The Values Sort

I have tried to be vulnerable. I have tried to cultivate a willingness to show my soft underbelly and not worry that the world will eviscerate me like one of those Jurassic Park velociraptors. Spilling my entrails upon the ground. I wonder how that will go for me? Because as I’m writing this, only the first eighteen essays of my Values project have been published.And If Taylor Swift has taught me anything, it’s that haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.She didn’t really teach me that. I knew that before she told me. She just made it catchy. And she helps me to remember to shake it off. Shake it off. I have talked many times about my friends that I stole from. I have written about my rage, and my proclivities toward violence. I have written about my weaknesses. My softnesses. My frustrations. I have written things that make my wife squirm in her seat just a little bit. I have written about breaking that girl’s heart in the Phillipines. I have written about my journey out of church, and I’ve written about the Order of the Mustard Seed.These are vulnerable points in my life.I worry that people will see me differently if they know I’ve been dishonest, told lies, stolen money, left church. I wonder if I’ll lose people if I tell them I’m a member of a lay monastic order. That’s so weird and I know it. I worry that I’ll lose people when I quote Rage Against the Machine lyrics. I worry that I’ll lose people when I subtly, (or not so subtly) expose my politics.But I cannot help myself. I will not. And the ability to throw caution to the wind in this way is a sort of privilege I enjoy. It’s a privilege cocktail involving age and occupation and yes, even whiteness. I don’t have to care what you think of me. I know what my family thinks of me. I know what my friends think of me. It’s enough. The relationships and the satisfaction and the love I have banked now is enough for me.Still, I hope that my willingness to embrace and not reject softness will reap rewards. What are the rewards?I hope my softness will show other men in particular that softness is an option. If I don’t have to be hard and impermeable in my writing, maybe you don’t have to be hard or impermeable to your family or friends.The truth is that I’m aiming for a reward. There is enough of an inflated sense of my own potential left within me that I imagine I might be a small part of changing the world. It seems worth it. But I still wonder what could happen.As I said, at the time of this writing almost twenty of my essays have been published. There are more than forty more in the can. I’m pretty happy with all of them, but they get raw. By the time this one publishes you will have learned a number of potentially embarrassing things about me and I’ll have said the f-word about twelve times in the obedience essay. I do not know what will happen. I am feeling vulnerable.I am nervous. Right NOW is when I found my voice. About twenty essays in. I watch the read counts, I watch the statistics. I wonder what will happen when people read freedom. Devoutness. Honesty. A world at peace. Obedience. Will I fall in your eyes? Already I have realized that at least one of my essays was inconsiderate to my wife and that put me on my back foot. I felt I was being open and honest about a situation in our shared life and she felt a little exposed. This is not a burn book. This is not a grievance blog. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I am, in truth, nervous. Frightened even. Because this has been such a great experience in my life—writing these essays. And what if nobody likes them? Time will tell, I suppose. Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention. But then, I wonder if I could even be destroyed anymore? What if everyone hates the words I write? It will be enough for me to have written them. And anyway, not everyone will hate them, indeed there are already people who like them.What if my business fails? It will be enough to have built something beautiful. It’s already been something wonderful in my community, it’s already been an important part of many people’s days over many years. I’ve had the conversations I’ve had. I’ve learned the lessons I’ve learned. I’ve grown, I’ve changed as a person and grown as a father and a husband, a friend, an entrepreneur, and even as a laborer.What if I lose everything? I will still have my family. They will never leave me alone. My friends have already made their sacrifices for me. I will always have room on a hundred benches and my plate will never be empty.So why would I harden and protect myself anymore? I have already won. I have already won.It is a great place of privilege, as I reflect, to feel so secure. And I don’t want to squander my position. We know we live but once! And vulnerability is, I think, a sort of spending. A way to spend your life and your position and your privileges in the service, (hopefully) of others.Brené Brown talks a lot about this stuff. I just rewatched a Ted Talk she did earlier in her public career. I think it was probably the first thing I’d ever heard from her and I watched it again just now. In it she talks about being really resistant to vulnerability. At least initially. She essentially, (my reading), says that vulnerability is a precursor to connection. To a feeling of connection. A sense of belonging. And that really clicks with me. It makes me feel lucky, because as I said, I do value vulnerability in my life, I practice it, I steel myself against crippling embarrassment, and I intentionally choose to uncover my softened bits.And I do feel a deep sense of belonging in my life. A deep sense of connection with my family, with my friends. With the natural world and with the animals I care for and the land I steward.And the other thing I want to foster and steward in my life is my understanding of how lucky I am to have these options. Because for some folks, trans folks, Black folks, lady folks, it can be a really different story. I can share myself without a lot of fear of rejection or retribution and I know not everyone experiences life this way. This is a value that I am lucky to be able to practice as freely as I do. I am embarrassingly rich in my life. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I want to talk about witness. Can I get a witness? It’s churchy, right? It kind of reminds me of old time religion. Call and repeat. Can I get a witness?I also think of a court. Witnesses being called to account for what they saw. Who did what, when, where, why?When I was growing up in church we were told to be a witness. A witness to the goodness of God. To the redemptive power of Christ in our lives. Which was hard, because it felt so large, you know? It felt so weighty. I felt a pressure to have witnessed something to which I could attest. And so, not entirely unlike this essay project I’m working on now, I combed my life for anecdotes or little stories that would prove not only the goodness of God, but hopefully… his very existence?I am a man whose faith in faith communities has been challenged. Things are weird for me in that area—you may have surmised. I have already talked about leaving a church community, and I’ve already talked about beginning to relate to a different one. This whole confusing process has been a confusing process.I am, to add to my own confusion, a member of a lay monastic order. Stay with me. You’ve been with me for this long, stay with me. My path is my own, and I’m only sharing it. Not recommending it.We have some friends. They are more like siblings. We choose our families. It’s a woman I grew up with, she was a little older than me. Her younger sister sang at my wedding and we remain close to this day.This older sister joined a christian mission school a thousand years ago when we were all very young. She met a boy, as kids often do, and so on, and so on, and she married an Englishman living in Northern Ireland. There they planted themselves and put down roots. Their faith and their vision for the future carried them across oceans and across theologies until finally they landed back at home, in Northern Ireland, where they live today with a very different, (though very similar) vision for their community.Our faith journeys are our own. And mine is no carbon copy of anyone else’s. But through life’s thick bits and thin bits we’ve become quite close with this couple from my past. They have, as I said, become like family to us. Quite dear. And part of that endearing has been some similarities in the wandering paths of wondering about God.When my wife and I were beginning our long walk out of everything familiar to us, our friends invited us to spend time with them, ask questions with them, and tuck in a little closer with them.They invited us to join the Order of the Mustard Seed. It is, as I said, a lay monastic order, which is really just a gimmicky way of organizing people who are loosely connected by thought and idea. The Order involves vows. If you can get your head around that. The vows are simple, but they’re like mustard seeds themselves, full of potential meaning and potential application. The three vows are associated with six practices, and I will share them with you now.* A vow to be true to Christ* A practice of creativity* A practice of prayer* A vow to be kind to people* A practice of justice* A practice of hospitality* A vow to be a witness to the good news you know.* A practice of learning* A practice of missionNow, what do you think of that? What do you think of those vows? What do you think of me having taken them?Do you know me? Do you know my heart? What then, do you think of my having taken these vows? Am I fulfilling them?I have fulfilled my vows. I have betrayed my vows. It has really depended on the day.I am empty of the promises I made in my youth. I promised to be sold out and radical. And I’m not sure if I ever knew what that meant, anyway. But am I a witness? What have I witnessed and will I testify? I am my own testimony. I am basically only a witness to my own life and circumstances. I am a witness to the mycorrhizae of relationships that have made me who I am, and I am witness to the transcendent power of community.I am not the man I once was. I don’t think or behave like I once did, and I certainly don’t worship the way I once did. But.Can I get on board with justice, hospitality and learning? I can. I can. As an act of worship to the God I’m no longer even altogether certain of, and as an act of love toward my fellow humans I can pursue justice, I can foster creative thought and action in my life. I can remember how much I must not know, and commit to learning where I can. And I can practice hospitality in my life, every day, with as many choices as I can muster. I can be a witness to these things.“Now wait”, you may be saying. What about prayer and mission? I’m conveniently leaving out these two more Christiany terms. Well. I can testify to these things as well, though they do formulate differently in my brain now than they once did.In season and out of season I find myself in prayer. I find myself tuning my ear toward the creator of the loved universe all the time, you guys. All the time. I ask questions, and I make my requests as I go about my day. I practice, (and it’s a practice), nonjudgmentalism, (knowing we judge ourselves most harshly), and I practice kindness toward others and gratitude. That’s prayer, right? Am I doing it right?The Psalms, (silent “p”), are a huge book of poetry in the old part of the book. And in order to claim Clyde, my 10¢ goldfish who died in a house fire, I memorized the twenty-third Psalm.I will again paraphrase. There’s a lot to unpack. It says something like,Lord, you are my shepherd. I need nothing. You supply. You lead me to peace and still waters. You envelop and restore me. You lead me, quite naturally, on the road of righteousness–to you be the glory.I can walk with confidence through the valley of death-in-life because I know you’re with me. Your direction and discipline are mine for the taking, and I drink it all in. You feed me, you feed my enemies–blessed is your name! You, creator of all things, have chosen to honor ME! I can’t contain the mystery of this. Surely your divine essence will permeate me and leak out of my pores every day that I’m alive, and when the day comes, I lay down and die, I will arrive in the great oneness of your presence for ever and ever.Something like that. I could quote it from the actual bible if you wanted me to, but that’s not why you’re here.This Psalm, this poem, and me running it through my brain backwards and forwards for forty years is my prayer, and so is my Values Deck. I’ll explain.When you do the exercise with me, once you’re finished, I take a trophy. I snap a photo of you, of your beautiful values choices and I add it to a collection on my phone. I text you the photo, and then I hide it in my heart. I don’t show it off to people, and I don’t put them on the internet. Periodically I scroll through the photos, and I might land on you, and if I did I would think kind thoughts about you. I wonder about you. I wonder what other choices you’d make today. Maybe I send you a text reminding you that I care for you. This is my act of worship. This is what passes for prayer in my life today.Finally, I’ll talk about mission. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it anyway.I am disgusted, outright disgusted with almost all of the missionary work that’s ever taken place on this God-loved planet.For time immemorial it’s mostly been shitty white men who couldn’t hack it in the societies and communities in which they were born, trying to stroke their own fragile egos in someone else’s garden. They drag their reluctant wives and their culturally fragile children around and in the absolute best of circumstances they tend to be paternalistic, rude expropriations of culture in favor of whiteness, Americanness, and a distinctly western flavor of the faith.In the worst of circumstances, well. In the worst cases the missions industrial complex has been an exporter of the very worst we have to offer. Cruelty, sexual abuse, criminal behavior, circumvention of cultural norms and national laws—all routine. It’s nothing but a Tuesday.I’ve seen. I’ve tasted that water. I won’t really be convinced that the net effect has been positive. The outliers, the true altruistic cases are the exceptions that prove the rule, and are very rare. I’ve known a couple, and inevitably they “fail” in fulfilling the expectations or demands of missions boards and sending bodies. And when that happens they do something else, something more, sometimes more beautiful, sometimes something closer to home. I mentioned in a previous essay, my first sojourn out of the United States. I was but fifteen years old traveling to far off lands on a missions trip. I listened to a compact disc of the Supertones, a christian-dollar-store Mighty Mighty Bosstones on the flight over, and from my place of privilege I let a girl fall in love with me when I got there. In truth I was as in love with her as a kid can be. Love is small when you’re young but it’s nimble. It moves fast. We wrote letters for a long time, and I know she expected me to grow into an honorable man, to come back for her and rescue her from poverty and abuse.In the end I did not. Because I was fifteen. And I never should have been there in her community in the first place. I broke that girl’s heart. I know because her brother told me so when Facebook was finally invented. In due course she married an abuser like some of the men she’d grown up with, and was eventually discarded with her children. I am not responsible for this. I am not not responsible. I do not bear no responsibility.I was there as an evangelist. A brutish occupation involving passionate preaching and threatening conversion techniques. I am ashamed. I was fifteen. Christ Jesus forgive me. I was fifteen, but I am not not responsible.So the word mission is quite loaded for me. I have not, in all my years, met many missionaries I didn’t want to shout down, and that includes, (begins with) my younger self.However. Even this word, “mission”, fouled by greedy and narcissistic men, can be redeemed. Not the poo

Let’s talk about my heritage. Let’s talk about booze. For thirteen weird years alcohol was prohibited in these United States. It was a master class in the foolishness of attempting to legislate morality. You might be shocked to learn how much alcohol was still produced, transported and consumed under the pious noses of a government tasked with guarding the purity and upstanding character of its citizenry.My great grandparents, my mom’s mom’s folks made bathtub gin. Which I’ve always been a little curious about. Bathtub Gin is how people colloquially referred to all manner of garbage-liquor containing cheaply produced grain alcohol diluted with water, juniper berry juice and even glycerine.They would have been experts at procuring this grain alcohol, probably legally produced for medical or scientific uses and, umm, diverted for domestic consumption. They would have used their metal or porcelain bathtub(s) to blend the final beverage, bottled and distributed throughout the community. And they would have known their way around distilling, even if “bathtub gin” didn’t typically involve the actual distillation process.When you distill liquor, you start with grains. Grains soaked and boiled in water, often with herbs and spices and other goodies, until the mash is separated from the feedstock. The feedstock is the alcoholic liquid that will be distilled into whatever spirit you’re distilling. And the remainder, the porridge-like grains mixture that’s been all boiled up is called the mash. The spirit is what you’d be going for in this scenario. That’s the marketable material. But in the end there’s a lot more mash than there is spirit.Many years after prohibition ended my great grandparents, the gin-runners, would come to visit us in Oregon from time to time. When they came, they drove their sedan, and in the trunk of said land-yacht they had a special suitcase. Ornate and beautiful, it contained a full bar. Or, a travel sized bar. But a fairly complete bar.I do not really even drink. An occasional summertime beer. A neat whiskey from time to time with a good friend ‘round a backyard autumn fire. But this is my heritage.One of my family’s love languages is firearms. We share them, we hand them down through generations. There are some old guns rattling around in this family. And some very neat old pieces of engineering they are.I grew up around guns, and I’m not afraid of them. I’m not unfamiliar with them, with their operation and function, and I’m not oblivious to their power and allure.Once, when I was learning to shoot larger firearms, we had a series of vegetables which we were invited to compare to the texture of our own bodies. Does the pumpkin feel softer or harder than my stomach? Does it seem more or less impervious to a bullet’s piercing power?And then of course, we shot the vegetables. And they were obliterated and I was convinced—guns were not toys. They were tools, in my home, for hunting. But I am not a hunter; I bear neither the need for a winter’s meat, nor the sporting desire.The world has changed, and I will not hand guns down to my children. My parents may not like reading this. My grandparents would not like reading this and my deeper-forefathers are likely rolling over in their graves. I will not hand the weapons themselves down to my children, but more than that I will not work to hand down a value for them.It’s not that they’re not beautiful on some level, but they’re powerfully destructive and have become representative of an ugly culture that’s grown up around them in recent years. There is a part of me that laments the loss of this culture of hunting and sportsmanship. It is largely overshadowed by aggressive fear-of-neighbor and protectionism, and I am repelled. Love of craft engineering, sportsmanship, these things are the spirit of my heritage. The rest is just mash.My dad’s mom is in assisted living now. She is old, and she is in need of community and care and she’s able to find both in her current living situation. But it’s required her to downsize, and so we have begun, as a family, the process of sorting her life like so much tonnage.Who gets the rolltop desk? Who gets the Ray Eylery paintings? Who will be responsible for these things moving forward.kI have her biscuit bowl. Her fried chicken-flipper. I have the rolling pin she received for her wedding and a very well-used potato masher with a lot of life left in it. These things are tonnage. These things are mash.The spirit of my relationship with my grandmother is the time she excitedly told me I had a baby sister. And later a baby brother. The spirit is not the biscuit bowl, it’s the memory I carry of her making the biscuits, and the recipe I contain within my brain today.Grandma is the grandparent I have been the closest with throughout my life. Her husband died when I was just about five, and my other grandparents were somewhat distant. I wrote about my grandfather in craftsmanship.But grandma was normal. She took us on errands. She watched us on regular days. We knew which of her phone books worked best for sitting up a little higher at her table for predictable meals of green beans and iceberg salads and, yes, fried chicken and biscuits. That’s the distillation of my relationship with her. The normal.My other grandparents were exotic and different and unknowable to me. Grandma was everything knowable. I treasure my memories and I treasure her.What is this value I feel for my own past? My family’s past? What’s that about? I wonder. There is so much in the present I don’t understand. So much about the future that I cannot predict. They say if you don’t understand your past you’ll be doomed to repeat it. I’m reaching into my past, not for tonnage, but for meaning. For a thread linking things of worth and value from the past to my future.One day in the not too distant future my grandmother will go on to the next thing. And she will exist only in memories. My dad and I will both carry the tonnage of a childhood lived alongside that woman. But what will my kids remember? Hands knurled from arthritis. The same few stories told over and over. Oil of Olay. All mash.I have grandma’s biscuit bowl. But one day I will let it go. Because it is also the mash, and not the spirit. I have already decided. One day I will have a ceremony, and I’m not yet sure how it’ll look. Maybe when I’m about sixty years old. Or seventy. Or fifty. I’m trying to think it through now. I will let the mash of my heritage go. I will let it die, and be done.I will encourage my kids to remember their grandparents! I will share stories while I yet may. I will encourage them to harvest my belongings for items that might have some meaning to them.And then I will take the rest and perhaps I will have a cleansing fire. I will write a story for my children, I will contain the past for any of my grandchildren who care to observe it. I will attempt, like my ginny-forefathers, to distill and refine, only my refined spirit will be an attempt to send something of value forward into the future.I will dig a hole, while my body will still dig, I will gather my grandchildren and hand them shovels, and I will tell stories about the biscuits of my youth, the subtle, and not-so-subtle racism that existed in my childhood and will doubtlessly exist still, the deaths that came too soon, the fried chicken, the appreciation for fine engineering, and together we will bury the past and allow it to die.Because our heritage isn’t the mash, it’s the distilled spirit that’s rendered at the end. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been stalling on this one for the whole series. It may be my most dearly held value. It’s not in the cards, but it is in the fruits. It’s kindness.I’m stalling because I don’t know where to start. I have established that I’m not necessarily kind naturally. I am also not always kind today, now, in my life. I want to avoid claiming kindness as a central part of who I am, intrinsically. I’m certainly not kinder than average and maybe less.I am prone to road rage. Nothing too out of hand. No roadside fisticuffs, (except, umm, that one time with my brother…)It’s often, but not always, a sense of justice. How dare you?! Cut me off? Go faster than me? Slower? The gall!There’s a clogged-bowel of a stretch of highway near my home. The road goes from one lane to two, but only for a couple of miles, and then back down to one lane. It’s one of these classic places where wine-tasting tourists do 20 miles per hour lower than the limit and it just makes locals insane. Some local jackass is ALWAYS trying to pass nineteen cars in that passing lane.I am often that jackass.Once, some time back, on that stretch of highway, a man wouldn’t let me merge. We yelled at each other through open windows. Horrifying my wife.Once, several years ago, I had a word-battle with a man in the worst place in modern lawlessness, the Costco parking lot. Again making my wife shrink with embarrassment.These are examples not only of unkindness toward strangers, but inconsideration toward my wife, which is a certain kind of unkind in itself.It’s fairly easy to talk about unkindness. It’s more difficult to talk about the consequences that sometimes present themselves. My wife shrinks. And in that shrinking a little distance is caused between us, a little rift. And the rift requires energy on both our parts to close.And sometimes we don’t have the energy to heal quickly. Sometimes it stays awhile, and festers, it begins to be poison that sinks into our bones and into everyday conversations. Everyday life. Everyday decisions.I’m a lucky one, because every single time this has happened in our lives we’ve chosen to do the hard work of coming back together. But this unkindness is the stuff of divorces. All the damned time. We’ve all seen them unfold.Sometimes it’s some great unkindness like infidelity. But often it’s little things, left unchecked and unmanaged and un-apologized-for. Unrepentant unkindness that spins itself into rancorous hatred that begets even greater unkindnesses.When I think of kindness, I think of my friend who I took $250 off of. But it wasn’t just him, you know. It was his wife, too. She was there, it was her money, too. And the whole reason I knew the pin code for the card was that they lived their lives so very open handedly.I shared in their electricity, and didn’t help with the water bill. I used their internet with abandon. I brought big, dumb, wet fish tanks into their home. I shared their awesome huge apartment watching town go by from an old fire escape. An exciting, city-boy experience for a farmer like me.Eventually I shared in their musicality. I love Jackson Brown and Mike Scott and The Barenaked Ladies to this day because of them. And I shared at their table, they fed me and even clothed me. Our lives had been so differently informed up until that point. I moved in with a cocky, political swagger. A dismissiveness of other people and their ideas. I made dumb jokes and messes I did not clean up. I was a child. But I was old enough to grow the heck up.You may recall the story. I was about eighteen-ish, I was living with a family who had taken me in. I knew of no other place to go. And one day I got wild and I grabbed the debit card from the countertop, and I walked downstairs and across the street to the ATM, and I pulled $250 right the hell out of their account. I do not know what I was thinking. To say I wasn’t thinking is letting me off the hook too easily. I knew what I was doing and I did it.And you know the rest of the story. A little bit of humiliation, and then immediate grace. Mercy. Forgiveness. These things came not only from my friend, to whom I played sidekick for a good part of my late teens and early twenties, but his wife as well.She taught me to move the heck over and make room on the bench. Even when it hurts. She taught me that move. He loved me because he’s got a soft spot for long-shots, embodying some of those traits himself. She had her s**t together and loved me for no really good reason. Her kindness, (and his), has remained, all of these years. And now I have them as a prize. Our love for one another is the prize of their kindness, I get to be a winner, and I’m grateful.Shouting impotently alone in my car notwithstanding, I am pretty kind, most of the time. And that’s because I value it, largely because of them. I value having kindness shown to me, and more and more every day I value being a source of kindness to people in my life.Today I crave it. Now I want to practice it and do it better. Like anything it requires practice to do well.Part of what makes kindness complex to talk about or even think about, is that it gets confused in my head with niceness. And they’re not the same thing.Nice invites for dinner. Kind scrapes food off its own plate and onto yours.Nice was inviting me into a home. Kind was not kicking me out when I stole.Nice makes a gesture. Kind makes a sacrifice.Nice is nice. Kind is deeper. Kind is stronger. They’re similar. Nice, I guess, is like kind junior. They can be confused for one another but they’re not the same.Today the bench belongs to me. It’s my turn to make room on the bench, as often as I can. As much room as I can, for as many people as I can.I have mentioned the small person living in my home who is not my native-born child. This experience is providing me many opportunities to be nice through gritted teeth, and many opportunities to choose kindness. And I can report that broadly and generally speaking, I am choosing that kindness.It’s difficult to write about. Today, as I write this, their future with us is unknown. Perhaps by the time this publishes they will not be with us anymore! It is currently unknowable by me, and unknown by their mother, who is working her way through childhood traumas herself; traumas I can also not really understand or comprehend.This situation is requiring me to make room on my bench. And it’s comparatively easy to make room for a child. A young child, who’s endured tough breaks and hard knocks in their short little life.But I find a need to make room for others. Others who are easier to forget. To take for granted.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make space for my eldest child, who is becoming an adult and who needs me more than ever to take up the slack in our relationship, no matter how tired I am. No matter how much I wish they’d meet me where I think the middle is. I want to remember my own eighteen year old self, and work hard to draw that line in closer, even as they begin to pull slack out. It will require me doing the moving. I will need to follow their dance steps instead of expecting them to follow mine. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can observe how confusing this life, and this specific situation with the young child is for my middle child. I can see them where and for who they are, and I can take steps to build up and encourage, even when I’m tired and it might be easier to allow the entropic universe to drag us closer to apathy.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can still be soft and tender with my youngest child as they admit quietly that they’re not really okay through this whole thing of life. I can put my elbows out and I can guard our relationship, I can never let go.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can show my wife compassion and love, I can do the hard work of seeing things from her perspective. I can sacrifice for her, and give my own so that she has enough. I can pile my plate full in life so that I have plenty to scrape onto others’.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make room for this child, who right now just needs me to be the nuts and bolts of a dad in their life. Not the dad, not your new dad. Just a dad. Here, now, today, I will perform that function. They don’t need to know that ten years from now, by hook or by crook, I will still be there for them. Nice is me making breakfast at 6am every day. Kind is answering my phone in a dozen years and driving to wherever they are to pick them up from an unsafe situation. My job, my kindness now, is simply proving that I’ve got good dad energy.Look, it’s not easy, and I’m no paragon of kindness. I yelled at the Costco guy. I did that and I have other examples.But I do think that the first step is at least wanting it, you know? The first step is cultivating the willingness to do with less, repair what’s broken, make room on the bench.My friend’s wife didn’t have to make room for an 18-year-old thief. My wife doesn’t have to forgive me when I rage at strangers. My kids don’t have to keep showing up when I’m tired and distant.But they do. And that’s the mycorrhizae. That’s the network underpinning us all.Kindness isn’t niceness. It’s not always easy, and it’s certainly not always clean. It’s the choice to keep making room even when the bench is full, even when you’re exhausted, even when you feel the person doesn’t deserve it.I’m still learning. I still rage on that clogged-bowel of a highway. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the first step—wanting to be kinder than you currently are. We try, we fail, we try again. We reach into our roots for the strength to try it a different way.My bench is getting full. But I can always make more room. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

​Let’s talk awhile about Repair.I am at work. I am looking around at the things I have repaired over the years, just here, in this room, and it’s a pretty long list.​I broke a stainless bolt off the foot of my effluent scrubber. I was so frustrated. It happened while I was uncrating it. It was brand-stinkin’-new! And I broke the foot off.I had to drill it out (no small feat, it was stainless!) and then re-tap, re-cut threads, and manufacture a new foot with all-thread I found at the hardware store.I did that.​I have patched holes in the roof. I have re-soldered circuitry on my bag filler.I have repaired and maintained my roasting machine a number of times. Everything from replacing burners to rewiring for data-logging software.​And this is my current roaster! A beautiful San Franciscan SF-25, built by hand in Nevada of largely American made parts and pieces, which I prefer and appreciate mostly because of the easy availability of replacement parts. The machine I began my career on, the machine that built this business, is resting in pieces in a storage unit.I will not go into great detail here and now, but it was also built by hand, a one-off fabrication some dude built in a garage in Olympia. I repaired, and repaired, and rewired, and rebuilt that roaster endlessly.It was maddening in its need for attention. Like a toddler, that thing demanded my constant supervision. And like some toddlers I’ve known, if left to its own devices, that roaster would surely have burnt the house down. That thing knew how to throw a proper spark. ​I have repaired espresso machines and I have repaired coffee brewers from various manufacturers and with varying degrees of competency. I’ve been to trainings and I’ve learned on the job. I’ve glued things back together out of sheer need, and I’ve paid dearly for new parts to swap in.​I think of my home.My tractor won’t start right now. It’s a fuel issue, I’m fairly certain, but I haven’t cracked into it yet. It’s cold out there! But I’ll get to it, and it’ll run.​I am, in truth, stalling.Right now, here, as I write these words.The toilet and shower are backed up in my home. I know exactly what the problem is—it’s a way the pipes were set up improperly in the first place, and it’d be a monumental challenge to tear them out and replace them properly now.So when I get home, I will address the issue, without fixing the underlying cause. C’est la vie. ​When I think of repair, I think of Thrift.And I think of the why behind repair.It’s not just money. It’s not just that I couldn’t possibly afford to buy my way out of a given repair project in my life.It is, for me, a value.​A value for avoiding superfluous resource spending, and a value for having my hands on my life.I do not want to go under my house today. I do not want to get the contents of my sewer pipes all over myself.But I do want to have the job done, and I want it done correctly, and I’d prefer it be done expediently. And, as we established in capability, I am capable of many things. So I do them.​I appreciate people’s work and I appreciate people who work with their hands.Because look at the alternative.​We live in a world of cheap consumer goods. We live in a world of inexpensive landfills. I just put stuff in a special can and a person comes and makes my hassles disappear into nowhere.We live in a world where we ship bales of fast fashion castoffs to faraway locales for people to sort through endlessly in their quest out of poverty.We live in a world where children in other countries work at sorting our e-waste, scrapping for bits of conductive metals to sell back to us in the form of even more cheap consumer goods.​And I am repulsed. I am alarmed.I am making choices in my own life that hopefully reduce my impact on these systems, but I feel so small. I feel so insignificant.​I buy durable shoes. I have my blue jeans repaired when they tear. I attempt to buy high-quality shirts, preferably ones produced in a responsible fashion in a country with high standards of laborer compensation.This means I spend more money on fewer t-shirts. I spend money on jean repair. I spend more money on shoes less frequently.I am not sure I’m saving money. And I know I’m not personally saving the Earth.​So why am I doing this stuff?It’s something about Agency.It’s something about living a life that I can be proud of and satisfied with. For and within my own self. ​(...A few hours later...)​I have taken a break from writing and fixed my septic backup.It was a relatively disgusting and straightforward procedure, and one of my kids helped me.​We learned how to do it better next time, and discussed strategies for managing the problem with the plumbing in the future.We did save a little money.But more importantly to me, we lived our lives together.We were not on our phones. We were not sectioned off from one another. We were knee-deep in the problem, together.​I showed my kid that a thing could be done, and in the process, I learned the same lesson myself.It makes us feel brave. We can do hard things.We saved money, we saved the gasoline needed for a repair person to come deal with the situation, and we saved a lot of time.We were in and outta there in less than an hour. We might’ve waited for days to get on somebody’s non-emergency schedule.​I reflect again on my pickup truck.I’ve chosen repair. I’ve chosen to upgrade instead of replace.Because when you repair something, you aren’t just fixing a machine.You are building a relationship with the physical world.You are telling the entropy of the universe: “Not today.” Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe