A Letter For Hard Physical Work

A middle-aged middle-class man's learnings from landscaping

I wrote the following after spending roughly 50 hours over six days doing hard manual labor to fix up and landscape a rental property we’ve owned for 10 years and are putting up for sale this week. Most of this work was outside in 85–90 °F heat and involved brutally exhausting physical tasks—moving piles of packed dirt, rocks, and clay with a pickaxe and shovel; carrying heavy bags of mulch and gravel; removing three cedar tree stumps with 4–5 ft tap roots; trimming trees, removing all the weeds and re-grading an 800 sq ft yard with shovel and rake; and installing a retaining wall to build a terrace. The rest was general clean-up and maintenance, beautifying and making it feel nice. Oh, and mulch. Lots of mulch.

The amount of effort, mental and physical involved I would equate to running a marathon every day for a week straight. Brutal.

When I set out, it seemed nearly impossible to accomplish everything in the timeline before me. The landscape contractor I’d hired even told me I was crazy and abandoned the project mid-way, leaving the bulk of the hardest work to me. I stayed committed, and some friends and family pitched in near the end when my body was failing—a huge lift. In reality this was the culmination of ten years of work I’ve put into the property as a landlord—a “last gasp” of effort to finally see the reward for years of patience, struggle, and frustration. It turned out great, and it’ll be a sweet sweet day when the ACH comes through and our life complexity is minimized. I’m so grateful.

Here is my essay:

Hard Physical Work

There is a rhythm to working with your body—a back-and-forth between “keep me safe and comfortable” and complete ignorance of that same thought. The work must get done, so the downbeat of this rhythm is that willful ignorance. At every moment when a sensible person would stop and give in, you harden the fuck up and push on. The more you choose to do that, the more gets done and the more capable you feel. Confidence grows as the rhythm builds and you see the fruits of your labor.

The pile of heavy rocks that had been an eyesore for years is gone. The stump that served as an ugly mailbox post is savagely ripped from the ground. The cancer-like weeds are removed from the soil. The progress high carries you even as fatigue sets in: a thousand swings of the pick-axe, five-hundred shovels of dirt, a hundred carries of 30-pound boulders—it all adds up. It’s less the gross force of each movement and more the absorption of the reverberations of that force through the tool and back into your hands, forearms, shoulders, back. When your hamstrings start to tighten and the lower-back twinges begin your mind starts to induce whispers of doubt.

That’s where the battle begins. The “keep me safe” voice grows louder, stronger. It fuels the doubt like gasoline on a fire. Your body insists there’s no way you can finish it all - there isn’t enough time, not enough strength. Tasks feel 50 percent harder now, and the doubting voice amplifies. It gets loud and you give in. You flop onto the grass, your back instantly savors the sweet rest and support as you look up at the cerulean sky. The sun warms your face, a breeze cools your skin, the dusty sweat evaporates. The reprieve is nice—until it isn’t.

“How am I going to get up and keep working?”

You lie there, almost comatose. Nothing comes to answer the question for what seems like 10 minutes. You know the answer already - take a few deep breaths and go. You shake your legs out, roll your wrists, feel your limbs moving. You summon more of that willful ignorance and commit your body and mind to one simple act: stand up.

You channel that ignorance into strength. On your feet, you shrug your shoulders, roll your neck, grab your water and chug, then pour some down the back of your neck—chills race down your spine and out to your limbs. A little dog-shake and, for a moment, no pain. Eyes narrow, focus sharpens. Gloves back on, shovel in hand, back to work.

As you resume the work your body pushes back, it’s gotten a bit cold, stiff. The Lactic acid is building up in your muscles. Your brain and body are working in concert now to dissuade you from carrying on.

You go to your music app and put on a song with a vibe and energy that you can’t ignore. You turn up the volume in your headphones to try and drown out the thoughts of quitting and failure. It provides the hype necessary to keep moving, you start humming along and syncing your movements to the beat. You forget that your working and laboring, the body and muscles warm and loosen. You’re back in the rhythm.

At this stage the muscle fatigue hits earlier, or at least you notice it quicker. Undeterred by it, you start to be led by it. When it hits you don’t fret, you just drop the tool knowing you need the rest. The wheelbarrow isn’t full yet but you take the load anyway, it’s a reprieve yet progress is still made. Your brain starts to notice other little tasks that need to be done – a missed weed to be pulled, a pile of leaves in a hard to see corner, some scraggly roots popping up that are unsightly.

By the time you finish these small tasks, the body has gotten some rest and rejuvenation. You remember the pile of dirt and rocks you were working on, bring the wheelbarrow back and get shoveling again.

There is an unconscious realization that balancing the tasks and spreading out the effort between hard and easy is key. In order to do so a letting go must happen. An awareness and intuition to what the body needs in the moment and a following along to that. It’s a game of mystical hokey-pokey between your consciousness, your body and the environment you’re interacting with.

You can only get to this point, when the universe is guiding you, by pushing through. It’s a necessary process. It’s a combination of effort, ignorance, progress, confidence, pain, motivation, exhaustion, doubt, and belief. These things come in waves, cycles. Eventually the cycle winds up (and down) enough where trust in it continuing combined with the right action creates a vision of the expected result.

Buying into that vision and dedicating yourself to realizing it, the work gets done. Not only does it get done, but it gets done to the level that satisfies you, pleases you. Often times you’ll surprise yourself with the final result – it will be even better than you envisioned. This is the universe rewarding you for trusting in it and diligently following it’s path, despite the hardship of its process to get there.