My Next-Door Neighbor
My next-door neighbors are a large Swiss family.
They have lived next to me for more than ten years.
We greet each other when we meet. Beyond that, our lives mostly run in parallel.
Except for one member of the family.
His name is Ernst.
I call him Ernesto.
I have no idea why. He is about as Swiss-looking as a person can be, but somehow "Ernesto" stuck and he seems amused by it.
He is over ninety years old.
I consider him a friend.
This is slightly surprising because, on paper, we have very little in common.
Ernst spends much of his day reading the Bible.
He believes deeply.
I do not.
He has never tried to convert me.
I have never tried to deconvert him.
Yet whenever we meet, we get along immediately.
There seems to be some understanding between us that neither of us has ever bothered to explain.
He walks a lot.
Partly, I think, because he has some kind of arthritis.
I have occasionally suggested supplements.
He politely ignores my advice and continues listening to his doctor.
Fair enough.
At ninety, a man has earned the right to decide for himself.
The other day I was taking my daughter to school on the motorcycle.
We saw Ernst walking through town and stopped to chat.
My daughter likes him too.
I asked him where he was going.
He pointed down the road.
There was a construction site there.
He told me that, before retirement, he had worked in construction himself.
Now he occasionally visits building sites simply to watch.
Then he said something that stayed with me.
"I'm going to wish them a good day."
That was all.
No speech.
No sermon.
No grand philosophy.
Just:
"I'm going to wish them a good day."
At first I thought: will they even care?
The workers are busy.
They have deadlines.
They have machinery, noise, schedules, and supervisors.
How much difference can one ninety-year-old man make by walking over and wishing them a good day?
Probably very little.
Or perhaps more than I realized.
Because the older I get, the more I notice that modern life has a strange obsession with usefulness.
We admire people who build companies.
People who manage projects.
People who optimize systems.
People who increase productivity.
Everything must have an output.
A measurable result.
A return on investment.
But what exactly is the return on investment of wishing somebody a good day?
How do you measure it?
Perhaps one worker smiles.
Perhaps nobody smiles.
Perhaps they forget him five minutes later.
From the perspective of modern efficiency, the entire exercise seems absurd.
Yet I find myself wondering whether Ernst understands something that the rest of us have forgotten.
At ninety, he is no longer trying to conquer the world.
He is no longer building houses.
He is no longer climbing ladders.
He is no longer managing projects.
He is simply walking through the town, carrying goodwill wherever he goes.
And perhaps that is a kind of usefulness too.
Not usefulness in the economic sense.
Usefulness in the human sense.
A small blessing delivered in person.
No invoice.
No performance indicator.
No measurable outcome.
Just a man wishing other people a good day because he genuinely hopes they have one.
I suspect that many modern people would find this naïve.
But I am not so sure.
There is something strangely dignified about a person who has reached an age where he no longer needs anything from the world and still chooses to contribute something to it.
Perhaps that is why I like Ernst.
Not because we share the same beliefs.
We do not.
Not because we live similar lives.
We certainly do not.
But because whenever I meet him, I am reminded that there are different ways to move through the world.
Some people leave footprints.
Some people leave buildings.
Some people leave money.
And some people simply leave a slightly better atmosphere than the one they found.
At ninety years old, Ernesto seems to have chosen the last option.
And I suspect the construction workers may benefit from it more than they know.