Dog Tags - The Purpose in Your Pocket
We are familiar, all of us, with the notion of dog tags: The metal identification tags worn by military personnel to ensure no matter what happened, people would know who they were and where they belong. The practice has many different expressions across the world, including paper notes pinned into jackets, discs and even wooden variations, all with the same basic desire to express your identity and your associations, lest you be rendered unable to speak, move, or even breathe, which we must accept as an inevitable end.
It’s incredibly easy to remove ourselves from death as an inevitability, but there is something incredibly poignant, deliberate, about the practice of wearing dog tags, that it carries a connotation of clarity and and acceptance. The end will come, and here I am, not to embrace it per se, but ready for it. Any man who lives with intent and a notion of responsibility creates contingencies for the worst. We ensure, that as husbands and fathers, our loved ones will be provided for in our absence, through small, but meaningful financial commitments that will bear fruit when we move on from this world. If we haven’t, then there is work to do. Now. Today. Do it. Because the day will come, that they will refer to as your last. We don’t tend to expect or understand when exactly that will be, resulting in the absence of mind and will that can often typify a life drowned in audiovisual excess and plastic foods.
We should however, also bear consideration for the questions of identity and purpose that plague anyone who’s breath has left them. There is always a narrative, a discernment of your value and design that accompanies death. It is of course, unfair and largely unfounded, but we cannot deny that we’d prefer the action hero martyrdom over the lavatory exit some are renowned for, no matter what their previous successes.
Hence, we must work to celebrate that purpose and intent in a deliberate, meaningful practice of personal dog tags. We needn’t chisel our purpose and identity into steel tags. Blessed and burdened with so many pockets, the modern man must set one aside as a love letter to a life well lived. We can take note that the contents of ones pockets will no doubt, speak volumes, once that chalk line is etched around us. Fill that pocket with the five items that speak most to the man you’ve as aspired to be, as we must remember, that intent is almost as powerful as achievement.
Set aside ten minutes to collect the five things that will cry out with personal and creative intent. The notebook. The fine pen. The guitar pick. The photo. The poem. The knife. The key. The business card. The tool. Fill this one pocket with the purpose and passion you brought to the designs and deeds that mattered most to you, so when they find you, they’ll know.
We create meaning and relevance in the most inane and irrelevant notions and habit, most of them buried under glass, built upon a bed of plastic and circuitry. Bring your attention back to the artefact. Timber. Paper. Ink and Bone. Take the five things that speak most of all you’re working to achieve, to relish, to share with the world.
Take one pocket, one moment, and imbue it with the purpose and meaning that any living, breathing man deserves. It may be the first time in a long time. It may be the last.
Gaetano Carcarello is a Discalced Carmelite, father of seven, and a teacher. He’s enamoured of music, smitten with silence and in love with the written word.
He creates custom made novel pages based on pivotal moments in people’s lives at Page 83; tweets as @gcarcarello; and blogs about Fatherhood, Fidelity, Culture and Creativity here at Wristwatches and Radios.