I'm the one who does the hard thing

Never Done: I changed the labels in the weighing labeling machine

Full disclosure: this post is an unexpected appetizer to the Park Slope Food Coop post which will come on Wednesday, because Tuesday night I am going to go to my first ever General Meeting. I'll explain then what it means to go to General Meeting but today I want to write about why I'm the person everyone assumes will do the hard thing, whatever the hard thing is. I love my Food Coop shift. I work in Food Processing, which means I pack nuts and seeds and dried fruit and candy into little bags, weigh it and label it, and put it on the shelves. Sometimes I cut and wrap cheese, and sometimes herbs and spices and tea. I have never done the olives. Ooops. That's means now I have to.

We have new weighing/labeling machines. Well, not so new, but new within the last year or so. New enough so that I have never been there when the labels ran out. Like they did when someone was packing mango slices. Apparently nobody else had been there when it had happened either, because nobody moved to replace the labels, but instead looked to me, as if I would (of course) be the one to figure out how to execute this maneuver. And the thing is, I did it. I looked around, I found the labels, I opened up the area where the empty spools were, I studied how the spent label sheets sat in their carriage. You get the picture. I basically figured it out, and I made it work.

I am proud that I am a person who knows how to figure things out and get things done. I think it takes about 99% persistence and 96% confidence, and only about 64% actual physical know-how. But I think confidence grows with know-how, and so maybe the correlation among these qualities is relative, and the percentages shift as each of them increases. In my case, I think I have always had a pretty high level of confidence, but maybe not persistence or know-how. But I was always a physically-oriented person -- coordinated and active, so I had an innate physical know-how, even if I didn't have specific mechanical skills. And then I became a carpenter. Every day I had to figure out how to do things I had never done before, and every day I started out thinking it (whatever it was) was impossible, and every day I came home having accomplished it.

I learned two priceless lessons in my carpenter years. One: step by step. Just like Anne Lamott writes in her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, I learned that the only way anything gets accomplished is by doing it step by step. Whether you already know how to accomplish each step or not, you still need to go step by step. As a carpenter, if you have to build a book shelf, you look, you think, you draw, you plan, you measure, you shop, you measure again, you draw some more, you cut, you nail or glue and clamp, you sand, you stain. It's really not nearly as intimidating when you think about step by step, rather than thinking I have to make a bookshelf. Lesson number two: Ask people who know how to do it. (Humility: Seek wisdom from others.) I spent way too much time pretending I knew more than I did because I thought people would respect me less if they knew what I didn't know. But it turned out that as soon as I started asking seasoned carpenters for advice, they started to respect me more. And I learned all sorts of good ways to do things, and I became more seasoned.

And, of course, as I became more seasoned, I became more persistent and more confident, and now I am a person who will take apart the label machine and figure out how to replace the labels, so the People's Republic of the Park Slope can eat its dried mango slices.