One of my favorite jobs is to shuttle for my wife’s business, Airpark Auto Service, an auto repair facility. When people bring in their cars, she has a free shuttle service to take people back to their homes or work, or to pick them up when their cars are finished. I work a couple of days a week for a few hours each day before I go to my counseling practice.
Last week I was shuttling Frank back to the facility because his car was done. I would say that Frank was in his 80’s, but that wasn’t what interested me. I asked Frank what he was doing in his retirement years and he said he was retired. When asking further about his comment, he began to tell me about a car he was restoring in the bottom picture.
It was a Honda NSX built-in the 1990’s. He had never restored a car before so he went on U-tube to get a step-by-step direction in how do take out dents in the car. It took him some time, but all the dents were fixed and it looked as good as new. Next came the painting which he also looked on U-tube for directions and he painted his car after buying the necessary paint equipment for the job.
What blew my mind next was what he was doing at present with his car. The interior leathers needed to be replaced, so he found an old leather sewing machine that he bought and went on U-tube to find out how to sew leather together for the next phase of fixing his NSX Honda. Some of the plastic parts he needed couldn’t be found, so he went on U-tube again and found a process to mold new plastic parts from the old ones. It was too complicated and I don’t remember the process he was using to pre-fabricate the parts. Needless to say Frank is a life long learner.
This may be the only time I ever run into Frank in my lifetime. I had never met him before and may never see him again. But the brief encounter had a huge impact in my thought process of my future. On this journey, I want to be known as a life long learner, which means that I need to continue to learn from the challenges I face and figure out what I need to do to turn obstacles into opportunities.
relationallychallenged 