Perhaps my nuances within the workshop make me look a bit strange. I am given to swearing at myself and my mistakes. I am pernickety to exasperation with myself, with my obsession for precision, and like some player in a Greek tragedy I am chained to this rock forever. I can be stunned into silence some days by the new problems I create for myself at the bench. I should know better and yet I act shocked by each new error, the most recent design flaw, a fantastic misplacement of tool or mortise.
It may surprise you then that my stumbling, erring ways allow me to produce any work at all. Yet somehow, I manage to make some very good things. I have worked at creating a life where restoring furniture runs parallel to anything else, I am doing. Sometimes that can be hard, but I have lasted at it.
It is important, I think for us to be at the workbench for that is where the voices quiet, where the healing begins.
Handmade furniture is not a need. It is a desire. Bringing something back to functional life that has been made by skilled craftsmen of times past brings me joy. I love tools and wood and to solve problems. And the seemingly simple task of bringing an old chair back to life can span all sorts of roles throughout a job.
Finally, and most importantly, I have been known to talk to myself. The running dialogue, this duet of yin and yang, the left-brain logic fighting the right-brain shenanigans. It is a delicate balance between determination and caution based on past failures. It is also important for to be at the bench for that is where the voices quiet, where the healing begins. My story is not about restoring furniture. Restoring furniture is simply a metaphor. My story is about practice and forgiveness.
Over time I have learned how to forgive myself my errors, how to fix most of my mistakes, and how not to point out the flaws in my work. I have learned when and how to pick up the pace. I have gained a fluency in my hands with my tools. I can make things look simple at the bench. The problem at the workbench isn’t the work, the challenges, or the mistakes, it is always me.
People assume that devotion and mastery of any type is a place that one reaches. It is a glow in the air that starts to become visible and hover around you. Or it is a corner that one turns on some fantastic day. These are pretty fantasies. Mastery, of anything, is an accumulation of experiences that, with wisdom, points out to you the truth of these things: you will get old, you can learn from your mistakes, and you should help others to their own truth. The things that you make will also accumulate and survive you. Do your best with each job. There will be evidence. If you work with your hands, I know who you are. If you have the desire to create and to make things, I am just like you.
We are still humans, for all our digitizing of the world. Our needs, our desires, remain the same. We need to use our hands. We love to create. We can become very skilled. How we do this is both personal and universal. “When we build,” Ruskin once said, “let us think that we build forever.”
It is my belief that working with our hands is valuable. Connecting with tools to create things offers us a compensation that no electronic calculus can bring. The cacophony that is the Internet keeps us distracted, impatient, anonymous, and searching, but rarely satisfied. When we can see the results of our labour—paring with a chisel; using the needle and thread; creating with paint brush, applying a new finish, or pen in hand—there is a different sense of accomplishment. It is a needed blessing in a hurried world to be able to say at the end of a long day, “I did this. Here are the results.” It may only be an attempt to create something that feels solid in a world of impermanence, but this kind of progress means something to me in a day. Perhaps to you as well.
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