I’ve written before about John Henry, the American folk hero known for his relentless hard work and persistence. He hammered steel into rock to make holes for explosives that would then explode the rock. He did this hard work for years, and eventually raced a steam-powered hammer. After winning the race against the hammer, John Henry died from stress and exhaustion, his hammer still in his hand.Very few of us can honestly claim to ever work as physically hard as John Henry worked. None of us can honestly claim to have worked so hard for so long.I’m writing this blog post for the morning Blogapalooz-Hour exercise in which ChicagoNow bloggers are given a topic and challenged to produce a post in one hour. This month’s topic is “Write about a time you worked very hard in your life at something.”I thought about this for half an hour. Usually when we’re given these topics I get the topic, make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and come up with an idea by the time I finish the last bite of crust. But PB&J isn’t available to me today, so I went to a vending machine and bought some peanut M&M’s.When it comes to inspiring my brain into action, peanut M&M’s are no peanut butter and jelly.I’ve worked hard at things, both for short periods of time and for long periods of time. Physically, mentally and emotionally. There have been times when I’ve felt completely exhausted for literally months at a time. I stand all day at work, by choice. There have been times when I’ve been so exhausted that standing seems impossible, so I have to sit.Given more than an hour, perhaps I could have organized my thoughts and words effectively enough to create a post about my hard work that you would have wanted to read.I could have written about the time I spent a day moving tons of rock while helping to build our house. I could have written about times I stayed up most of the night to finish a homework assignment in college. I could have written about days at work that are so busy that the day is over before it begins.I could have written about the hard work of being a good parent. People devote entire blogs, not just blog posts, to that topic.I could have written about how relationships can be hard work, even when they shouldn’t be, or when we don’t want them to be.
I could have written about how I’ve worked hard — intermittently, I admit — to improve my poor eating habits, and control my weight. Look to the left to see the current state of that battle.But as I tried to choose a topic that I could expand into an entire post, it occurred to me that sometimes the hardest work seems like inaction. It’s seems like doing nothing at all.Thirty-five minutes passed before I wrote the first word of this post. Twenty more minutes have passed, and now I’m three minutes away from deadline. I won’t meet the deadline. Luckily, nothing happens except feeling a small amount of shame.Writing this has been the easy part. It’s what happens before writing that’s the hard part. When my fingers are moving the thoughts are already there. It’s easy to see the results of that work. Unseen are the moments before when it would have appeared to an outsider that I was standing around and doing nothing.It might be easy to assume that inaction is the hard work only when doing non-physical activity, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true.John Henry conditioned his body to pound at that rock all day, and he worked hard at it, but the human body is an amazing thing. The more we challenge it, the better it will respond. It will ache, it will be sore, but it will heal itself relatively quickly, and it will be stronger after that. And the next time John Henry pounded that rock, it would have been a little easier than the day before.If John Henry were real, I bet he’d say that the hard work came at the end of the day, after he’d pounded rock for countless hours, and then he went home and realized that he had to do the same thing tomorrow.So now this post is done. I’ll publish it, you’ll read it. And now the hard work begins: thinking about the next post.Let me send you more Dry it in the Water posts!
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