Pay Attention

headed for new ground

            Sometimes a phrase gets caught in my head and plays over and over again.  Out here in the Frack Lands of NoDak I do a lot of repetitive exercise in places where the scenery is, shall we say, less exciting than my home in Jackson or my second home in Seattle.  The phrase pay attention has been the one on repeat of late.  Part of this is due to the excellent book I am reading on the advice of my friend Matt, The Rock Warrior’s Way, and a fair amount of cross-referencing in other works I have read recently.  I don’t have to tell all of you who practice yoga or do other sports which require a high degree of presence that this mindfulness brings unexpected rewards, a new awareness of the beauty and problems all around us that we miss when we walk around on auto-pilot.

exciting scenery in Watford City, ND

I have found as I venture further into guiding and into the oil industry that this phrase also applies in the working world.  The more I focus on whatever task is at hand – rock rescue, the downhole workings of an oil rig, how to fix my car, how to train for ice climbing – the more I get in return.  I earn more interesting guiding assignments, higher-paying oil jobs, no labor bills from a mechanic , off the couch performance – all from clicking away from Facebook and towards the YouTube how-to videos, by picking up and deciphering each step in written manuals, by asking co-workers or climbing partners to explain something else.   Pay close enough attention and you will get to the meat of how things work.  This will give you the confidence to act on that knowledge (for those females who have mastered your fear of working on your own car, you know what I am talking about!).  

Attention is a commodity, arguably the most important one you can cultivate in an age of that offers you the choice of constant electronic connection.  Attention is something scattered, blown to bits by omnipresent screens and their shiny promises of fleeting distractions.   The distractions offer brief, reliable bursts of emotional response that we no longer get from each other.  We don’t need to.  We have brain candy, a mental diet of little sugar highs.  We never have to be bored again. 

We must re-teach ourselves how to pay attention, those of us still interested in learning after leaving the educational institutions set up for this purpose.  I have stopped saying I cannot afford something, because if I really want to I can borrow and afford most things.  I will not afford more education through debt.  Another degree will not solve my problem of how to get out of debt and learn how to live so I never have to be beholden unto these lending institutions ever again, only postpone this.  Most things taught in a school you can learn yourself.  You can earn that knowledge just the same outside the institution.  The price is focused attention.

We are living in a very different age than that of our parents.  Perhaps a few from a generation that still had pensions and job security and living wages realize that the math doesn’t add up for their 20 or 30-something offspring, but most don’t.  It’s easier to blame us, because that’s easier to understand than what is actually going on.  It also has an easier solution: quitcher bellyachin’ and pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, kids.  They think it is our refusal to start at the bottom, not realizing that the bottom is all most workers can look forward to for the length of their careers.  There are a lot of articles going around about how we are the entitled generation, a bunch of self-important children who grew up with trophies for participation who want high paying jobs without doing the work.  Let me tell you: the world has changed.

 People didn’t always have to take out 20 to 50 to however many tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree.  A degree does not necessarily equal a job, and once taken out student loans are there and you cannot declare bankruptcy on them.   “So what happens if I just stop paying them?” I asked one day to the customer service representative for the company that manages my own student loan.  After several minutes of ‘we try to make your lifetime of debt slavery as painless and affordable as possible so you don’t default and we can keep milking you for interest’ she responded that if I defaulted on my loans my degree could be taken away, any professional licenses that depended on that degree could be revoked, and my wages could be garnished by the IRS. 

I remember my incredulity when I, after two years of temp work and a hesitant willingness to try the ‘working in offices’ path (my mother once told me that if I had ‘worked in offices’ my whole life, I would have everything I needed by now.  I thought where are these mysterious offices?  And what would I do there?), I was offered a job for the whopping sum of 13 dollars an hour with an outdoor clothing company in Seattle.  Really?  How will that pay off my student loans?  How will that allow me to get a mortgage, let alone pay one, for any kind of property in the city of Seattle?  Where is the American Dream?  You can borrow it.  You can buy it with credit cards.  A lifetime of debt is normal, said my family.  Your student loans will always be there, now Buy A House, because that will make you an adult.  Five figure credit card debt is normal, said some friends.  As you get older you get more. 

lonely

The belief that you must accept debt is bullshit.  You should get out of debt as quickly as possible.  Banks make money on interest from your student loans and your credit card and your car loan.  They make money off the fact that you get to have those nice things that you have been told you need and that everyone else has right now.   The interest you will end up paying is hours of your future life sold.  It is money you earn but don’t get to use to run your own life, to stay healthy by buying better food and getting outside (of those mystery offices?) and moving, to work less and do more.  I don’t need to tell you this, but I am, because this is my blog for things that matter to me and I am fucking mad as hell that I listened to the voices of family and a few peers telling me what they thought I needed and fell into the trap.  My oilfield work is undoing my mistake: I bought in.  And I want out.

Anger is a motivating force if harnessed at a problem and not, as so often happens instead, at another person or group of people.  Refusal to accept diminished circumstances is the basis for the biggest changes and most inspirational stories we know.  Good enough is not good enough for me.  It’s about time I stop being vague about my motivations and intentions for this oil patch business and share the hard truth of my current work project alongside all the effusive posts about ice climbing and danger and beauty.  Today I just got confirmation that I will soon be starting a much more time-consuming but lucrative job on rigs in Pinedale, Wyoming that will effectively end my guiding career for the unforeseeable future but will allow me to climb out of the debt hole I am in.  Hell, it will allow me to live where I can see a mountain at all, where I can climb or ski without first driving six hours.

 With MWD  (Measurement While Drilling), there is room to advance on the rig, and therefore that valuable attention I was going on about could actually earn me more money for a change (which is what any other MWD will tell you, because everybody knows EVERY SINGLE MWD EVER is going to become a Directional Driller.  Probably next year. I am serious – ask one sometime).  This is something mudlogging will never offer me.  I have the wrong type of degree (not geology), and therefore am not allowed by the company that contracts the one I work for to be the wellsite geologist who steers the well.  I am working in the oil industry mainly to pay off debt, but stagnation in any form still bothers me.  

This next step is a mix of sacrifice and gain.  I am sacrificing time, valuable life hours and days and months, all in one chunk instead of letting my debt fester like an untreated wound for decades, siphoning away my life energy in monthly increments, narrowing my field of possibility.  I am paying attention, and finally have put my life in a pattern in which I have a shot at earning my way out of the trap.