Reach into the ground. Dirt, rock, and decomposing sticks jab your fingertips, threatening to peel your fingernail off like an orange peel. It’s 6:30AM, the last week of August, in these green foothills. The duff is sticky with dew and trees are ready to shed their tired leaves.
You realize tiny, microscopic cuts hours or days later. Slightly infected, they’re sore, but you need to keep digging and ignore them.
You dig again the next day and the next. Soreness swells, sensitivity peaks. You don’t stop. Crow and wood thrush provide the laugh track, heckling words of encouragement.
Calluses form, and dozens of minor cuts dot your hands, sensitive to touch. Soap and hot water needle the tiny holes in your hand. You pull back, but a back-of-the-brain need nudges you, and you embrace the pain: conditioning.
Training the signal, not chasing the pain.
You start to crave the smell of earth and leaf mold and crushed ferns. Injured, but strong, your hands’ conditioning is nearly complete, and they yearn to dig. “Why am I not digging?” they ask. “Find me a spot to dig!” they demand.
Your hands learn. Nerves in your fingertips subconsciously respond to the hint of a rock’s jagged edge and go around or behind it. Like a seasoned coach, they know how hard to push an athlete: enough to get the job done, but shy of injury.
I must do to write.
First hands, then words. That’s the work. The Man On series premise is: full, from-the-field essays.
You see, I’m not a writer who writes; I’m an experiencer who experiences and then thinks and writes about it. For me, that’s stumbling through a blowdown or big box aisle; one teaches how to move when the way’s not there, while the other teaches how not to be moved by what’s there.
Sitting in my office, day after day, for the sake of writing is a killer for me. Glowing screen and raised shoulders.
It’s the difference between hiking through an un-trailed forest and a paved path.
For me, writing requires focus, risk, thrill, or struggle. My goal is to bring back what those conditions teach: mistakes, lessons, connections.
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Get to that raw, focused place. Struggle, get lonely, scared, sore. Forced discomfort. Force myself into that zone through circumstance. Know what it feels like and be reminded of it, then ingrain it into my life in both the everyday and outlier standout events.
I don’t want formulas. I want to share these experiences and their meaning.
To build the habit of going together.
Of focus.
Of not saying we can’t do that.
Of not saying we don’t do that.
Hands ready. Ground waiting.
To keep digging and see where it leads.
Spot on:
"I must do to write."
I am regularly in awe of—and inspired by—your ability to sum up complexity with such precision. Your self-awareness is at genius-level.