Men’s Sheds men’s mental health gears and no skill work.
Men’s Sheds came into my awareness several times this week for different reasons.
Firstly a large lathe gear arrived by courier delivery from Sydney. This is a piece of pure sculpture and metallic beauty especially if you are a connoiseur of men’s toys. John has been working restoring a huge lathe at the TRAMS Men’s Shed. It had teeth missing from its gears. He got quotes from several places to have the teeth replaced and now here it is done and returned in pristine geometric perfection. The pleasure working restoring this historic piece of equipment is giving him is a pleasure to see.
Next I was reminded of the men’s mental health theme behind the whole Men’s Shed movement. Men’s Sheds get good funding support from government because there is a real recognised concern with the mental health of retired men suddenly detached from the purpose their careers gave them and the networks of people contact. So here was a male friend no longer young suddenly struggling with exactly the sort of thing that sends people over the brink. He’d finished a post-graduate degree and associated university work and was now finding it hard to make headway as an older person reestablishing himself outside in the non-academic world but somehow he was finding a way. Then he was called and told he had to present himself for full-time work at a certain place and that he could do this work because it was categorised as being suitable for people without any identifiable employment skills. To top it off when he got there there was a crowd of people who had been sent down in a similar vein and not much to do. There is a degree of belittling humiliating dismissal of any sort of human soul behind this sort of treatment by the larger system. It almost certainly suits some need of the government to obscure the true nature of current unemployment statistics.
However what does this sort of heavy-handed action do for the mental health statistics? Sure we were there to console this friend and talk him through it but for lots of old men it is a profound message of rejection powerlessness and hopelessness. It seems to contradict utterly the purpose of the Men’s Shed movement – what the government is encouraging with one hand they are destroying with the other.
It seems to me that we can be brutal with people as they age callously pushing them out of the workforce while at the same time enforcing impossible demands on them to find work in their last few years before pensionable age or divesting them utterly of any last shreds of status and wealth they had from their younger years.
Brain and cognitive research in recent years have discovered that our older brains aren’t capable of less but startlingly more. Our ability to understand and draw together threads of knowledge and experience across life into wisdom has an almost miraculous touch. Communication with younger people may not be easy when we see them struggling where we have long since found an easy path through. Our opinion is not wanted and we are dismissed as old and stupid. This is starting to sound curmudgeonly! But the point is that the friend who was dismissed as having no skills at all by the job search agency is among the wisest men we know as well as practical and helpful in almost every situation and also profoundly compassionate with the most broken among us and able to dialogue with leaders and with deep theological understanding. But I guess that our modern job search agencies would most likely dismiss Jesus as having no skills at all.
Song: Life Gets Tedious Don’t It
Old dogs and children and huckleberry wine
Will you still love me when I’m 64