Pio Writes

My hands were painfully tired, unable to maneuver my 1000W electric hammer. I haven't been doing this for a while now, actually, I've never been taking so much cement plaster off the wall. It's an old wall, deep red and beige sandstone letting the cement shell fall freely, but the shell is strong.

And under, smells like turned soil after the rain. Plaster doesn’t let the moisture go – it keeps it like a sponge – and the stone wall, until now, was slowly eroding. It’ll breathe now.

Just like me two years ago when I gave up. I was renovating, with my own hands, our house for a deadline, that if extended, we would be homeless and, apart from being a new dad, I was working long hours building software for a Spanish startup with another tough deadline. There was too much death and too many lines around me – I felt choked. I was burned out.

Now walking out of this dump dusty room, I'm sweating, my hair is full of dust, and they stay up, down, or horizontal – as I wish. That is good, I'll style them neat, I thought preparing for an online meeting in five. It’s the old client I was building a mobile app for. A few days ago, he asked if we could “have a chat”. He never asked for a discussion, always to have a chat. A founder of a still-startup – same Spanish one. “The other guy said he had a lot of time and then he constantly was unavailable due to lack of time, ” the men on the screen said, “strange, but anyway, we worked together and I know you're honest about these things,” he ended his rant about freelance software developers these days. Only two days per week I can give you, I said. A few months ago only Euros were coming out. I could help him out more, but now, it may be tricky. I closed my laptop. Sitting still, I was enjoying the warm sun on my body. I felt energized and concerned about the time, or lack of time I will have now. It is all hard labor, I thought, software or taking cement off the walls, but worse is that I'm trading my time.

The courtyard I was sitting in had a noisy fridge with a few bleached stickers barely holding on, aged yellow plastic bits, and only an echo inside. It is hungry to store mini beer bottles, Portugal’s favourite, to enjoy a late summer evening. Now, however, the house is empty – in 3 months, the owner wants to move in. I'll have to throw a few tons of lime and sand on the walls before that. It'll be hard and physical work, but when I finish, as always, I’ll be surprised how pleasing lime plaster flows on those old walls. Now, though, the room is full of old cement rubble and dump eroded sand from the sandstone.

Trust the process, I repeated to myself while taking out my notebook to write a scene I had been thinking about for the last few hours. Sometimes physical work brings ideas to my consciousness, other times brings a peaceful nothing. I sat there, in the sun, for another half an hour until there were no words left.

I put grey gloves on with black rubber for handling, glasses made of transparent plastic, and blue safety headphones – I was back to scraping off that grey dump shell.

#generalist #lifeinportugal #multipotentialite #Autodidacticism