Welcome to the mundane-verse.
It is an intricate and delicate system — a time-bending affirmation of existence — a fourth dimension of rapture — a profound ancestral imprint — it is everywhere and everything — all the time — all at once. Can you feel it yet?
I was recently tasked with removing a fallen tree from that fell near a cabin in the woods.
Such a rare opportunity — a chance to do the work of my forbearers.
The Steinbrener voiced by Larry David in Seinfeld described the unique joy of eating soup in a bread bowl, how you eat the soup, then the bowl, and nothing else remains. So it goes with clearing a fallen tree and splitting it into firewood. Eat an apple core and find out — it is satisfying to use all you cleared away.
Nearly impossible in modern consumption. Everything comes in something you recycle or discard. And everything, before it was packaged, has mysterious origins that our market economy has determined good and worthy.
The task of tree removal went in two phases.
First, take a chainsaw to rip the long tree into segments small enough to haul away for chopping. The tree was on a hill so gravity was an enemy. With the help of a friend, we positioned the tree on a heavy-duty boot scraper and ripped until the weight of the tree could be supported by hand.
Now, ripping a chainsaw through a tree is satisfying, yes. You have in your hands a powerful tool — one that gives a single man or woman the chance to put rotating steel through full-grown conifer. What took 150 years to form, you cut through in 15 seconds. Yes, very satisfying, but it was not what gave me a glimpse into the mundane-verse that day.
I entered the mundane-verse when chopping wood.
That is the task that tipped the balance between technology and skill back into the hands of this human, the one pushing keystrokes on the screen for your reading pleasure.
There are two main factors in chopping wood: the weight of the ax head and the position of the log. It is a deeply personal physics because you not only account for those two factors but how your person relates to them. With what force can you swing the ax head? At what distance does the arching steel fall when you apply that force?
An experienced forester joined the party at this time. So I asked him for some advice.
“You just split it,” he said.
“Show me.”
I watched him pick up the ax and judge its weight. And then, in his first broad swing, he split the log, more round than his waist, in two even pieces.
I don’t doubt there are wordy instruction manuals on wood-splitting. You can likely ruin the discovery of this chore in lengthy explanations. But that day, I got to experience the joy of navigating how to hold and swing a handle with a blade on the end of it, and breaking a three-story tree into pieces the size of my forearm.
The mundane-verse opened its portal into the retrospective channels fused into each pump of blue blood. Lose focus for one instance, and you misjudge what length the arc your leg-position creates, and your blade sinks ineffectively into the outer ring of the tree. Too many misfires and you’ll lose the strength required to chop the cord. You re-calibrate and set your uninterrupted focus back on the center.
Sobriety is the center of my life. If I keep it as my primary focus, then I can accomplish outstanding things — burying sharpened steel in true centers being one of many examples.
What makes the difficult task of staying sober — of never succumbing to the great impulse to escape through drink or drug — worth it is what I call the miracle of the mundane.
Simply put, if you clear away all that isn’t, you are left with only what is. And that paired down experience of life is a miracle. Yes, less is more. I am the infant who plays with the box the toy came in rather than the toy itself, the father who observes his two year old rather than his phone at the playground. I laugh at stupid jokes and cry at sappy movies. I pack my families’ lunches in the morning while I make breakfast. And my joy on a day-to-day basis is measured not by what I am doing, but my ability to lose myself in what I do.
I have learned that it is not necessarily the things I do that matter most, but my approach to those things. In my approach, if I can clear away all the forces pulling my attention and desire and ambition elsewhere, I enter the mundane-verse — an Eden of purpose and meaning where everything is done because it had to be; where I do everything because, if I didn’t do it, it would not get done, and the mundane-verse would lose its perpetual advance, thereby ceasing to exist.
People are tripping over themselves to understand the multiverse, that theory of multiple universes overlapping to form our reality.
Others are expanding their stake in the metaverse, the alternative reality that technology creates.
The mundane-verse is the most powerful of the three in that it includes both.
The overlapping and interweaving of universes of the multiverse are, I argue, the handle to the steel blade I hold in my hand before splitting wood. The same universes which, assembled and aggregated, allowed me to bring my hands into position is the same that allows you to catch the baseball your son threw or to estimate the water needed to turn those seeds in the garden into food. Basic acts of focused attention require us to tap into the countless and wildly diverse experiences and histories — and all the astrophysics that brought them about.
As for the virtual world, what is its purpose except for rendering us entranced and absorbed by our senses? We, of course, love that feeling. When I first played a virtual reality game I bellied over on the floor laughing in an ecstasy of sensory explosion. But make no mistake, the metaverse capitalizes on the base experience of the mundane-verse. I can belly over laughing with the same force when my 2-year-old summons the courage to attack the monster I am pretending to be. Think of the mundane-verse as the metaverse, only certified organic.
It is better to understand than to be understood, as the saint once said. And I wish you all the understanding that this mysterious life can bring. And drop a line some time to let me know how your understanding is coming along because it is also true that sometimes the best way to understand is to seek to be understood.
