I recently read a book entitled The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby. It is not a book I intended to read, nor did I even know it existed until I read Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and Amazon offered that I might also like a series of related books. The title caught my interest.
The Cosmic Serpent is generally about the author’s journey into the Peruvian rainforest to live with and report on the Ashinanca people. It is not a long book (less than 200 pages I believe) and I would recommend it as there is much to discover and it is both engaging and more dynamic than your average account of an outsider on the ground in a foreign land.
The point here though is to share a passage, the concept of which I find myself returning to on a consistent basis with the mantra, “make that axe.” You will see why as you read the following:
Furthermore, by living with them on a daily basis, I was continually struck by their profound practicality. They did not talk of doing things; they did them. One day I was walking in the forest with a man named Rafael. I mentioned that I needed a new handle for my ax. He stopped in his tracks, saying “ah yes,” and used his machete to cut a little hardwood tree a few steps off the path. Then he carved an impeccable handle that was to last longer than the ax itself. He spent about twenty minutes doing the bulk of the work right there in the forest and an additional twenty minutes at home doing the adjustments. Perfect work, carried out by eye alone. Up until then, I had always thought that ax handles came from hardware stores.
The takeaway here is simple and obvious, but also difficult to practice in a modern life needlessly complicated by things other than what is happening in the moment - if you want or need to do something, you should simply do it as it comes up rather than putting it on a to-do list where it is buried with all the other overthought and rarely performed check boxes.
Of course it is not always practical to do something the very instant you think of it, but it is possible to do more things in the moment than one might realize. For the past few months rather than picking up my phone to write something down on my to-do list, after which I convince myself I don’t have time to do it, and proceed to delve into fifteen minutes of scrolling or news reading, I just tell myself to “make that axe” and get to doing the actual thing.
We all have ways of motivating ourselves, but in the world of distraction it can be difficult. When you need or want to do something, perhaps now you’ll remember Rafael stopping in the forest and carving an axe handle in twenty minutes. Indeed, most of the time the things we need to do take twenty minutes or less anyway.