Ten of Coca

Today I met a family whose small business had been passed from one generation to the next. I expected the story to be mostly about the business itself, but the longer we talked, the more I realized that wasn't really what had been inherited.

The parents talked about what they had taught their children: how to choose materials, how to care for what they owned, how to recognize good work, how to treat the people who came through their door. Their children had learned by growing up beside them, helping when they were young and gradually taking on more responsibility as they got older.

There were physical things being passed down too, of course. Tools. A place to work. Things the family had spent years building and protecting. Those things mattered because the next generation didn't have to begin with nothing.

I kept thinking about that afterward. We spend so much of our lives building things without really knowing how far beyond us they might travel. The tools, the knowledge, the place itself, all of it had become part of someone else’s beginning. That felt like such a beautiful kind of harvest.