a myriad of blocks I hadn't anticipated. Sure, I'm still in the mode of buying a house and paying it off early but what I'm not focused with is doing it under the scheme of low pay and low thought work.

Personally speaking, the history of who I come from has been bubbling up from inside me for a while and its only in the past year and half that I've begun to listen. I come from a solid working family. My grandfather was a tradesman and craftsman for many years. He taught my father to be the same. I remember the days of going to work picking up the flooring scraps and sweeping up with the big broom. I also remembering hating every second of those moments. From those times I was implanted with a thought of "going to college is your ticket out of this life," as though the honest life was something to want to escape from. I followed those whispers into the military and eventually into college and eventually out of college and eventually into a job that I hated. As I recalled the moments of youth spent on job sites with Dad, I tried hard to recollect a moment where I could remember Dad returning home to complain about work. I couldn't see these moments. I tried to figure out why these thoughts had escaped me until I realized it was because they didn't exist. It can be said that my Dad had his words to say about the folks whom he worked around, words about the business as a whole or how the material that day just didn't want to line up, but I never remember him complaining about the work itself. Though his knees hurt, his back destroyed and his hands cut he chose not to complain. Choosing instead to go on at great lengths of how the job came out. I remember these moments with absolute clarity. His eyes and brain had worked a day, he figured out stuff and made the project come together. He was a thinker and a doer using his dirty pants and band-aid covered hands as a sort of workmanlike currency adding merit to his claims of a job that was not only done but done to the best of his ability.

Fast forward 23 years to my present. I'm at a cross-roads in life. I've gotten the college degree and my ticket to an "open future." I have proven to myself that I can be a good pervader of knowledge in this knowledge based economy. I can read books. I can pass tests. I can achieve academic success. I can even earn a degree. But what does that all mean to my soul? It hasn't made me happy. Especially with the memories of a craftsman father singing about a job well done and to the best of ones abilities. I was ashamed of who I was becoming in this world.

With these and a hundred other thoughts in my head, I have been handed this book. In these pages are thoughts I will never understand. Written in a mans poetically romantic, theologically rich verbiage that tries to explicitly set straight his own battles over the lines of thinking from doing or in his words "blue collar from white collar" and why these terms even exist in the first place. And yet for all the paragraphs that are over my head intellectually, I am given tiny morsels of wisdom that would have served me well in childhood.

In this time and of this space it has been the right book at just the right time.

The trades are what I came from,

the trades are what I tried to escape,

the trades are what I'm coming back to,

the trades are in my history,

the trades are my true freedom.

Exert from SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT

The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. Freedom from hope and fear is the Stoic ideal.