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I can think of nothing more salutary for modern people than remaining connected to hard physical labor. Friend and I poured a slab in my backyard yesterday. In a flush of enthusiasm, we decided we'd mix the concrete ourselves rather than call a truck. Good God...
It was a small but thick slab, required 1,000 pounds of sand, 350 pounds of cement. We rented mixer, but had to position it 90 feet from the pour and wheelbarrow the loads. Long story short - everything associated with concrete work is absolutely brutal labor. Yet how often...
strolling through this world of slabs and foundations, do we stop and thank those who do this most difficult, most thankless job? I've found calling up gratitude as a abstract concept does not work well. The way to cultivate a grateful heart is to actually do the...
work. I've built houses before, and recall the concrete guys would actually look old before their time, and often would not make it to 60. It's not only physically brutal, it's highly skilled and high-stakes - if a concrete job goes south, it's a disaster. If it is...
done perfectly, no one says a word about it. So, perhaps for the first time, as you sit in a solid, comfortable building today, give a thought - and perhaps a prayer of thanks - to the unknown men (and they are always men) who poured the foundation on which it so firmly sits.
And then give another thought to those who built the structure on that foundation. Lack of gratitude for the built world is perhaps the most corrosive modern attitude I've observed. Every large-scale constructed object represents an exhausted human being. May God bless them all.
