Metaphorical Leaf Blowers

On Monday, for a good three hours, members of our office building's landscaping team tackled the leaves outside on the sidewalks and the streets with leaf blowers.

I've always found leaf blowers to be a bit funny —massive, loud, gas powered tools that are used to blow around tiny, lightweight, delicate leaves. Blowing 80% of the leaves into a pile sends at least another 20% of the leaves into the air, spiraling upward, and landing somewhere else. . . only to have this cycle repeat itself over and over again.

Watching the leaves fall from the trees and the chaotic process of leaf blowing that followed outside my office building felt a bit like a metaphor for the last few years. The leaves fall from the trees in all sorts of random ways; we attempt to corral them into piles with leaf blowers, only to have them blow around in a different direction, where we move a couple feet and try again.

The whole thing is a bit of a Sisyphean-feeling process, as though we are rolling the metaphorical boulder uphill (or, in this case, blowing around a pile in which the leaves randomly spiral upward and land elsewhere, away from the pile that we just created).

Watching this process made me wonder: are there any areas within our lives where we are using a leaf blower, when perhaps a small rake would suffice?

Or, instances in which we are gripping tightly to the leaf blower in the midst of a wind storm, when instead we could wait a couple of hours for the leaves to settle, at which point we could formulate a plan?

What do you think?

Are you navigating any metaphorical leaf piles in your own life?

What tools are you relying upon as you do?