There is something deeply satisfying about splitting wood. Not only are you providing warmth for your family, but splitting wood just makes you feel like a man. That may not be important to you if you spend your days driving nails or pouring concrete, but for those of us who spend our days in a climate-controlled office doing nothing but typing and moving a cursor, it feels good to get back to the basics, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” and all that.

I don’t hear it that often, but occasionally someone will imply that mental work isn’t the same as manual labor and that you probably don’t deserve a paycheck as much as someone who spent the day logging. Hearing this, I puff out my chest with indignation and exclaim, “Thinking is work too!” and stomp off muttering under my breath.

Thinking is work. I have both nailed shingles and taught school, and the hardest job I’ve ever had was teaching. Teaching is a job with no physical strain other than maybe a typing cramp or tired eyes from grading papers, but I would often end the school day more exhausted than after I had shingled for ten hours.

Even though I can find fulfillment in wrestling an unruly sentence or difficult equation until they submit, I still like the feeling of exhaustion and sore muscles that come from physical work. It seems that maybe the Bible is right, and we were meant to earn our bread by literal sweat dripping from literal brows. We miss something when we don’t use our bodies to work

When you split wood, you can feel the elements that make up the universe colliding. A tree spends decades or even centuries taking gases from the air, water from the ground, and energy from the sun and turning it into complex polymers of glucose that are linked together into a robust substance that withstood years of cold, heat, disease, and insects. You use a fire-spitting saw burning the refined remains of long-dead organisms to fell the tree and cut it into manageable pieces. Then you wield a splitting ax whose iron atoms were mined from the heart of the earth. In one stroke you bring the iron atoms into contact with the bound up energy from the sun and rend it into two pieces with a satisfying crunch.

Man and nature collide, and man wins. However, both you and nature know your triumph is only temporary. One day you will lose and your body will go back to the dust from which you came. So today, enjoy your victory.