Time to Sharpen Your Main Tool: Yourself!

It’s been a very demanding year.

And I’m sure I’m not alone feeling like this.

On top of the life-threatening issues of COVID, I have friends who have lost their jobs and are now restlessly looking for new ones, some of us have had to work harder and longer hours than ever (I’ll put myself in this category), some have faced mental and emotional challenges they’d never been confronted with before, I, for one, had an anxiety attack during lockdown, something I’d never experienced before.

We’ve all been doing our best this year.

But despite that, there have been moments we’ve also felt like we weren’t trying hard enough.

Workwise, we’ve been waking up earlier and going to bed later. We call it work from home, but we’ve been effectively living at work. Yet we’ve felt guilty and told ourselves we weren’t doing enough. “Let me send one more CV. Let me write one more email. Let me work another hour.”

Emotionally, we’ve felt exhausted, restless or even lonesome at times, but we’ve been embarrassed to admit it to others or even ourselves. “Oh, I’m well, all good, don’t worry about me,” we’ve told friends. “Ignore the tiredness, the anxiety, the loneliness,” we’ve told ourselves.

And of course we also want to be there for the people we love: close friends, family, young children, ageing parents. We genuinely care for them and have been devoting so much time to them this year… calling more often, Zoom drinks, longer calls, endless chats, home deliveries… or just worrying for them a lot. And yet sometimes, we’ve felt bad and told ourselves that we weren’t looking after our loved ones enough.

No matter how hard we’ve tried, even if to our own detriment (e.g., skipping the gym, going to bed very late, not reading the book that’s been gathering dust on our bedside table, disregarding our favourite hobby, not even sitting on the sofa for a minute to just breathe), we’ve felt like we’re consuming ourselves running on the hamster wheel, but still it feels like it’s not enough.

If you’ve felt that way this year, even only at times, I’d like to share an old story* with you.

Once upon a time there was a woodcutter who turned up one day looking for work at a lumberyard. The salary was good and the conditions were even better, so the woodcutter had every intention of making a good impression.

The first day, he introduced himself to the foreman, who gave him an axe and assigned him to a certain part of the forest.

Excited, the man went out into the forest to chop. And he cut down eighteen trees in a single day.

“Congratulations,” the foreman said to him. “Keep it up.”

Encouraged by the foreman’s words, the woodcutter decided to do even better the following day. So that night he went to bed very early. The following morning, he rose before anyone else and went out to the forest. But despite his best effort, he couldn’t manage to cut down more than fifteen trees. “I must be tired,” he thought. And decided to go to bed when the sun went down.

At daybreak he rose, determined to beat his record of eighteen trees. Nevertheless, that day he didn’t even manage to cut down half that number.

The day after that he cut down only seven, then five, and on the last day he spent all afternoon trying to chop down his second tree of the day.

Anxious about what the foreman might say, the woodcutter went to inform him of what was happening, and to swear up and down that he was working himself to the bone.

The foreman asked, “When was the last time you sharpened your axe?”

“Sharpened it?” asked the woodcutter. “I haven’t had time to sharpen it: I’ve been too busy chopping down trees.”

*****

Does this story resonate with you? It surely resonates with me all the times I find myself so focused on the things I ”need” to do that I forget to look after myself.

The woodcutter makes the fundamental mistake of considering cutting trees and sharpening the axe as two separate things in opposition to each other, both competing for his time.

That’s the same mistake we make when we think that working on ourselves (aka investing in our personal growth or just in our wellbeing) is in competition with work, or that looking after ourselves is in competition with taking care of others.

It’s not. As the woodcutter story beautifully shows us, they are the same thing.

I’ll pause for a second to let the concept sink in.

We often inhabit a story where attending to our duties is in opposition to looking after ourselves. But if we’ve felt overwhelmed this year, it means that story is not serving us well.

The moment we realise that we can inhabit a different story where they actually are the same thing, our life changes completely. All those dichotomies that have been tearing us apart disappear. And sharpening the axe becomes as valuable and as fundamentally important as cutting wood.

So this is my wish for myself and for all those who’ve found themselves in similar situations this year: to drop the story of “it’s not enough, we’re not doing enough, we’re not enough” and to start taking care of ourselves, not as opposed to all the other people or all the other duties that we’re taking care of,

but because we care for them.

Happy Holidays from Wise Humanity

Davide

* You can find many versions of this brief story on the internet and in many books. I picked the one from Let Me Tell You a Story by Jorge Bucay.

Subscribe to our newsletter and blog here.