The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
He was laying bricks when I saw him, doing it neatly and methodically, and let us be quite honest about it, he was taking his time. He was doing it in comfort too, for it was an inside job and he admitted that bricklaying was a good job. Just then his mate came along with a hod full of mortar. ‘That’s the fellow who really does the work’, said the bricklayer.
What puzzled me was his earlier remark to me that he would be glad to quit bricklaying. ‘Thirty-five years I’ve had of it now, and it’s a good job, but I never liked it and never will.’
One day, down by the railway line I met a man whose job seemed to me to be dreadfully monotonous. He had to walk three miles of railway track every day, checking over the nuts and bolts that hold the lines together, and the blocks that keep the lines in position. He told me that he would never get any promotion in that job, he would just go on day after day walking three miles of dreary track. But he seemed to be content.
As I see it, my friend the bricklayer had never got beyond his bricks. ‘Ah’, said he, ‘the trouble is that they expect you to lay 1,000 bricks a day nowadays and you just can’t do it.”
Just bricks and mortar! I wonder if he stopped to think for a little while would it have made any difference to him? The bricks he lays, and the walls he builds, are the foundations of a home and he is helping somebody to build it.
There is a very old story now of Sir Christopher Wren that, one day, he was walking around while they were building the Cathedral he had planned. He spoke to one workman and asked him what he was doing. ‘I’m cutting this stone’, said he. A second man who was asked the same question said, ‘I’m earning 3/6 a day.’ But a third man drew himself up proudly as he was asked the question and said, ‘I’m helping Sir Christopher Wren to build his great Cathedral.’
When I was talking to my friend the railway-man, a train steamed past on its way to the seaside. It was a lovely summer day and the carriages were full of men and women and children on their way to a little bit of happiness. The track-walker looked as the train passed, and I saw the faces of all those people in the train and I suddenly realised that their safety and happiness depended partly on one man who walked three miles of dreary railway track every day. A dull job, but it was a job with a purpose.
Well, there it is. You want to change places with me and I want to change places with somebody else, and we are not content in our jobs because we miss the great truth that behind everybody’s job there lies a bit of service that is helping to make the world run smoothly. Maybe you won’t feel that way when the hooter goes at six or seven in the morning but it will help you to understand if you stop to think what lies behind your own job and the other fellow’s as well.
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