Be the metaphorical ax and keep cutting. From Hardscrabble Farmer at theburningplatform.com:
A few years back the pigs were turning up the soil behind the house and uncovered and old worn down iron ax head. There wasn’t more than an inch of the bit left forward of the hole. I keep it around to remind me of how something that you imagine is impervious to wear- after all the ax chops the wood- can be worn down by time and the much less robust wood it repeatedly worked.
To think of how valuable a pioneer ax was to someone carving out a homestead in the midst of an impenetrable forest that they would use it up before discarding it, to imagine how many times it must have struck to have given up four inches of hardened steel to the task puts our own lives in perspective.
