Firewood Philosophy (Mon, May 31, 12:30pm)

Yesterday morning before I left to head back to Seattle, I stacked firewood for three solid hours. Carl had delivered a huge pile, and I began working on getting it into a nice evenly stacked row and out of the weather. I built a row about 15 feet long and it slowly grew to knee-level, then waist-level, then shoulder-level. I had this nice orderly stack of firewood, but then I began noticing a strange phenomenon of firewood physics: even though the stacked row was growing higher, the big pile of wood wasn't getting any smaller! I could see the trampled path of grass over to the pile, and I was getting tired, so I was pretty sure that something was happening, but the pile of firewood sure didn't look any smaller. Then I realized that I'd better focus on the immediate task--stacking each chunk of wood in its place--rather than looking at the long-term goal of reducing that huge pile to ground level, or the task would overwhelm me and I would never finish. And amazingly enough, eventually all that wood ended up in a nice stack, and I once again saw the grass underneath where the pile used to be, and everything ended up just the way it was supposed to. Moral of the story: No matter how daunting the task, if you focus only on each piece as you come to it, eventually it all gets done even if you aren't exactly sure how.