The Goodness of Blisters

Posted by Rich Crowley in Change, Personal Improvement

Being someone who works in an office environment, I have office-worker hands. It doesn’t take much in the way of manual labour to lead to the inevitable and annoying blister. I’m not a big gardener, but fall leaf raking thing sometimes produces them. I also love splitting wood for our fireplace and that activity always leads to blisters when I have any kind of splitting volume to get through.

A couple of weeks back, as I was happily hacking my way through some maple from a neighbour’s tree that came to a sad end, I ended up with a broken axe (above all else, maple is hard) and, you guessed it, blisters. However, I also ended up with a wonderful stack of split maple that makes me almost look forward to cold nights in the dark of winter. The price for this was blisters but it struck me as being a small price to pay for doing something I love, and that I don’t do on a regular basis.

The moral of the story? Doing things outside of our circle of “normal” will often cause some pain. We can’t always know in advance what that pain will be, but it shouldn’t deter us from doing these things because the gains will often outweigh the pain.