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Dear Family and Friends,

I’m not sure if I’ve fully established how much I appreciate my current location. But in case my sentiments have lacked any sort of clarity, I’d like to state for the record that the south of France is pretty damn fine.

For instance, there are lovely parties.

Last night my fellow helpers (volunteers) and I were invited to a soirée hosted by one of Nico’s friends. The home was on the side of a stunning valley lined with vineyards and dotted with cows lazily wandering in pastures. The summer sun slowly sank over the hills, while people sipped glasses of wine, ate from a decadent buffet of quiches and laughed light-heartedly with each other. As it grew dark, strings of mini-lanterns were lit and Nina Simone records began to spin. It was a scene directly extracted from a movie about a place that makes one’s heart feel alive.

But it’s not just moments of gorgeous cinematic splendor. I actually do work here.

The main task of the week was ‘pointing’ an exterior wall of an eighteenth century castel. Some of you might not know exactly what this entails, and perhaps you are imagining me standing with my finger extended, and pointing at a big ol’ French stone building, saying, “Vous êtes un mur.” You would not be far off.

But the actual art of ‘pointing’ a wall involves replacing the mortar in between stones; mortar that forces of nature, such as wind and rain, have slowly eroded. For the work to occur, there were secondary tasks to address, such as crushing stone into sand for the mortar and constructing scaffolding (which is like a giant game of Lego). In general, the tasks were an unglamorous blend of banging rocks and getting covered in mortar goop. It was sorta fun.

And as I was working this week, I had many thoughts running through my head. Some of them ran so incredibly fast that they were lost forever. This is fairly typical.  But other thoughts were sticky and fat and slow and half-baked, and these contemplations left introspective residue that continues to provide fodder for internal dissertation. I’ve come to certain inevitable truths about myself. One is in terms of talents.

It turns out that I’m really not good at some things.

* gasp *

For instance, I’m actually quite dreadful at this type of renovation-based work. Part of it is because I lack concrete experience (pun intended), but there is also is something to be said about my personal disposition and how I’m wonderfully wired with certain talents and completely wire-less (so to speak) at other tasks. Like fixing shit.

I feel a nugget of jealousy towards those men and women who know how to repair stuff, who have the patience for renovation and large-scale restoration projects. These folks are making the world beautiful, as well as maintaining architectural gems that provide critical historical information about the people we once were. It’s important work. But I just don’t swing that way.

My lack of skills in some domains thankfully does not affect my overall self-worth. I’m good at some things.  I can write a killer tweet. I make a damn delicious black bean chili. I have the ability to effortlessly entertain a classroom of undisciplined Peruvian children in an English class. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I am really good at sleeping.

Sometimes I wonder, however, why I bother trying the stuff that doesn’t come naturally to me. Is it really worth it? Instead of trying to become something I’m not, shouldn’t I simply invest my energy in the things that I’m good at?

Wouldn’t it be most beneficial to the world if I stuck to what I knew best?

In some regards I think it would be advantageous for the world if we all stopped wasting our time on self-indulgent skill-building activities that won’t actually amount to anything.

If this is the case, then you ought to quit that Italian course now, because chances are you don’t have the years left in your life to actually speak in the capacity you want to speak. Throw in the towel on those cello classes. You’re bordering on tone deaf. And chances are you’ll never not sound like a stray cat being gangbanged. Flush your romantic dreams of building your own house down the toilet. You will take years to learn all the details of construction, and even if you manage to erect something that resembles a hut, it will probably be unstable and crush you in your sleep. Let the superfluous dreams die. Stick to what you know, right?

Or should we?

I haven’t fully formulated my thoughts on this question of whether or not we should do stuff we’re shitty at – I told you my thoughts were half-baked. But I think that, just maybe, there is a value in attempting that which doesn’t come naturally as well as the stuff that we do with ease. I’m no cranium expert, but I’ll bet that when we are challenging ourselves to try a new skill, even if we don’t become a master, our brains are encouraged to be less stuck in their ways. And attempts at other endeavors might even make us better at our strongest skills, simply because we’ll have more reference points.

What do you think?

So I’m going to keep pretending I’m a construction worker, and not only for the superficial reasons of tool belts and great tans, but because it’s probably good for my brain to do something that requires a new way of thinking. And you should sign up for the pottery classes, and even if your creations look like deformed masses of donkey poo, rest assured that it doesn’t matter.

We’re making ourselves better version of ourselves.

With gorgeous cinematic splendor,

xoxo

Daniel

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