Get to Work, Old Man
Thoughts on becoming alive and things that ease my mind
By Gema Lane
I walk out the back door and look out onto the property. The sunlight carefully makes its way through each oak branch. The air is clean and crisp. But that will mean nothing by afternoon. I saunter along and assess the work that needs to be done. I turn on the sprinklers. I water the new sod around the limestone pavers. Today I am thinking of the oak trees. The oaks are like caring for an elder parent. I think about their health. Caring for them can be an expensive endeavor. They’re getting old and still I want them to outlive all of us. The trees are worth knowing and preserving. They heal in strange yet beautiful ways. I can’t help but think about how the trees get a beatdown. Season after season. Yet they stand.
When the world is on your shoulders and you feel overwhelmed and weighed down it is a simple and mundane act that can ameliorate our mind. I had the chance to work as a life coach with cancer caregivers, and I would prompt them to reflect on activities that brought them back to their true selves. One woman shared with me how much she missed mowing her property. She lived on a large estate and had to outsource that activity to the neighbor so she could squeeze in more caregiving time. Another gentleman shared his love of puttering around the yard. Physical labor heals the soul and mind. “Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a very small drink of water. “There is much slave work to be done now that the fight is over.” But is the fight ever over? Life is a journey.
“Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a very small drink of water. “There is much slave work to be done now that the fight is over.”
The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway
We go through seasons. We weather storms. We bare the onslaught of our actions and inactions. We get moments of rest. At times we get chapters that seem endless, empty, and fruitless. But if we get up each day with purpose and understand that it is in the toil of work that we truly find peace. It is in the routine. It is in the pulling of the weeds, the pruning back of branches, seeding, planting, growing, and on and on. There I am. When I get cut by a branch or nicked from physical labor, I hardly feel pain. The red blood I spill from minor cuts and the aches I feel my shoulders from physical labor makes me feel invincible. It makes me alive. If a man dies by hard labor, then so be it. He lived well.
I think so many things we engage in are killing us. What is keeping you alive? Is there anything that is exactly killing you as it is keeping you alive? So many of us are stuck on an island while much awaits us in the vast sea of living.
I’ve been at war with myself, and it has taken me a long time to figure this out. It seems so simple to see the words written out so plainly. I have been at war with myself and therefore at war with the world. I have been in a spiral of deceiving my inner self and justifying my thoughts. In the process I have built walls around everything. I’ve been trying to meditate on some profound teachings and learnings. In the last three months I had to deal with a real gut punch feeling of how much I regret doing, saying, avoiding, over the course of my life all because I was at war with myself. I don’t have any terrible overt vices like drinking, drugs, or other common self-harm activities. I don’t have one watershed confession that somehow revealed this reality. However, when you’re warring with phantoms you get lost in another kind of hell. I didn’t realize how much I was toiling in my own inner conflicts.
I must be getting older. I want to walk surrounded by natural wisdom. I don’t have to care if others have mocked or slighted or wronged me. I do not want to be angry. I want to have deep wrinkles in my skin like the bark on the trees. I want my scars to heal beautifully and outwardly. I want everything about me to show the life I have weathered except my eyes. I want my eyes to sparkle like the sea. I want them to hold your gaze buoyant and undefeated.
Resources:
As I read these two books, it was like peeling back an onion—on myself. I hate cutting onions. I read the first book so quickly and yet proceeded to follow up on the second.
Leadership and Self-Deception AND The Anatomy of Peace both by The Arbinger Institute.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - I love going back to this short book. It’s so profound. I have footnotes that I keep adding and it informs so much of how I want to grow as a human.
Not a book but an annual film I watch is Legends of the Fall. It is a staggering epic. The final monologue from the Native American, One Stab, really stayed with me this time around.
“I remember when he was a boy I thought Tristan would never live to be an old man. I was wrong about that. I was wrong about many things. It was those that loved him most that died young. He was a rock they broke themselves against, however much he tried to protect them.”
Also from One Stab: “Every warrior hopes a good death will find him.”