Mark Twist - Building With Love |
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NAME: Mark Twist
AGE: 51 LOCATION: Goonellabah, Australia Bricklayer My name is Mark Twist, I grew up in the inner city suburb of Balmain in Sydney, it‘s where all my family grew up. As young kids me and my cousins would play outside all day only coming inside to eat. I remember I loved to build things, especially anything out of mud. I loved to create. I would put rocks together and seal them with mud so that it looked like a house. I would draw house plans up and set out rooms, all the time feeling a real achievement. I loved to build with Lego and Meccano – it’s no wonder that as I grew older I got into the building industry.
Looking back as I write this, even with all the ugliness going on around me, I really enjoyed life and was so full of life as a child. I loved meeting people and wasn’t put off by those who were better educated or more ‘important’ than me, nor did anyone feel less than me, famous people didn’t worry me, race never bothered me – to me people felt the same, no-one better than another.
As I got older and school got less and less important I started to work, eventually getting a start as an apprentice bricklayer. It so felt like the job for me. I remember going to the hardware store to get all my tools for work and feeling so excited, I was doing what I was born to do, build homes and make mud pies. I was a natural, I picked up a trowel and it was an extension of me; I had an eye for detail and was good at problem solving, I could talk to people and sort through any difficulties that may be going on with the job. I was a leader.
At this point I also found out about how 'Brickies' liked to drink beer and how good they were at it. The motto was ‘work hard play harder’, and boy could I do both. We would drink at smoko, drink at lunch, drink after work and sometimes drink before work. I knew my way around Sydney from the pubs, if I had a job in a suburb, I knew where it was because first I would remember the pub in that suburb. The culture in the building industry was one of work and drink and if you didn’t drink then something was wrong with you and boy would you cop it.
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I spoke to Serge about being a bricklayer and the toughness and hardness I had to be in to work and survive in this industry and how I struggled to connect with people. Serge very simply stated ‘you are a very sensitive man and you feel this, to go into the toughness is to dull you’.
To say I walked out of there and changed on the spot would be a lie, yes while I was away from Sydney I let myself rest from all that was abusing my body and I remember starting to feel a freedom, but alas upon returning to Sydney the old ways came back to play and for the next 3 years I would say things stayed the same. What I couldn’t shake off was what Serge had spoken to me about – being sensitive rather than hard, and what I go into to stay in that hardness.
Well as it goes, drinking, smoking and gambling went out the window a few years later and I was able to start for the first time in a long time a connection that was about me. In taking Serge’s words and putting them into practice I started to share more of myself with other men in conversations that we would have at work, rather than just talking about day-to-day superficial conversations. I started to talk more about how I felt. I found this allowed other men to share how they felt and in doing this it made the relationships more open and real. I found the old feeling of connection with others, so enjoying that, it’s what I made work about, not the hard slog or daily grind – it really was a joy to go to work and lay bricks.
If I start to go into a ‘doing’ or ‘making it hard’ my body will react and naturally let me know that it’s best if I slow down. If this is not the best relationship that I have with me then I don’t know what is. All that I can say is I know now what I was born to do and making mud pies was the best choice that I ever made.
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