Chop Wood, Carry Water: Finding Stillness on a Speeding Locomotive

By Craig Lesley, LPC-A · Supervised by Laurie Stevens-Beck, LPC-S

There's a Zen proverb I come back to almost daily: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

I love it because it refuses to let me off the hook. There's no finish line where the dishes stop needing washing, the teenagers stop leaving their cleats in the hallway, and the email inbox finally hits zero and stays there. The wood still needs chopping. The water still needs carrying. What changes — if anything changes — is how present I am while I do it.

I didn't always think this way. For more than twenty years I worked in high-tech, writing and managing projects, moving fast because moving fast was the job. I was good at it. I was also, if I'm honest, pretty far from settled. Around fifty, I felt a pull I couldn't talk myself out of, and I left all of it to become a counselor. People sometimes ask if that was a leap of faith. It was more like finally getting off the locomotive.

The locomotive

I describe life to my clients as a speeding locomotive — often chaotic, rarely gentle, and never quite as easy as the highlight reels suggest. Anxiety, overwhelm, grief, finances, relationships, the slow grind of a hard transition. Most of us aren't standing calmly on the platform watching the train go by. We're hanging onto the side of it, wind in our faces, trying to read a map.

When someone sits down across from me for the first time, my instinct is not to hand them a worksheet. My first job — every session, every time — is to help them feel settled, present, and safe. Sometimes that's a minute of EFT tapping. Sometimes it's a little guided grounding. Sometimes it's just me listening while they catch their breath. You cannot do the deeper work from the side of a moving train. You have to find solid ground first.

What happened to you?

A few years ago I read What Happened to You?, the conversation between Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, and it rearranged something in me. The book makes a deceptively simple case: when we look at the struggling person in front of us — including the one in the mirror — the more useful question is almost never What's wrong with you? It's What happened to you?

That shift matters more than it sounds. What's wrong with you is a verdict. It assumes a defect to be fixed. What happened to you is an invitation. It assumes a story to be understood — a nervous system that adapted, often brilliantly, to circumstances it didn't choose. I've spent a lot of hours in crisis work, on suicide and recovery lines and in residential settings, and I have never once met a "wrong" person. I've met a lot of people who survived something and were never given the chance to set it down.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be that small reframe. The next time you catch yourself asking what's wrong with me?, try the gentler, truer question instead.

The one skill I'd teach the world

If I could install a single skill in every person on the planet, it wouldn't be a productivity hack or a breathing technique, useful as those are. It would be self-compassion.

Most of us extend more patience to a struggling friend, a confused stranger, even a misbehaving dog, than we ever extend to ourselves. We'd never say to someone we love the things we say in our own heads at 2 a.m. Self-compassion isn't about lowering the bar or going soft. It's about talking to yourself like someone you're actually rooting for. In my experience it's the soil everything else grows in — without it, every other tool just becomes one more stick to hit yourself with.

A small practice, badly

Here's the whole thing, and I want you to do it imperfectly on purpose.

Pick one ordinary task today — washing a mug, walking the dog, waiting at a red light. Before you start, take one slow breath and silently say, I'm here. Do the task. Notice when your mind sprints off to the next car on the locomotive — it will, within seconds — and instead of scolding it, just gently bring it back. Here. Wood. Water. That's it. You don't have to feel enlightened. You don't have to feel anything in particular. You just chopped wood while actually being there for it, which, it turns out, is most of the point.

I still get on the locomotive. I'm a work in progress — a guy with two teenage sons, a grill I take too seriously, and a meditation practice I keep returning to precisely because I keep wandering off from it. But more and more, I'm learning to carry the water without spilling all of it, and to be a little kinder to the man carrying it.

Chop wood. Carry water. Be here for the part of your life that's actually happening.

If any of this stirred something up — if the locomotive feels less like a metaphor and more like your Tuesday — that's worth talking about. You don't have to white-knuckle it alone. You can work with Craig or get started with a therapist at Austin Mindfulness Center — in person in Austin or online across Texas.

— Craig