Fully Present

I spent five years in Hous­ton, Texas back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I moved my fam­ily down there for not a lot of money, a whole lot of work, a ton of experience.

It was a hel­la­cious expe­ri­ence in many ways. We all worked long, long, long hours — it was expected.  I remem­ber leav­ing home at 4:40 or 5:00 to get to “oper­a­tions meet­ings” that were really a goofy pressure-cooker; a lot of over­worked, exhausted peo­ple try­ing to project sales and prof­itabil­ity for the remain­der of some four-week period. We were work­ing in a whole­sale ware­house that was los­ing money with every load of gro­ceries that went out the door.

I worked Christ­mas Eve, Christ­mas night, Thanks­giv­ings, New Years, you name it.  It was insan­ity — but at the time I thought it was what I needed to do to take care of busi­ness, myself, my family.

About ten years ago I went past the ware­house when I was down in Hous­ton; it was closed. It looked like an aban­doned ghost town. It was sur­rounded by razor wire with huge expanses of con­crete: empty. The long row of doors on the dock with­out any trucks backed up: ghostly to me.

It was one of those times — per­haps one of the first — when I really was hit with the thought…“what the hell was all this for?” I mean REALLY “what the hell.”

Look­ing back, I real­ize how much of who I was depended on how I was doing at work; and was really shocked by the per­sonal sac­ri­fices we are will­ing to make; sac­ri­fices made based on self-imposed expectations.

Unbe­liev­able really.

This week­end I drove by an aban­doned fill­ing sta­tion on the way back from up north. I have wanted to take a photo of the place for quite a while. I’m glad I stopped.

It made me won­der what it was like when this place was new, and a place that sup­ported the fam­ily that lived upstairs; how hard every­one might have worked; how much well-being and liveli­hood was created.

And now its closed — like that ghost town in Houston.

Stop­ping to shoot it was actu­ally rest­ful; it was nice to think about Hous­ton and how hard the work was, how dif­fi­cult the logis­tics of sim­ply get­ting to work in a town that had com­pletely out­grown a road sys­tem; strug­gling to sup­port the family.

It’s all good to me know.  Even though they are just build­ings now, and always were, I’m glad I made the ware­house in Hous­ton more than ‘just a build­ing’ when I needed to — and that I have fig­ured out how not to do that now.

I am no longer my work.
Thank goodness.