Jay Kuten: Value of work and friendship

Jay Kuten

AT THE recent funeral of a friend, Tyrell Ruscoe, the sadness I felt at his loss was further magnified when I heard from others who had known him far longer.

I heard the many tributes offered by his children and his friends of many years. The sum, to which I would add concurrence, was that this was a man in full. Tyrell was a consummate craftsman, a cabinet-maker with an artist's eye, and he excelled at his work of making furniture or other objects by raising the standard of craftsmanship to a new level.

Tyrell surpassed at imagination. With an abiding curiosity and a playful sense of adventure, he sought to master each new technology, not to let it rule him.

He brought the first television to Whanganui in the 1950s and became an aficionado of the computer and internet.

Hemingway's definition of courage -- "grace under pressure" -- applies, as Tyrell maintained an attitude of amused forbearance in the face of the many usual things that go awry in any workshop, a benefit for those who were his workmates and employees. It was his unfailing good humour that made him a boon companion.

But as those tributes at his funeral testified, it was the love he shared with family and friends that will remain as a lasting memory.

That sense of serving others and giving of himself to his work, to his customers, his friends and his family leaves behind a profound gift of having been in the presence of an estimable human being.

Tyrell's passing brings to mind the ultimate questions as to the meaning of life. His life answers in deceptively simple terms of the value he placed on doing things to the best attainable, whether in work or play or love of family.

His exemplary life stands as a contrast to the assumptions that are currently underlying much of our behaviour.

Perhaps it's a generational matter. When I entered university in the 1950s, we were given a pamphlet describing the purposes of education to which we might aspire. If you entered hoping for a good job or to advance to a profession this was the wrong place -- the university's motto said it: "Crescat scientia; vita excolatur": the purpose of education was to learn to live a good life.

Bobby Knight, a basketball coach at Indiana University, was equally famous for his winning teams and his abusive conduct. He was finally fired in the 1980s for assaulting a player with a metal chair.

But the university's president did not cite him for violation of common decency. Instead, "that sort of behaviour sends the wrong message for students whom we prepare for the workplace" -- the purpose of education was preparation for work.

Along the line there came a seismic shift in our values and in our relationship towards work.

We used to adhere to a set of principles which held that one's basic commitment was in creating value and treating fairly those whose work contributed to that value -- the employees -- and ultimately extending that fairness to one's customers.

The integrity fostered in those values was the same integrity writ even larger that was involved in the love of family. Or community.

Today a somewhat lessened spirit prevails -- all that seems to matter is the job and the material things it brings.

The quality of that job, the quality of what that job produces, is less important than all the measures by which that job can be quantified. Until with enough ones and zeroes the worker themselves is quantified, commodified, fungible, and interchangeable -- a part like any other.

That's a truly dystopian future,and it's preventable -- not by Luddite practice but by taking as models the behaviour and underlying integrity exemplified by people like Tyrell Ruscoe, generous in spirit, curious and experimental in outlook and tempered by the inherent scepticism of a broad sense of humour.

�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.