At church a couple of weeks ago my wife and I were preparing for the noon coffee hour. Two women were setting up for a celebration in conjunction with the event and they had bought a full iced sheet cake. (Boy, would Dad be surprised at how much those cost now!)
I cringed as I watched it carried the thirty feet from the kitchen to the serving table. She had one hand under each end of the cake's cardboard tray and was walking across the room in confidence.
That was the context in which I recall Dad's saying: "Put one hand under!" The reason: the cardboard can (and occasionally does) buckle, thereby destroying the cake. In college I took a free course from the student in table waiting from the head of food service at the Boston Hilton, and we were also taught similar methods for securely transporting trays of food and of tableware between kitchen and table.
Every profession has its tricks of the trade. Minor but important rules (how do the uses of a ball peen hammer differ from a roofer's hammer, and what makes a hammer right for a given job?) that make all the difference in productivity.
But so does life itself.
Relationships are more important and more difficult than carrying cakes, but unless you can find the special ways in each relationship that support it, you will find it will break and lose its value.
Of course, most of the rules we learn unconsciously growing up. Dad was very introverted and Mom was the opposite. Thus, we three sons had a suite of choices for how to interact and even how to modulate for context; I feel sorry sometimes for children raised by one parent, because they do not have the same conflict/synergy of relational notions that come about with two parents. I can barely imagine what it must be like to have other adult family members in the home as well!
Fortunately, though, Dad was an experimenter, too. So I learned that the rules could change, be created, and even be destroyed. [Am I the only one left who knows how to check multiplication problems by casting out nines?]
And, my all to frequent mistakes in life and work have given me plenty of opportunity to change, create, and destroy rules of life and work. I have learned that a screw-up should be rare, so it is always worth the time to figure out how to avoid it in the future.
So, while you are considering New Year's resolutions, here's a suggestion: Create at least one new rule for life and work in the coming month (and feel free to tell me and others about it through the comments).
And don't forget to keep a supportive hand under all life's fragile things.
