The Crooked Timber of Humanity: A Lesson Learned
I’m back to writing after taking a break that I now regret.
Two-weeks ago I was at my son’s high school football game when a friend and one of my son’s former coaches came up and told me that he really enjoyed my writing, and said I need to start doing it again. It wasn’t the first time he mentioned that he found value in what I was putting out there. He then asked me why I stopped. I realized I really didn’t have a good answer beyond the typical, “too busy” and “focusing on other things.”
It was a good question and one that I didn’t have a real answer for.
My writings are aspirational. They are based on my study of subjects like philosophy and psychology in an attempt to apply what I’ve learned in my everyday life. Beyond that I always wanted to be a writer and felt that I have something positive to say. Of course anytime someone puts themselves out there it begs the question: “why is this guy so perfect? Why should I take his advice?”
I’m not perfect in fact, far from it.
What I write on this website is an effort at introspection, as I work through what I struggle with on a day to day basis, hopefully giving others some value in the process.
Two days ago I was taking a morning walk along the Pacific Ocean and listening to “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday. In the introduction to the book Holiday used a quote by Immanuel Kant that I hadn’t heard before:
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made
I immediately stopped and made note of the passage. It hit me like a ton of bricks due to the regret that I had stopped the creative outlet of writing. Doubly frustrating was my reasoning— the fact that I’m a flawed human being and that my writings made me sound like someone who had achieved some sort of perfection in my private and professional life. In hadn’t. I'm flawed and every person who reads this is flawed, to varying degrees.
I’m Kant’s crooked timber of humanity.
We all represent Kant’s crooked timber of humanity.
Rather than sharing my journey and areas of study that have the ability to inform and help others, I stopped writing because of the perception that I have everything figured out.
I don’t.
The more I thought of the Kant quote, it reminded me of a home project my wife and I completed several years before. Ten-years ago, along with some friends, we built a large deck on our home. As I read the Kant quote it reminded me of the process of picking out the timber for the deck. As much as the industrial revolution created machines to ensure the deck boards were of perfect length and width, there were always irregularities— crooked and bowed, full of knots, etc. In many cases we had to shift around several boards to give the floor of the deck the right look and feel. Essentially several imperfect boards were leveraged to create that turned out to be an aesthetically pleasing final product. The end product was a deck that we enjoyed for years.
The construction of that deck became an interesting metaphor for life. I hadn’t built a deck before so we relied on the experience of our friends Kim and Kevin to show us the way. There were mistakes, bad cuts, tricky angles, and sections that had to be re-done. It was a two-week process that was both exhausting and fulfilling at the same time, complete with several trips back to Home Depot. in the end, the final product was a success, even though the journey had several bumps in the road. Just like life.
So back to our famous German philosopher, Kant. As humans we are like the boards on the deck. We aren’t perfect and have our flaws, but the overall product is worth it in the end. The key is avoiding what I did. I halted a creative outlet that gave me great personal satisfaction and positive feedback from my peers because I felt (and was even told) that I wasn’t “perfect” and that I needed to stop creating the illusion that I was.
I let a perception dictate my reality.
Never again.