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The Portfolio of Your Enthusiasms
I met a man recently who was built like a bodybuilder whose work for the last 30 years has been maintaining the casted dies in an aluminum extrusion facility. His job: check the dies to ensure everything is within tolerance so the shapes created by the dies are to customer specifications.
I visited with him in his shop for close to forty-five minutes. He wore a huge smile as he talked about the love he has for his work because of the new challenges it brings everyday.
His shop was inside a bustling factory, heated to uncomfortable levels by the furnaces that soften the metal prior to forcing it through the dies like the $500 million Play-Doh shape factory it is.
The late author Jim Harrison wrote, “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,” then followed that with a need that we have to seek “jolts of enormous electricity,” to “freshen up your feelings about being alive.”
In an elegant essay that quoted the same thoughts from Jim Harrison, John P. Weiss writes:
In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do things you used to.
