Hustle and Flow

Hustle and Flow

Just got in this evening from a nice Portuguese meal at a place around the corner we always forget to visit because it's just too obvious. It’s a tapas place; we had it to ourselves and sampled several nice plates of goodies while assorted not so great variations of Xmas music played in the background.  It was mellow until one of the waiters started screwing around with his ringtones and then other patrons started arriving and messing with our wa.

Earlier in the day Edy and I planned to go out for brunch and tour a museum we’ve not seen.  By noon the plans were being re-thunk and by 4pm they we’re being re-vised in their entirety.  It was a textbook example of the old Yiddish saying about Man Planning and GOD laughing.
At 1pm Man was not laughing, I assure you.

I spent the morning cleaning out some old project files. There was stuff in there from 2004 I no longer needed and a bunch of outdated manufacturer literature that had to go to make room for new.  While purging, I ran across a bunch of older misfiled information that reminded me of when my offices flooded due to a huge water line break. I just happened to be there when it happened and had 3 minutes to grab anything that mattered and haul butt out of there. I grabbed my kids photos and a server and ran down 3 flights of stairs to the parking lot and got the kids out of there because the building was going to implode. It didn’t collapse then but it was definitely a game changer for me from that point forward.  As it turned out it took another 10 years for a tornado to finally take the building out. This may seem small, but the building was built in 1860 and had withstood floods, fires and other storms. It seems that this particular decade proved to be too much for the old girl and she just caved.  

I’m sure most of us have benchmarks we point to in our lives of places or events that were pivotal in moving us in directions not previously even on the radar. Turning points, some might call them.  For me, one important one was that flood. It had actually begun earlier with re-thinking a lot of things but to see 25+ years of “everything” go in a few minutes was hard to take. It was a foreshadowing of harder days to come.

I have worked since I was 8 mowing lawns and such and 40+ hour weeks since I was 15. It always felt good to hustle new work and amass the goodies that came with jobs well done. Multiple homes, boats, cars, art, stuff all felt like it was a direct manifestation of my hustling and provided security for the future. The flood took away some of my most prized positions and other subsequent natural disasters took most of the rest. I really began to rethink possessions in a big way from that point forward. A friend pointed out once that we only rent "it" all anyway, so ownership is an illusion.  Ah-so desu neh'.

So, going through old papers reminded me of how freeing now it is (for me) to be unburdened by “stuff”. I strongly feel that something caved in me with the flood that pointed my hustling in a more purposeful direction. What exactly that is I honestly still don’t know yet, because although the flood is long past, I’m still in the flow.