The Bench

Welcome back to Substance, Not Psychobabble! After a couple of months off, I’m back and I’m raring to go. One of my first projects I undertook in the early summer was building a potting bench. Just me, about 1,000 pieces of wood, 1,000,000 screws, a drill, a couple of hammers, and a photo of what it was supposed to look like. I wished myself luck, blasted some hard rock, threw my baseball cap on backwards, and got to work. I’m no carpenter, so patience became a necessary virtue to complete the task. As I went, I kept thinking about how we construct a life with the pieces we’ve been given - our lives, our personalities, our innate gifts, even our traumas - and many, many lessons were learned along the way. In this episode, I share my mini-journey into absolute amateur carpentry as well as the moments that taught me about how our lives are constructed while I was bending and drilling wood to make “The Bench.”