From Mud to Mastery
The other day I woke up around 5:15am. Bathroom trip — I guess I’m getting to that age. On my way back to bed I thought: what a gift. I love the early morning quiet. I’ve been trying to become more of a morning person for years. Time to give it a shot.
Then I couldn’t decide what to do with it. Too early for email. Too dark for the garden. Scrolling felt like a waste of the very stillness I’d just celebrated. So I got back in bed, and when I finally got up at 7:30 I was furious with myself — not just for missing the morning, but for the particular flavor of disappointment that comes from wanting something and still managing to sabotage it in real time.
Here’s what I understand now that never quite registered at 5:15: I hadn’t failed to execute a plan. I’d never made one. I had a vision — become a morning person — but no next step, so I stood there waiting for a step to materialize out of the vision itself. Lame. Like showing up for an Ironman simply because you like the merch. I do, and did, twice, but that particular vision warranted the whole package: training plan, regimented diet, Herculean patience with myself, sacrifice, commitment. How is it possible to train for an Ironman and not become a morning person?
There’s a parable a friend and mentor taught me that I return to often. A man walks through a medieval village and finds three people mixing straw and mud. He asks the first what he’s doing. “Mixing straw and mud.” He asks the second. “Making bricks.” He asks the third. “Building a cathedral.”
The lesson is obvious enough: vision that becomes reality necessitates a blueprint. To be the vision guy, you either need a steeped-in-the-action-plan-partner or you have to have the double skill set. I’ve always loved that story because vision is where I live. I can see the cathedral. I have never once struggled to see it. Building bricks, however, not so much. Personal shortcomings aside, the man with the cathedral in mind is doing the same physical labor as the other two, but his vision directs his labor; the vision imbues the labor.
What the story also leaves out is the eight hundred years from start and finish. Someone mixed that mud every single day for eight centuries before the spire went up. The vision didn’t get anyone out of bed on the four thousandth identical morning. Only the accounting did — the honest, unglamorous tallying up of exactly which stones were laid yesterday and which ones get laid today.
We are entering Rosh Hashana, and its central liturgical demand is cheshbon hanefesh — an accounting of the soul. That’s the blueprint. The assessment of how many bricks were made and placed. Not a vague spiritual gesture toward self-improvement, but a rigorous audit: where did I actually stand this year, in full, including the places I fell short. But to focus only on the delays and cost-overruns without at once updating and then fortifying the vision? Let me paraphrase the Cheshire Cat to Alice: if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.
In my youth, I did this accounting and it felt almost trivial. Wasn’t kind enough to my sisters. Didn’t work out enough. Small ledger, low stakes. In my early career, the accounting took on more weight so most of my self-worth and self-reflection was connected to my performance review. In recent years, the accounting has intensified because the man being audited is now a husband and father, and the gap between who I am and who my family needs me to be is no longer something I can back-burner until next Rosh Hashana.But I’ve caught myself misusing the accounting, and I think this may be the deeper conversation. Instead of using the cheshbon hanefesh to locate my next brick, I’ve been using it to prosecute myself for every brick I didn’t lay in the last decade. Running the same case again and again — I could have been a morning person, I could have had better executive functioning at work, I could have had a more consistent workout routine if only I’d started sooner.That isn’t accounting. That’s wallowing dressed up as accounting, and it produces the exact same result as the 5:15am morning: a vision with no next step, except now the missing step is buried under years of self-excoriation.
Here’s the choice actually in front of me heading into 5787. Wallow in the land of woulda-shoulda-coulda, relitigating bricks that are already set into the wall. Or roll up my sleeves and mix today’s mud. The power of Rosh Hashana is that G-d instructs us to go through this process every year to experience the gift of learning to forgive (self included), never forget, and then move forward. Mixing today’s mud has to, at a deeper level, include the same kind of promise to lighten up on myself — without that becoming a warped justification for risking as little as possible. The key for Rosh Hashana, though, is to do that accounting in alignment with the highest possible vision for the year ahead: living a life of meaning and purpose guided by the values and deeds throughout Torah.
My wife and my sons are the reason that choice has real stakes now. They didn’t inspire the vision — I’ve always had the vision. What they changed is the cost of not laying the brick. When it was just my own ambition on the line, spending an evening in the courtroom of my past was both self-indulgent and wildly inefficient. Now every hour I spend prosecuting who I used to be is an hour I’m not building the thing my family is actually standing inside of. I still need my head in the clouds to see where the cathedral goes — tapping into the power of Rosh Hashana gives me that. But I need to get back down to the ground quickly, because they’re waiting on the walls. So it’s how to do both. All three guys.
Cheshbon hanefesh is not supposed to be a courtroom. It’s a map to get back on track. Read it once, check in with the vision, then find today’s brick and lay it
