steel cocoon

My job schedule is four 10-hour days so that leaves me with three-day weekends. For the last few of these I've been fairly steeped in various little survival projects, and the depth with which I can become absorbed by them is by turns comforting, wondrous and disturbing.

I've modified an aircrew survival knife and four different machetes. Nothing major, just little tweaks with a rotary tool and some sanding and filework to improve different functions. I took the knife and one of the machetes and made a survival package with some odds and ends and a few ideas of mine and others I found online. It's cheaper than drinking and there's no hangover, just a lot of little metal shavings everywhere.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist or zombie apocalypse enthusiast. I haven't been camping in any way that requires more than a pocketknife in nearly two decades. I just like this stuff.

I have to take my ideas when and where I can get them. If they involve things I already have, that's even better. Give me the time to work on them and it's better still. To take something good and improve it, adorn it, weave it with other good things to make a system, leads to a rare and elusive euphoria. Trial and error doesn't enrage me here like it usually does as long as the errors can be corrected. Here like almost nowhere else, I grasp the meaning of learning from mistakes.

Mistakes are illegal in my world. They are to be prevented, avoided, and failing that, punished. The main thing to be learned from mistakes is not to make them. There is no dodging or evading responsibility. I own my mistakes. They define me. This is not what I believe because I want to; this is what I have learned. This is what I was taught. This is the signal I picked up five-by-five from people and life almost from the start.

In the bubble I've locked myself in for the last few weekends I receive a different signal. I still own the mistakes, but I also own what I learn from them. Oddly enough , the absence of pressure to perform improves my performance. I excel by not obsessing over excellence, by focusing on what's good enough.

It's a tiny island of competence in an ocean of haze and uncertainty and failure. Here I'm the boss, and I'm a pretty decent guy to work for. The job gets done and enjoyed in the process.

People use the term "cocooning" to describe a deep, tunnel-visioned retreat into any activity as an escape from life and reality. When I get this deep into a hobby I feel pangs of guilt as though that's what I'm doing. Wouldn't it be a right kick to learn that it really is a cocoon, not a coward's refuge but a place to transform into something better?

It could be argued that I have more important concerns than convex grinds and paracord wrap patterns. I do, in fact. It often feels like fiddling while Rome burns. My only defence is that this, like it or not, is part of who and what I am, and it has not a thing to do with how long it's been since I hacked out a campsite. I still don't know like others claim to that I matter much at all, but I know that many people and other forces have expended tremendous passion, energy and resources to nullify and erase me. If there are things I need to address, than I matter at least as much as those things. If there is none of me left to bring to them, they are lost to me.

I don't think God made me for that. Any step I can take towards what He made me for, however trivial, however mundane, is closer to where I belong, if such a place exists. I wish these tiny things didn't loom so hugely on my pathetic little screen, but it is still better to have them than not.