I wanted to write something profound. Simple, maybe, but profound. But here I was, sitting, waiting for the electrician to ring the bell only so he could help fix the water heater. It was all I could think of, and it did not bother me as much. People rarely talked about the simplest things—getting groceries, getting the heater fixed, and the dishes we washed every night. Yet, these were the things that our lives revolved around.
Sure, you could have all your dreams in the palm of your hand, a house so high no one can even look up at it without getting blinded by the sun. Yet, there is a good chance you would be waiting like me for the electrician to come fix something. If you were handy, you could handle most of it yourself. I tried to do most of it myself, too. But most of life was waiting for assistance. It was the very fabric of society. You were always waiting—in traffic, in aisles, airports and stations, your own home—for someone else.
I had a deep respect for every job in the world that actually moved it, simply because I could not do it. I had never been someone who went out in the day to physically change things for others. No leader, celebrity or CEO moved the world. They only talked in the high and mighty jargon. The people like cab drivers, people who handled deliveries, electricians, hairdressers, plumbers, and on and on held the world together. The others, like me, continually spewed bullshit in words and fifty-slide presentations about hullabaloo no one will remember.
They weren’t unnecessary—most people did something significant, and everyone worked hard regardless of what they worked on. I had respect for hard work, but I could not respect someone based on how high they were in the hierarchy. I have always had a problem with it. Labels and positions meant nothing to me.
I often came off as polite but disrespectful to most people who were full of themselves. Naturally, it confused them. They could not decide if I liked them or not. For the most part, I did not. I only treated everyone as a fellow human being with the same qualms, the same heartaches, the same broken water heaters—no less, no more.
There were no Gods among us.