Man at Work: Sunday musings…3/29/2026
1) Vacation. Funny, I know. Start a “musings…” with “vacation. Still, here I am, slowly coming down from the high of a week away with Beth, her sisters, and their husbands. Gearing up for a week of work ahead.
Vacations are good. Vacations help make the work, you know, work.
2) Mexico. My in-laws loved Mexico. Loved everything they ever learned about it. To explore Mexico they purchased a couple of timeshares, adding one in Maui some years later with a plan to will one each to their 3 daughters. Timeshares aren’t really terrific assets to inherit, their most notable aspect being 99 years of financial responsibilities. Realizing this the Hurst girls combined the three assets into one and turned it into a 10 year asset.
A lovely, special asset that we 6 visited for the last time this past week.
We are very lucky. 3 couples joined by our 3 marriages, all close friends who enjoy each other’s company and travel quite well together. As an aside the 4 couples created by my siblings and I have similar friendships and enjoy travels together. Over the week we managed to fit in something of note for each one of us, all while honoring both the gifts and the memory of Beth’s parents.
It was a great run. We are all thankful for the gift of family.
3) Work in progress. A life’s work. Work to do. Much to my surprise I find myself fully engaged in work.
“When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it–but all that had gone before.”–Jacob Riis
There is a certain nobility in work. A certain expression of self. It matters not what work we consider, and it certainly matters not what job we might occupy. It is the work that matters. The working. Riis observes and verbalizes an eternal truth, that the result of work done does not always illustrate the amount of work actually done.
No matter. The more essential lesson is one of hope. Hope and resolve. Each task before us must be approached with the hope embodied in Riis’ tale. Each strike upon the stone must be delivered with the conviction that it will be the one to finally render the stone in two. Watching someone else succeed gives one hope.
Hope is a uniquely human characteristic. Some tasks defy hope, and it is reasonable to turn away from work that generates only despair. Still, it is the hope inherent in the task at hand, the hope that our work will succeed that brings us ever back to the stone. There is still work to be done. For however many times I have managed to split the stones before me, at least one more stands between me and repose. The task at hand is doable. Hope abounds; I go to work.
However stones may remain will ne’er be split otherwise.
I’ll see you next week…
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