When working on projects, there are tasks we must undertake that are hard. They take longer than required, and can come up suddenly, unexpected. They nearly halt our progress, and ask of us a quiet determination and patience, to step laterally from our track of project momentum. It feels almost like we've been maliciously stopped by an outside force that wants us to suffer. Like the project is fighting back. This is what we generally call an obstacle.
Being mindful, we can see that the reason this is more difficult than anything else, why it stands out as an issue, is because we didn't plan for it. We are not prepared. It's not that the obstacle is more difficult than anything else, but the mental game is to look at it as such, because no forethought has been put into it by our egoic subject-object thinking.
These hangups feel almost separate from the project, but they are in fact just the next thing in the line of tasks. It's all in our head. Quoting Hamlet, "...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".
During these times, I find it helps me to disrupt my thinking and expect that I don't have all the answers. Expect to be met with a task that is difficult and unexpected, and plan to learn-while-doing in completing it. Expect that it will be more expensive and time consuming, as anything new can be.
Most importantly, go with the flow.
The story is below:
We are converting an old school bus into an RV. One of my first tasks, after removing the seats, is to pull up the flooring, walls and ceiling. They all contain about 2" of insulation that needs to be replaced with high density foam spray.
There are handicap wheelchair anchor rails inlaid in the plywood floor. Each piece is mated to the floor with seven grade 8~ hex head bolts. They were up against the frame rails, lending no chance of getting the impact sockets on it, or even a wrench. The space under the bus was too tight to work tools into.
A few days ago, I first attempted drilling out the bolt heads from the top. I destroyed two bits on seven bolts, using cutting oil. I then took the angle grinder to the underside and cut fourteen more bolts, albeit at the cost of throwing sparks near the diesel tank, which I cleverly shielded with a piece of cardboard, and the cardboard then proceeded to catch fire. I could not do any further work as both of my batteries were dead and we didn't have the generator yet.
Returning home, I read up on drilling steel and discovered that two things had gone unnoticed by me. The tips of the bits I was using were pilot point, which was useless for cutting the shape of material to remove that drilling out the bolt head required. Secondly, I didn't have enough bits. People on the forum I read suggested they went through several. I bought twelve for $30, including a ten-pack of cheap bits that ended up carrying this effort.
Yesterday I arrived at the bus with new bits, a generator, full batteries, and a cup of coffee. I pre-drilled seven heads in a row with a brand new dewalt pilot point cobalt bit, then proceeded to cut through using the cheap bits I had bought, and plenty of cutting oil. It went like a dream, and all seven came out rapidly. What was hours of work the week before was cut down to thirty minutes today by approaching the job ever so slightly differently.
My hands were shaking by having done twenty-one of them, and I had about thirty more to drill at my first break. I had been fighting some which were turning in their holes. At this point I decided that I would leave any that fought for my hands' sake, and go ahead and try the angle grinder on them afterward. I donned my respirator and earplugs, and I ended up having to angle grind several bolts. I should have cut them all like this from the start. By removing tons of material with the angle grinder and just reducing the bolt heads to melted slag, I had saved immense amounts of physical energy.
The obstacle was gone, we could now start unscrewing the plywood floor.
