To Late We Learn
I doubt that
anyone that needs to see this will, but for the sake of others I will try. When
I was younger and even when I was still a kid I have been always over using my
body to get things accomplished. Some kids are lucky to never have that problem
but still being from a farm we were always overusing our bodies. Not that I am
afraid of work and still do what I can. It is that I was never taught the
proper way to pick things up with knees bent. Instead I would just bend over at
the waist and scoop things like feed bags, bales of hay, and whatever else came
along that needed moved.
I started
working when I was young after riding a hay wagon and just enjoying things. I wanted to be part of the family, and being
the youngest of the boys , I couldn’t wait for my turn at working . Once they
found out you could do something then it was your job for life it seemed
whether you were capable of it or not. In fact my brothers would do all they
could to point out the many positive aspects of doing a job so that they would
never have to do it again.
Some jobs were shared,
like pitching manure with a pitch fork; I usually ended up with the pitchfork
with the busted handle as I was the shortest
at the time. Other kids were allowed to go to summer camp and go swimming. We stayed
at home and shoveled crap. There was always work to do, fence to fix, and cows
to be fed and milked, all my life from age eight or so, I was firmly entrenched
in farm work and chores that needed done.
Really didn’t have
a choice about doing the chores and never really questioned it as I was growing
up , totally unaware of what it was doing to my body now. Recently I saw an
article about where they wanted to change the rules about farming to keep kids
that were my age then from even participating in farming. In some ways I feel
this is good and bad at the same time. Sorry to be so ambivalent about the
issue of child labor, but I do understand the effect it has on the body as we
grow older. The experience of working was great though, as I was much further
ahead of my peers when it came to understanding what it took to get a job done.
No matter how formidable the task might be.
Still as I am now
57 for a few more months, and I am now disabled due to problems with my back . I
have to think that starting the heavy lifting so early in life when my body was
developing and I lacked the knowledge of working smarter not harder, had
something to do with my present condition today. Also if someone would have
instructed me with how to lift a heavy object, how this would have been much
better than seeing how much I could lift as when I played football.
Regardless of
how much I worked at home I was still involved in sports at school and was soon
at the weight machine trying to push my body to the limit and beyond so I could
look like a professional football player while still in my teens. This was the norm
then as it is now. And yet not once in all my years of growing up did one
person ever think of my back. Oh they knew who to yell for when they needed the
engine block moved or needed you heft some immovable object into place so as to
avoid injury by doing it themselves. It was always get the big guy. They didn’t
want me for my smarts instead; it was for what I was capable of picking up. Yes,
it landed me a bunch of jobs, where it was necessary to lift heavy things to
get the work accomplished.
Even when I went
to work I was expendable if I failed to lift the heavy objects as they wanted me
to. In the oilfield, it was necessary to lift up to a 100 ponds of iron at
times to get the job done. Most of the time you were by yourself and in order
to get home you needed to stow your equipment as no one else was going to do it
for you. Yet again they never gave you any safety training to show you the
proper way to lift a heavy object. Yet if you had a problem like a sore back or
would file a workmen’s comp claim to cover the expenses of a medical visit,
they would be sure to dump you at the first chance they had available.
This was the way
it was then and yet I don’t feel it is much different now. We spend money to
send kids to school but unless things have changed I doubt that they teach
basic job surviving skills we so badly need today in our next generations
youth. Instead are teaching them all the same skills to get a job as a CEO
somewhere when the vast majority in reality will end up doing some kind of a
labor job requiring them to stand on their feet for hours on end, whether it is
in sales or whatever. It would be nice to see kids all become presidents of a
corporation but most are not capable of even filling out an application, let
alone running a major corporation after leaving high school. So wouldn’t it
make sense to focus on what is important to the youth to assure they live a
long and happy life?
Having a bad back
is no picnic and neither is being on disability as it you are limited in what
you can achieve. I haven’t given up and have no intention to do so. I have the flexibility
to do a lot of things I wasn’t able to of before like concentrate on how to do
things by myself. You adapt and plan how I am going to pick things up instead of
just grabbing something and hefting it into the truck. I do work smarter and
not harder, taking time to appreciate life and my circumstances of how I arrived
here at this place in my life where I have to make amends for that bad back. One
way of making amends is making people aware of what a lack of education does to
a person. Would I have been different with an understanding of how what I do
early in life affects me in the future? It is hard to say exactly how it would
have been different if at all, except knowing that if I was given instructions
and the possible side effects of what heavy lifting could do to my body , then I
would not be writing this blog at all . I would have been told.
Instead the coach
who was pushing me to be my best and kill other high school students, as they put
it, or the boss who wanted me to bend over at the waist and unload a semi full
of 60 pound boxes of dynamite, or the
other boss who wanted me to climb down in a pit and shovel clay over my head to
make sure the machine operated properly. These guys needed to be made aware
that what they were asking was eventually wearing me down. None of them has
come around to offer to help me now that I am disabled. All of them lack an understanding
of that how you perform a hard task with even something as simple as using a
shovel could ultimately land me where I am today.
Just once before I
was injured would I have liked to have seen someone instruct me or tell me to
wait to get some help before moving a heavy object. It didn’t happen and I am
not quite sure whether it is being taught now, but I think we need to have an
understanding of how something so simple can be avoided. Time isn’t all money
and whether it takes two to lift something is not going to make or break a
company as much as paying those high workmen’s comp premiums will, or how much
income is lost by folks like me as I now am unable to work due to an injury
caused by working in an unsafe manner without instruction.
After I was
injured I had more than enough instruction on what I was doing wrong, but by then
it was too little too late. We need to be aware of this as we go through our
lives , and when we see, or we encounter a situation , take time to step back
and look at how much or how little moving that object will be of importance to
you, and if there is a different way of
doing it. By all means when you see our youth out there struggling trying to
impress us with their prowess as they sometimes do, remind them that mountains
can be moved much easier when you take time to think how it should be done. But
I am sure it isn’t going to be on one person’s back alone.
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