by Brian Mattocks
About eight years ago, Brian Mattocks sat in his lodge and admitted to the brethren gathered there that he simply did not understand The Plumb. Not the tool itself, which made obvious physical sense, but what it was supposed to teach. Stay upright through the several stations of life, the catechism suggested, and he would nod along while privately finding the lesson about as useful as a motivational poster in a break room. Be true to yourself. You'll be fine.
The problem was not the symbol. The problem was the frame he was putting around it.
The Myth of the Beam of Light
Most of us carry a quiet fantasy about purpose. It lives at the end of a hallway we have not quite reached yet, in a future where the chaos has settled, where we have finally gotten our lives organized enough that the real work can begin. Purpose, in this fantasy, arrives. It descends. There is a moment of recognition, a beam of light, and suddenly you know.
This is not just wrong in the practical sense. It is wrong in a way that actively prevents the thing it promises. When purpose becomes something you wait to receive, you have already surrendered the only mechanism by which it is actually found, which is your own sustained attention to yourself over time.
The Plumb, understood as a symbol of uprightness in the passive, attitudinal sense, does very little argumentative work. It sounds like a virtue, and virtues that only sound like themselves are not doing much. But The Plumb understood as an instrument changes everything about the conversation. A plumb line does not aspire toward vertical. It does not approximate vertical depending on its mood or circumstances. Gravity pulls the weight, the line goes taut, and it tells you exactly where the center of the earth is from wherever you happen to be standing. That is not a metaphor for serenity. It is a metaphor for a very particular kind of active, embodied, relentless self-orientation.
The beam of light fantasy is appealing precisely because it externalizes the work. If purpose is something that happens to you, then you are off the hook for doing the excavation. But as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued in his research on optimal experience, the conditions for deep engagement and meaning are never passively encountered; they are structured and cultivated through repeated practice and attention (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). The beam of light, when it does arrive, is retrospectively visible precisely because of the years of work done quietly before it.
What Gets Buried in the First Twenty Years
In A Mason's Work, Brian Mattocks defines the Working Tools not as decorative symbols of past craft traditions but as active instruments for a specific kind of interior labor: the excavation of the self from beneath the accumulated material of a life lived in reaction to others. That framing matters here because the problem with purpose is not usually that it is absent. It is that it has been covered.
The covering happens gradually. In the first two decades of a life, most people are engaged in a continuous negotiation with their environment, learning which versions of themselves produce approval, safety, belonging, and which ones create friction. By the time that negotiation is complete, many people have buried the signal beneath layers of adaptive behavior so practiced that the adaptation feels like identity. The behaviors that protected you become the behaviors you mistake for yourself.
This is precisely what made the decade of indecision so grinding. The weight of choosing a direction for an entire life, the institutional pressure to select the right degree, the right trajectory, the right form of becoming, compressed the question into something so heavy it could not be lifted. And the reason it could not be lifted was not a lack of intelligence or will. It was that the process was pointed outward, toward options, toward paths, toward imagined futures, when the only information that mattered was already present and already buried.
The Common Gavel, in its operative function, removes the rough and superfluous matter from the stone. It is corrective work, and it is slow, and it is uncomfortable, and you cannot do it by standing at a distance and imagining what the finished surface might look like. You have to be in contact with the material. The excavation of purpose works the same way.
What Discomfort Is Actually For
The movement from buried self to legible self does not happen through reflection alone. It happens through experience, specifically through low-stakes but genuinely unfamiliar experiences where your habitual defenses have not yet organized themselves into position.
When you place yourself in territory where you have no established role, no default competence, and no reliable script, your responses become visible in a way they rarely are in ordinary life. You might reach for humor to dissolve the tension. You might feel the urge to move, to walk, to do something with your hands, anything to keep the discomfort from settling into the body where it would need to be felt. Somatic psychologists have described these patterns at length; Peter Levine's work on trauma and the body argues that the organism's instinct is always to discharge unresolved experience through movement rather than to metabolize it (Levine 1997). The flight response is not just behavioral; it is the body routing energy away from exactly the kind of felt experience that carries information.
The excavation work requires learning to stay in that discomfort long enough to notice what is underneath the default response. And what is underneath, when you stop running, often arrives as rawness. A kind of new-skin sensitivity. The experience of expressing something genuine and feeling the exposure that comes with it, not because the expression is wrong, but because it is real, and real things feel vulnerable in a way that performed things never do.
Brené Brown's research on vulnerability and shame is relevant here not as self-help scaffolding but as a precise empirical description of this dynamic: the experience of being seen in genuine expression is neurologically distinct from the experience of performing competence, and the discomfort that accompanies it is not a signal that something is wrong but a signal that something is actually happening (Brown 2010). The rawness is the data. The discomfort is the instrument telling you that you are in contact with something real.
Over repeated experiences of this kind, patterns begin to emerge. Not in the moment, necessarily; often only in retrospect. A particular quality of aliveness that was present in one situation and absent in another. A sense of connection, or awe, or absorption that marks certain experiences as different in kind from the merely pleasant ones. James Fowler's work on stages of faith development describes a similar process of progressive differentiation, where what begins as a diffuse sense of meaning gradually becomes more specific and more genuinely one's own through a process of testing and revising against lived experience (Fowler 1981).
The Room as a Mirror
The excavation is not a solitary process, and mistaking it for one is one of the ways people stall out. Once you have begun to identify moments of genuine expression, the people around you become an instrument of calibration.
This requires a specific kind of attention. The feedback worth tracking is not the polite kind. It is not good job or nice work or the general social lubrication of approval. It is the feedback that arrives unsolicited and reaches past the surface. Someone who tells you they were moved. Someone who says you are the only person they can talk to. Someone who seeks you out specifically, not because you are convenient, but because something in how you are present has created something they could not find elsewhere. Frederick Buechner's often-quoted formulation points toward the same intersection: vocation lives where your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger (Buechner 1973). The feedback loop is not flattery; it is the world's hunger becoming legible.
There is a trap here worth naming directly. For people who are genuinely skilled at something, the skill often does not feel like a big deal. It does not feel remarkable from the inside precisely because it is native. What comes naturally does not announce itself as extraordinary, which means the external calibration is not optional; it is necessary. But skill alone is not the signal to follow. The more reliable indicator is the overlap: the place where the vulnerable, emotionally resonant experience and the quality of external feedback both point in the same direction. Where those two things converge, the excavation is getting somewhere.
The same logic holds for purpose that does not live in human relationships. Some people find their most genuine self-expression in the natural world, in sustained attention to animals or plants or the scale of things. The feedback loop is different there but equally real. There is a legible difference between tending something that thrives and tending something that does not, and that difference is instructive in the same way.
The Work, Step by Step
1. Dismantle the destination model. Before anything productive can happen, the beam-of-light fantasy has to be named and set aside. Purpose is not something that arrives. It is something you uncover. The excavation begins with accepting that the work is yours to do.
2. Get into unfamiliar territory deliberately. Choose low-stakes, genuinely unfamiliar situations where your established competencies do not give you cover. The less fluent you are in a context, the more visible your actual responses become.
3. Notice the default escape routes. Humor, movement, intellectualization, performance of competence: these are the physiological noise that keeps you from the signal. Name them when they arise. You do not need to eliminate them; you need to see them.
4. Stay in the rawness long enough to observe it. When a moment of genuine expression produces that new-skin vulnerability, do not immediately clamp it down. Let it run its course and then ask: what was the quality of that experience? What was happening in it? Note this, even clumsily.
5. Revisit in retrospect, not just in the moment. Pattern recognition across experiences requires time. Keep some kind of record, formal or informal, of when you felt most present, most alive, most like yourself. Look for the connective tissue across those moments.
6. Track the quality of feedback, not the volume. Pay specific attention to unsolicited responses that reach past the polite layer. Note the feedback that is specific, that names something, that comes from someone who had no social obligation to offer it. This is calibration data, not flattery.
7. Look for the overlap between resonance and response. The purpose-adjacent territory is the place where your own embodied sense of aliveness and the external feedback loop point in the same direction. That overlap is where the excavation is worth deepening.
When the Pieces Come Together
The Japanese concept of ikigai, which translates roughly as a reason for being, describes the convergence of four elements: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The concept has been popularized extensively, sometimes in ways that flatten it into a Venn diagram exercise, but its actual philosophical weight is closer to what the excavation process points toward. Ikigai, in the fuller sense articulated by researchers like Ken Mogi, is not a single destination you identify and then occupy; it is a quality of engagement that emerges when enough of these elements are in alignment (Mogi 2017). It is, in other words, a plumb line, not a fixed point.
When the excavation has gone deep enough that you have a working sense of your own genuine expression, the vocational question becomes both more tractable and less urgent. More tractable because you have something real to align a vocation toward. Less urgent because the expression does not stop when the vocation is absent. If teaching is genuinely your purpose, you will be teaching in some form in almost everything you do, whether or not a salary is attached to it. The vocation matters because it focuses and amplifies the expression, connects it to outcomes that are visible to others, and creates the conditions under which the full convergence of purpose and mission and livelihood becomes possible. But it is downstream of the excavation, not upstream of it.
What the Plumb offers as a symbol, understood operatively, is exactly this: not an aspiration toward uprightness as an attitude, but a working instrument that tells you where you actually are in relation to where you need to be. It does not flatter. It does not adjust its reading to make you feel better about being off vertical. It pulls taut and tells the truth, and the truth it tells is always specific to where you are standing right now, not where you imagine you might eventually arrive.
The beam of light that people around you perceive when they see someone who has done this work is real. It is just not what they think it is. It is not the arrival of a gift. It is the accumulated result of years of deliberate excavation, of repeated discomfort voluntarily sought, of feedback loops honestly attended to, of the slow and unglamorous work of removing what does not belong until what remains is, genuinely, you.
That is what The Plumb has been teaching the whole time.
Bibliography
Brown, Brené. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing, 2010. Brown's research on vulnerability and shame provides empirical grounding for the claim that genuine self-expression is neurologically and experientially distinct from performed competence, and that the discomfort accompanying it is informative rather than pathological.
Buechner, Frederick. Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. Harper and Row, 1973. Buechner's formulation of vocation as the intersection of deep gladness and the world's deep hunger articulates the feedback-loop logic of purpose in a compact form that holds up across secular and religious contexts.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row, 1990. Csikszentmihalyi's foundational research demonstrates that the conditions for meaning and engagement are structured and cultivated, not passively encountered, which directly undermines the passive reception model of purpose.
Fowler, James W. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Harper and Row, 1981. Fowler's developmental framework describes how a diffuse sense of meaning becomes progressively specific and genuinely one's own through repeated testing against lived experience, a process structurally parallel to the excavation described here.
Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, 1997. Levine's work on somatic experience and the body's instinct to discharge unresolved experience through movement explains the physiological escape routes that interrupt genuine self-observation, and why staying in discomfort is not optional in the excavation process.
Mattocks, Brian. A Mason's Work. Self-published, 2024. Mattocks defines the Working Tools of the Craft as active instruments for interior excavation rather than decorative references to operative tradition, a framework that anchors the Plumb's operative function throughout this article.
Mogi, Ken. The Little Book of Ikigai: The Essential Japanese Way to Finding Your Purpose in Life. Quercus, 2017. Mogi's treatment of ikigai restores the concept's philosophical depth beyond the popular Venn diagram reduction, framing it as a quality of engaged alignment rather than a fixed destination, which corresponds to the Plumb's operative rather than aspirational function.
Related Podcast Episodes
- Finding Your Plumb (Episode 1): Purpose Is Not What You Think It Is
- Finding Your Plumb (Episode 2): The Excavation Begins
- Finding Your Plumb (Episode 3): Sitting with Discomfort
- Finding Your Plumb (Episode 4): Reading the Room and the Feedback Loop
- Finding Your Plumb (Episode 5): Ikigai and the Work Coming Together
