Playing With Your Blocks

“To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.”

— Patrick Kavanagh

Lately I’ve spent a lot of effort fussing about with block time. You know, regimented scheduling as a way to try to fit 36 pounds of day into a 24-pound bag. Focus exclusively, with laser precision, on X from the hours of Y to Z, then catapult into the next block.

It works, or rather it works until it doesn’t, but then the five-year-old inside me is still appalled that it’s come to this, and chafes mightily, because there was a time when there were fewer responsibilities, fewer commitments, with less to do, and all it just seemed to flow better, or at least that’s the burnished way I remember it.

The memory of this has sun-kissed angels singing above it, too. Just so you know.

But there’s value in backing off and seeing a day in this simplified form, each day as a block unto itself. It makes today the basic building block of time, of lifetimes, and we only get a fixed number of blocks to play with. A few tens of thousands, at most. This may seem like a lot, but it’s not, really.

Consider the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. Consensus estimates say it’s made of around 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks.

2,300,000 blocks. 30,000 blocks, and that’s if you make it to age 82. Ponder the differential. Just a tiny fraction of the pyramid, the world’s greatest structure. Now imagine what you can build anyway, with that comparatively small supply of blocks.

What will it be? Something to endure?

Will it be worth studying, wondering how the hell you did it?

And what of it will remain after you, the master builder, are gone?

Now. Count the blocks — the days — you’ve already used up. 365 multiplied by your age. Rounding is allowed.

Next is the blind part, the faith part: guessing your total number of days. You can’t know. But pick a number anyway, and you might as well be generous, because it’s something to shoot for. Use an actuarial table from the insurance industry, if you must, but something closer to home will have more meaning.

I used the age of my longest-lived grandparent.

Then subtract.

This is what’s left to finish your work. More or less. It’s a sobering thing to look at, this number, because no matter how big it is, it’s still finite.

Now take a long moment and look behind you. Look at the blocks in your wake, the ones you’ve already had to work with. If they really were blocks, maybe a lot of what you’ve done with them looks dismayingly chaotic. Over here, say, a broken and jumbled pile from that year you were a mess after that relationship ended. Over there, something that looks solid but incomplete, a career you started but got bored with.

Or maybe a dream project you walked away from. Or never started.

Is it weathered now? Dusty? Pitted from time and sandstorms and neglect? Maybe it’s time to go back. Polish, clean, make it ready for the mortar again, if it looks like a foundation you can still build on.

Or maybe most everything behind you was just practice. Maybe the real work comes now.

Either way, and all guessing aside, you have a pile of blocks in front of you. It may be a lot. Or not very many. It may be a mirage, look like more than what’s actually there. Or there may be more than you think could realistically be present, given some current condition.

However many there are, they’re yours. No one else’s. They’re just waiting for a design, a plan. And for god’s sake, don’t let anyone else talk you into using their plan for your blocks. Trust yourself, that you know what’s best for your blocks, however murky their number may be.

Now start.

Write. Paint. Sculpt. Compose. Shoot. Film. Sew. Saw. Establish. Found. Fund. Raise. Launch. Whatever your verb of choice may be.

Whatever form it takes, make a monument. Not for your own glory, but because it needs to be made. Because monuments inspire. Some make us think, some make us reach, and others expand our spirits. So make a monument, or a series of them, that someone, some day, can encounter and feel glad that you were in the world.

And if you still don’t know, if you look and look and there seems to be no plan…?

A couple years ago, a friend of mine died of pancreatic cancer. He was a Special Forces veteran, and lived as large as anyone I’ve ever known. One of his final acts, on one of his last good days, was to take a chainsaw to an enormous tree stump and carve his own grave marker: a wolf poised atop a mound.

Bob loved wolves. His left arm even bore a scar that one had given him for doing something stupid.

Amazing workmanship, what Bob did with that stump. But his real monument lay, in part, in all the paintings he left behind. Including one he did just for my wall. The paintings and, of course, the life behind them, that reached so many people.

But the wolf is pretty cool too. It’s guarding an inscription:

“Shhh. Be quiet, and still … and listen to the wind.”

When you just don’t know, the wind is as good a place to start as any. Because if you listen just right, what you hear underneath the sighing and the howling can eventually start to sound a lot like what’s in your heart.

The blocks will be waiting when you’re ready.

May you have as many as you need.

*****You are invited to segue over to my blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling through the lens of the ancient-yet-timeless warrior poet ethos. I didn’t plan it this way, but the latest post, “Be Brave. Be Very Brave.”, works as a companion piece to this one.*****

(Pyramid photo by Yasin Hassan)