Many years ago, I was puttering away in the barn in a haze of WD-40 fumes trying to resuscitate an ancient hay-mower when my wife came out to deliver a message from my editor, Peter Gredig. He was looking for my monthly column in his Ontario farm magazine.
I called him back right away and confessed that I had been ‘goofing off’ in the barn rather than scribbling something amusing for him.
“Why do you call it goofing off?” he asked. “The barn is where you get your best ideas. It is essential that you spend time in the barn, in the field or any place you can get out of your head and use your hands.”
Like me, Peter had a double life as a writer and farmer and he had been ‘goofing off’ himself that day, trying to coax an old combine back to life. We talked about the various types of smoke produced by farm machinery and the increasing threat levels as it darkens from white to brown to black. I handed in a column later that same day which examined all the meals you could prepare on the manifold of a John Deere 4400 combine. “Manifold Cuisine” still makes me smile 25 years later.
I have been thinking of Peter’s advice many times this past year as I watch my household and many others around us cope with the anxiety of lost jobs and dim prospects. There was already plenty of anxiety to go around long before the pandemic struck. I assumed it was going to get much worse as all my children got tossed out of indoor jobs and into various forms of work with their hands. I expected them to be glum about their changed circumstances, but the opposite has proved to be the case. My eldest son moved from bartending to tree climbing and has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of trees, mushrooms and woodworking. His brother, who quit the military the same week that the first cases were reported in Wuhan, has stumbled into an endless amount of work in landscaping. The two are starting to collaborate on weekend projects as freelance arborists.
For years I have been chirping at them to get off their screens and put down their phones and stop wasting time. I have railed about the colossal fraud perpetrated on their generation by Social Media like Facebook that encourage them to brag and boast or Twitter which trains them to blame and shame. All this online nonsense does is fuel a national epidemic of narcissism and clinical anxiety . . . and of course, these lectures landed on deaf ears. But as the lockdownstook hold, the boys suddenly weaned themselves off their screens simply by becoming absorbed in a worthy task that required skilled engagement. Who knew? They found the task of felling a dead white ash tree with a monster Homelite chainsaw or building a dry-stone wall to be more fun than anything Facebook or Twitter could offer. Both now talk about how time flies when you are having fun.
“It’s more like hanging out than work,” they say.
My own craft is writing. Wrestling a difficult sentence into submission is absorbing work that puts me in the company of masters and makes the rest of the world fade out for a few precious moments. I also feed and grow stuff on this little plot of land, another craft that demands full attention. Shearing a sheep or performing a carburetor kit on an antique Homelite chainsaw draws you into a state of spiritual liberation approaching that of the Buddhist’s blown-out candle.
I certainly feel pretty well blown-out after peeling six sheep.
Carl Jung told us that all we need in life is love and work that matters. That this kind of work can be found in abundance all around us on these small plots we till should reassure us and help build our confidence about the way forward.