What Is and Isn't Important

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A bunch of years ago my sister lovingly and bravely hired our youngest brother, Rye, to be her housekeeper. He was a young adult struggling strongly with many of the skills necessary to get and keep a job. So, my sister hired him in order to teach him how to be more hire-able.

During his training, she was explaining how to clean the gunk from around the kitchen faucet. Rye just shrugged and announced, "That isn't important. It's just gunk, I don't need to do that."

My sister stifled a giggle and explained why it is important and why he did need to do it if he wanted to get paid.

I love this story! Rye was right, of course. It isn't important. The gunk looks unclean but isn't hurting anyone.

My sister was right, too. It is important. If you want to get paid for a job, you do the job. If you want to maintain a clean looking kitchen, if you want to be quickly aware of something leaking or changing or breaking in that area, cleaning the gunk is important.

What's important often depends on what you want.

It's not true that someone who wants to maintain clean organized closets is more right or important than the person who wants to have a comfortable tossing of clothes in semi-organized piles. Neither are they less right or important.

Neither one is more important, but they are different.

Which means when living and working together, it is important to allow for difference while shifting ourselves in service to others. It is an evolving landscape we should always care for.

So, my brother learned to clean the gunk, and even eventually stopped leaving boogers on my sister's walls at the end of a cleaning day.

(He also learned he does not want to get paid to clean houses. Which is good since I don't think many people would want to pay him to avoid cleaning gunk and perhaps leave his boogers!)

After working for my sister for a few months, he was able to present himself to potential customers in our small town (offering to mow their lawns), knew how to listen when they told him what they wanted and what was important to them, came up with appropriate amounts to charge them for his time - taking into consideration the quality of his work - and learned, after several mistakes (e.g., knocking on doors begging for money at 10PM claiming to be starving), how to properly follow-up in order to gain a cluster of repeat customers. He has been able to live on his own and pay his rent in this way for more than ten years. He has spent almost as many years working for a local barber filling shampoo bottles and running a few errands. And now he's also a perfectly capable pizza delivery driver for a local pizza shop.

First, my sister hired him and helped him feel hire-able, helped him learn some skills to become hire-able. Then, folks in town hired him, some fired him, then re-hired him, helping him learn skills to be not only hire-able but desirable.

What is important depends on what we want. I want a world where my brother is hire-able and desirable.

I love getting what I want!

Author Credentials:

Tsara Shelton, author of Spinning in Circles and Learning From Myself, is a contributing editor to Disabled World. You can also keep up to date with Tsara's latest posts by following @TsaraShelton on X.com.

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