The Plank – what I’ve been learning as a builder’s labourer

Coaches tell you that if you want to make progress, you need to get out of your comfort zone. I've been so far from comfortable the last three days I'm not sure where my zone begins and ends.

We are doing an extension to the house. My mate Bill the builder is the expert, and I am the labourer/apprentice. That means, for instance, when we are cutting down a tree which is the way of the building, that Bill wields the chainsaw, while I hold the rope and Bill says: "Pull that way, and try not to pull it on top of yourself."

The big challenge, for me anyway, has been the digging of the footings. There's no room to use a bobcat, and this job is being dug by hand. That means hack out the dirt, fill up the barrow, and load it onto Bill's tip truck.

To get the barrow up and onto the truck, there's a four metre long Plank. It's about 250 mm wide. You get a bit of a run-up, push the barrow along the Plank, then tip the barrow up when you get onto the truck tray.

Sounds simple, but the Plank has taught me a few lessons over the past couple of days:

Commitment – you only really have one shot at getting all the way up the Plank with the barrow. That means you have to take a few seconds to line up, build up speed and then just go. "Keep your feet a bit sideways," says Bill. You have to keep the wheel of the barrow dead ahead, and your feet behind it on the narrow Plank. Once you go, you have to keep going. There's a 1.5 metre drop on either side.

Acceptance – Once or twice, no matter what commitment I made, or what effort I applied, just as I got to the top of the Plank I couldn't get the barrow up and over. Accept the failure, and make a choice: let it fall and clean up the resultant mess; or retreat ignominiously down the ramp with the barrow pushing me instead of vice versa. I chose the latter, thinking how stupid I would look on Funniest Home Videos.

Over-thinking – After the first 30 or so barrow loads up the Plank, I got a bit philosophical, and thought: "There must be some Zen in this – when pushing, just push." I then went up the ramp in a very un-Zen-like way, thinking through the process, got to the top of the Plank in a muddle, and had to toss the barrow sideways onto the truck to avoid falling off the edge. I was doing a whole lot better before I started analysing.

Persistence – I got pretty sick of pushing the barrow up the Plank, and physically tired as well. The dirt, however, kept coming out of the trench and there was only one place for it to go. I had no choice – keep running up the Plank. I had to apply a large dollop of "This too shall pass," and a sprinkle of "May this too serve awakening".

Suspending ego – Bill the builder is the same age as me. We each had a barrow, and it was pretty soon clear that his barrow was filled with more dirt than mine each time we respectively ran up the Plank. It took only one experiment, where I tried adding half the difference between Bill's barrow-load and mine, then almost came to grief on the Plank, for me to realise that I wasn't going to be playing any keeping-up-with-Bill games. Just whistle and be happy pushing my David-sized loads.

The Plank was an unexpected, unlooked-for mentor. If I ever hear anyone say about someone else: "He's as thick as two planks," I had better go and ask the specified person what they may have to teach me.