Take Every Chance You Dare

If you see me walking around in the next few days rubbing my eyes, it's probably because I'm suffering from culture shock within my own state. Truth be told, it has nothing to do with the perceived inherent superiority of one situation to another, but in the past few days, I've made more rapid transition than the sales of Mrs. Pacman arcade games in the wake of Adam Jones's latest name related announcement.

This time a week ago, I was enjoying the finer things in life. Lunch at a great restaurant? No problem. Exciting events on the social calendar multiple nights per week? The usual. Doing anything more physically strenuous than lifting a coffee cup? Not likely.

This week?

Well, let's just say things have changed quite rapidly. If there were a song to describe my journey from Houston to the Rose Capitol of America, it is undoubtedly "From the Ritz to the Rubble" by the Arctic Monkeys. Granted, the song never actually uses those words, but the title is incredibly prescient.

Today instead of going to work on the 20th floor of the second tallest building in Texas, I drove with my Dad to work at a company of about 10. We loaded and unloaded rebar, we moved brush, and we sweated more than I thought was humanly possible. As much as I might have been tempted to wonder what in the world I was doing moving steel in the middle of an East Texas afternoon, I remembered a line from Kipling's great poem "If".

"If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same..."

This is not to say that the position in Houston was an absolute triumph or that my job here in Tyler is an absolute disaster. Instead, what I believe Kipling was striving to convey is the idea of constancy and contentment. The ability to learn from whatever situation you find yourself in on a given day. The understanding that even though I'm training to be an attorney, a little manual labor for a few weeks is going to make me a better man.