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| Divers. Expatriates. Friends. |
Can you imagine how many skills
each of us posses? Add to this number all the skills we are acquiring
day after day. To cope with our jobs. With businesses we run. The
skills needed to make our leisure time good.
Yet so frequently we are stonewalled on our paths due to the lack of certain skills.
What should we do?
a) use every moment of our time to master some more skills
b) declare ourselves as incompetents
c) lock ourselves in the room and cry in the dark corner
d) or to learn when it is time to ask for some help
Some skills of today differ significantly from skills of yesterday. How to track a deer is not so important when visiting a supermarket. The skill how of making a canoe from a log fades compared to the negotiating skill when you are renting a canoe on the lake.
However, some skills remain same essential as they used to be.
How to interact with other living creatures and with yourself – without these skills people were doomed to the hollowness of their souls. And still are. The most neglected skill, how to accept yourself for what you are and through this to accept anything you encounter for what it is, is maybe even more important than the skill of how to operate your new ENIAC hand-phone.
When it comes to understanding of density, turbulence, temperature changes, partial pressures of air and other mixtures of gases I'm OK. Lecturing on the significance of Bernoulli equation and explaining why a hundred ton airplane doesn't fall from the sky as a brick used to be my profession.
Reading a diagram is fine by me.
However, when a small, devious mechanical part develops a tiny leak under the pressure all my skills of understanding are blown out of the window. How to dismantle the little monster without destroying half of the machinery, what to service and what not, why to change this and not that – I feel like a PhD in Comparative Philosophy trying to figure out his new state of the art coffee machine.
After weighing two remaining options, to either bang my head into the brick wall until I'm enlightened or call a friend who is a master of this and similar issues I decided for later.
I know he is overburdened with his work, he hardly gets any time to rest – but he came with a smile, checked the system and found a solution in a few minutes.
The meaning of the overused, too many times abused phrase “That's what friends are for” is clear. Yet, if your best friend doesn't have a clue what kind of help you need, do not whine nobody cares about you.
Speak up.
Yet so frequently we are stonewalled on our paths due to the lack of certain skills.
What should we do?
a) use every moment of our time to master some more skills
b) declare ourselves as incompetents
c) lock ourselves in the room and cry in the dark corner
d) or to learn when it is time to ask for some help
Some skills of today differ significantly from skills of yesterday. How to track a deer is not so important when visiting a supermarket. The skill how of making a canoe from a log fades compared to the negotiating skill when you are renting a canoe on the lake.
However, some skills remain same essential as they used to be.
How to interact with other living creatures and with yourself – without these skills people were doomed to the hollowness of their souls. And still are. The most neglected skill, how to accept yourself for what you are and through this to accept anything you encounter for what it is, is maybe even more important than the skill of how to operate your new ENIAC hand-phone.
When it comes to understanding of density, turbulence, temperature changes, partial pressures of air and other mixtures of gases I'm OK. Lecturing on the significance of Bernoulli equation and explaining why a hundred ton airplane doesn't fall from the sky as a brick used to be my profession.
Reading a diagram is fine by me.
However, when a small, devious mechanical part develops a tiny leak under the pressure all my skills of understanding are blown out of the window. How to dismantle the little monster without destroying half of the machinery, what to service and what not, why to change this and not that – I feel like a PhD in Comparative Philosophy trying to figure out his new state of the art coffee machine.
After weighing two remaining options, to either bang my head into the brick wall until I'm enlightened or call a friend who is a master of this and similar issues I decided for later.
I know he is overburdened with his work, he hardly gets any time to rest – but he came with a smile, checked the system and found a solution in a few minutes.
The meaning of the overused, too many times abused phrase “That's what friends are for” is clear. Yet, if your best friend doesn't have a clue what kind of help you need, do not whine nobody cares about you.
Speak up.
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