Howdy folks — Glen Blamstead here, reporting from Mora, where the snow is still doing whatever it wants, the coffee is strong enough to offend a reasonable person, and I have recently stepped entirely out of my own mind and left a note on the door saying I'll be back in five minutes.
It's been longer than five minutes.
I want to be upfront about that. The note was optimistic. Notes usually are. Notes are written by a version of you that still believes in schedules, timelines, and the orderly management of interior experience. The version of me that is currently wandering around somewhere in the vicinity of my own consciousness, kicking over philosophical rocks and peering underneath them, did not check in with the note-writing version before departing.
That version is a dreamer. I try not to let him near important decisions.
The Particular Quality of Not Being Entirely Present
There is a specific kind of mental absence that is different from distraction. Distraction is when your phone goes off during a conversation, and suddenly you're reading about a recall on a brand of garden hose you don't own. That's a distraction. Common. Rude. Easily corrected.
What I am describing is something else. It's the state of standing at a job site with your eyes open and your boots on the ground and your clipboard in hand, and yet some portion of your brain has quietly packed a small bag and gone somewhere else entirely. Not somewhere dramatic. Somewhere like a bench by a lake. Somewhere that has nothing to do with truss engineering or frost depth or the ongoing debate about whether a particular door should swing in or out.
My crew has learned to recognize the signs. A certain stillness. My coffee going cold in my hand without me noticing. An expression my wife describes as "the one where you're physically present but contractually unavailable."
She is not wrong. I have been told this is a feature of a certain kind of personality — the kind that builds things with its hands but can't stop the rest of itself from wandering off to examine questions that have no load-bearing value whatsoever. I have also been told, by fewer people, that it might not be a bug.
What Happens When the Mind Leaves the Building
Here is what I have observed over fifty years of occasionally misplacing my own attention: the mind, when left unsupervised, does not idle. It investigates.
When I am not actively directing my thoughts toward something useful — when I am between tasks, or waiting for a pour to set, or standing outside at five-thirty in the morning with the kind of Minnesota quiet that makes you feel like the last person on a very cold planet — my mind goes looking. For what, I couldn't always tell you. It rummages. It holds up old things and looks at them from new angles. It asks questions like "why does that work," "what would happen if," and "has anyone ever considered" — questions that are technically irrelevant to the current project, yet keep showing up on the invoices.
I've come to believe this is not a malfunction. It is, in fact, the part of the process that most people forget to budget for. The part that isn't on the schedule. The part that happens between items on the punch list, in the margins of the workday, in the gap between putting down the tape measure and picking up something else.
You can't build anything worthwhile without it, even if you can't bill for it.
The Five-Minute Estimate and Its Relationship to Reality
Now, the five minutes. I want to address the five minutes specifically, because I think it is doing a lot of philosophical work and deserves recognition.
"Back in five minutes" is not a promise. It is an aspiration expressed in the language of optimism. It is the mental equivalent of telling your crew you'll be right back while you go figure something out. Nobody believes it. Everyone accepts it. The five minutes could be five minutes. It could be forty-five minutes. It could be three days during which the problem you were supposedly solving has transformed into an entirely different and more interesting problem, which you have now also left temporarily.
I have said "back in five minutes" to myself at least ten thousand times over the course of a fifty-year career, and I want to be transparent: the average return time is considerably longer. Not because I am disorganized — though I have had my moments — but because the mind, once it steps out, tends to discover that there is more worth looking at than was initially advertised.
This is not a construction problem. This is a consciousness problem. The construction just happens to be where I notice it most clearly.
The Part Where I Connect This to Pole Barns, Because I Always Do
I cannot help it at this point. Fifty years of post-frame construction have made pole barns a lens through which everything eventually gets examined, including questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to step briefly outside your own head.
Here is the connection: the best buildings I have ever been part of — the ones that came together right, that work the way they should, that the owner is still happy about fifteen years later — all had something in common. At some point in the process, somebody stepped back. Stepped out of the immediate problem. Got briefly out of their own mind. And came back with something they would not have found if they'd stayed inside it the whole time.
A layout that might be better. It might be a different approach to a drainage issue. It might be the realization that the door is going in the wrong wall entirely, and you've known it for three days but needed to go for a walk before you were willing to say so out loud.
The worst construction decisions I've witnessed — and a modest number I have personally made — happened when nobody stepped back. When the plan was executed exactly as written, without pausing to ask whether the plan still made sense. When efficiency was treated as a virtue in the absence of reflection. When everyone was so busy being present that nobody had time to step out for five minutes and look at the thing from the outside.
The Theoretical Case for Being Temporarily Out of Your Mind
There is a concept — I want to call it something, but I am not a philosopher, I am a man who builds structures in Minnesota — that relates to the value of stepping outside your own operating assumptions. The idea that you cannot see the frame you are standing inside. The mind, fully occupied with the content of its own thinking, cannot simultaneously evaluate whether that thinking is any good.
You have to step out to see in.
This is why I am not actually concerned about having left my mind unattended. My mind knows the way back. It always comes back with something worth examining. It might be a small thing — a slightly better answer to a question I wasn't consciously asking. It might be a large thing — a whole reorientation on a project, a customer conversation, a business decision that had started to feel complicated and comes back looking simpler.
The note says five minutes, but the value is not in the five minutes. The value is in the willingness to step out at all. To release your grip on the immediate. To trust that the thing you're building will still be there when you return, and that it might actually benefit from having been briefly left alone.
Concrete sets while you're not watching it. That's not a failure of supervision. That's just how concrete works.
Coming Back and What You Find When You Do
I am, as of this writing, mostly back. Eighty percent, let's say. Enough to write this, which suggests more coherence than I may have implied earlier. The remaining twenty percent is still out there somewhere, kicking rocks, asking questions that don't have useful answers, doing whatever it is that portion of me does when I'm not supervising it.
I have made my peace with that. Fifty winters in Minnesota will do it to you. You learn that the parts of yourself you cannot control are not necessarily the parts you need to worry about. They are often the parts doing the most interesting work.
When I come back from one of these temporary departures, I usually find that the problem I was wrestling with has not gotten worse in my absence. Frequently, it has gotten quieter. The noise around it has settled. The important parts are more visible. Whatever I was holding too tightly has relaxed enough to be seen correctly.
At Sherman Buildings, we have been building pole barns, post-frame structures, barndominiums, and various other things since 1976. That is a long time. Long enough to learn that the buildings we are proudest of were not always built the fastest. They were built with the full combination of skill and attention and judgment — and judgment, specifically, requires the occasional departure. The willingness to step back, step out, and come back in with clearer eyes.
We haven't changed that in fifty years, and we don't intend to.
The Note on the Door
The note is still there. "Out of my mind. Back in five minutes." My wife has read it three times and says it explains a great deal about the last forty-something years. I told her I take that as a compliment. She said she knows.
If you're in the process of planning a pole building — or a barndominium, or a machine shed, or anything that involves columns and steel and a piece of land you've been staring at since last spring, wondering what to put on it — I'd encourage you to do the same thing. Step out of it briefly. Not because the decision is hard, though some of them are. But because your best thinking tends to happen just after you've stopped trying to think.
And when you come back in? We'll be here. We're very patient. We've been doing this since 1976, and we've never once left without a note.
— Glen Blamstead: Still building. Still wandering off mentally. Still finding his way back before anything goes seriously wrong.
