A man is spotted laboring in a field trying to dig a series of holes with a bent kitchen spoon. As he works, his aging face, shows decades of frustration. He mumbles that he has always felt frustrated, but no one ever cared. He labored anyway because he is a hardworking man.

The exhausted laborer used to have more energy and enthusiasm, but this work was very difficult to do. This job, he was forced to do. This job always required a shovel and the shovel should have had a blade and a handle. The handle should have a grip and the collar should not wiggle when the blade hits rocky ground.

Inside his boyhood heart, he also knew his hands should be gloved to prevent blisters. To him, that no longer mattered because his hands had grown so calloused, he didn’t feel the same pain he used to feel. Using the spoon made its own callouses and those callouses produced protection as well as demonstrated decades of hard work. The knotty fingers showed the damage in himself, but the callouses others felt when he tried to touch them.

The man knew which tool he needed, but it must have been locked away somewhere on the property and accessing it meant being humbled or humiliated and asking uncomfortable questions. It also meant he had unfamiliar work to do exploring the grounds.

The diligent, but weary worker, had never been taught how to ask questions safely. He was met with barking bosses and his former colleagues had consistently left him abandoned in the field to do all of the work alone. It was better to do it alone, anyway. No one could convince him it would be any differently.

Historically, exploring the grounds, had only ever occurred when the worker was most frustrated. Unable to see all that was around him with his peripheral vision being clouded, he had never successfully managed to find the shed the shovel was even stored in. He knew the shed existed, in theory, but he had never seen it for himself.

Decades of digging holes with a kitchen spoon had made him a professional, by all accounts. He had always dug holes this way. He knew exactly how to hunch over. He knew how to angle the rusted spoon and how to haphazardly bend the spoon back into shape in a pinch to get the required work done.

The work he performed had to be required, these days. The significant effort the job took demanded those stipulations. His resources were more valuable as his energy had been depleted. There was simply less energy to draw from, even if the desire was still there. He didn’t know if the desire had remained.

He knew how to keep the sweat out of his eyes like no one else, but the sweat no longer bothered him the same way. His tired fingers were going to write a manual on how to perform this routine, but there was no one standing by to give it to so he kept his manual to himself.

Inside his heart, the amazing man knew his former routine no longer produced the same results around him. Time met effort and had worn it down to almost nothing.

When asked why he wanted to keep using the spoon, the dedicated man unable to recognize his own face replied, “I have always done it this way. This has always been who I am.”