Lessons from beyond the classroom...

Much of my fiction deals with finding a new home and getting acquainted with it, once you've found it. It's a recurring theme in my writing I suppose, because my childhood was one of almost yearly upheaval and change. New towns, new schools, new friends all meant having to learn to be flexible and adaptive. It was a lesson I took to heart from the time I was in first grade.

Some lessons come harder than others, as I'm sure you know, but some of mine seem to have contained nested lessons. Important points safely tucked inside that would emerge as I matured enough to understand them.

One of these really began my Junior year of high school. We moved to a very rural setting from a mid-sized town. My High School had over seven hundred students when I was a Sophomore. The next year, there were only ninety six. We'd been living in a suburban neighborhood one year and in the woods the next, with our nearest neighbor a half-mile away. It took some getting used to. For example, for any entertainment, I had to either travel forty miles to get to a large enough town, or I had to make my own from what was at hand. Of course, I felt terribly deprived, but I also knew I had to fit in, so I began to wing it and soak up the prevailing rural culture as much as I could. Eventually I noticed how rich the woods were in entertainment and spent more and more time there.

One of the most surprising lessons, hidden within the general lesson of adapting to small town life, was discovering how incredibly resourceful country folks are. While they are not usually ones to blow their own horns, I found they share an ability to find useful benefits and value in almost any situation or even in discards. I learned how to look for value even in junk, which is useful to this day, despite making my wife cringe at the stuff hanging from the rafters in the attic. Ditto the garage/barn.

Coming from the "city" I had swallowed the urban myth of how country people and kids were less sharp, slow moving and slow witted. I found it exactly the opposite. Looking back, I think that year was the one where I really began to appreciate the intricacies of how other people navigate their lives. The tiny town we were situated in wasn't even close to a monochrome image. There were huge ranges of contrast between those who seemed to live well, even comfortably and the rest of us, including those who lived hand-to-mouth.

In most cases, those who lived well had found resources or skills they could always exploit for gain, while others who scraped by were always trying to ferret out new opportunities, new jobs, new partners. Always changing, always looking over the fence to see if a better deal was to be had. Needless to say, at first, I thought the more comfortable life came from wealth or land handed down. While it turned out to be true in a few cases, in most it was a matter of folks having learned to simply keep working at what they did best, not wasting effort or resources and staying on the path until they reached their goals. It came from the ability to think out of the box, to be resourceful in their approach to life, and to keep it close. Not telling the story of their struggles and their victories to everyone sometimes made them seem closed-mouth or unfriendly, but I learned it was a smokescreen so that they didn't attract too much attention to distract them.

Today, the lessons I learned that year and later, working in the woods as I entered college, have prepared me better than the lessons learned in the classroom have. It was also my personal introduction to how foolish it is to misjudge people based on outward appearances. In any case, you really don't know any real truth about anyone else until they share it with you. Shared truth like that is the highest compliment you can give another human being. It comes directly from recognizing yourself in them, no matter how different they may be.

That common ground is our connection to life itself. Being able to marvel at another person's ingenuity in the face of trouble means you're learning. Learning is our main job here and it's the one we are able to perform every single day. The lessons will just keep on coming, as long as we're alive.