Surveyors and the secrets we hold

More reflection on the past and the privileges that follow life as a surveyor.
I'm not sure how many other occupations cross so many paths, intertwined with stories and people, personalities, families and individuals.
I guess I'm not alone in saying we see, hear, smell and rub shoulders with perhaps more people in our lifetime than most and from diverse and differing lifestyles, race and creed.
Being a surveyor here (Tasmania) sees access into the inner workings of families and organisations.
Everything from family feuds, marital bliss or opposite, financial affluence to bankrupt soles, house and land owned outright to mortgaged and second mortgaged.
Many of my surveys are not å? to 1 day jobs, more often spanning months, years with 3 now into a decade. You get to know your clients in ways that can be frustrating, intriguing but most often with a friendship and a trust built out of your input into their lives, often in a time of need, even pain.
You hold their lives in balance, standing between success or failure carrying them over the threshold of planning success projecting them forward to where dreams become reality.

There's a job where I sit at the kitchen table listening to the owner pouring out his aspirations for the family (estate planning stuff) and reminiscing of stories about his father with whom I'd worked with 25 years before.

Occasionally families who correspond with each other by solicitor only. And yet I deal direct, sharing in their griefs and disagreements.

Then there's those lighter times when you spring out of nowhere and startle a couple of lovers having a quiet time down an isolated coastal track I can only imagine they considered safe from prying eyes.
They'd arrived in individual cars probably very quietly and left in full flight.

Stories unlimited, and ah, yes, somewhere in the midst is often an interesting boundary redefinition where history is probed and objects unearthed, pieced together and the modern cadastre evolves.

Surveying! Wouldn't change it for quids.