Maker's Time, A Reflection

I am thinking it's time for this blog to take a new direction. In the past the emphasis has been on particular works and woodworking tips...what and how. Needless to say, the sole proprietor woodworker's life is all-consuming. There are customers to meet, plans to draw, materials to buy, catalogs to savor, parts lists to compile, schedules to extend, tools to accumulate, new jigs to clutter space, blogs to write, maintenance to defer, shop to clean, wood to cut, rout and sand, components to assemble, completed works to finish and deliveries to make. Some family time and sleep are then well in order, but reflection would be a luxury. Nonetheless, given the subject of this blog is my career as a woodworker, it seems appropriate to do some reflecting on this life now that the shutters are largely drawn. That brings me to the primary ingredient of my work, the irascible and evanescent element of time.

Yes, my only plea to the clock was to slow down. Having done various rote jobs in my life, though fortunately never for very long, I knew well the meaning of watching the clock. Yet how opposite to watching the clock were the hours spent in the shop, avoiding any flirtatious, even fearful glances in the direction of the clock, whose hands seemed visibly to rotate. As the workday began to draw to a close, in the late afternoon, the hands experienced even further acceleration. The speed of time's movement at times slipped into a transcendence of time. I feel very lucky, indeed, to have, not always, but often, enjoyed this state of absorption, enhanced not only by the manual nature of the work, but also by the lack of an overseer. Also, the opportunity of losing a finger at any moment enhances attention nicely. Much of my working life passed this way.

I once spent a lovely summer living alone in a brown log cabin not far from the shore of Lake Superior. It was situated on a grassy knoll just above a small stream sprinkled with small boulders and falls, rapid flowing. A talkative stream it was, and at times I would swear to hear the conversations of passerby. It must have been spring-fed as it never wavered in its flow, hour to hour, week to week, rain or sun, all summer long.

Current psychology has a term, quite applicable to this stream, a term I rather like, “flow state.” This describes well the absorption I could feel in the shop. Some of the characteristics of this flow state tally with my own experience: complete concentration along with an absence of rumination, performing well-rehearsed tasks with effortlessness, the challenge of the work closing in on, though not exceeding, my skill level, pleasure and reward in seeing my goals accomplished...that pile of rough boards at the day's start transforming into a useful, perhaps even beautiful, object. And, not the least, the fleeting transcendence of time.

I have often thought of the following passage, one of my favorites, in reference to my woodworking life, a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden which describes perhaps the ultimate flow state, an artist who passes beyond Time:

There was an artist in the city of Kuoroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff, Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly into the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made out of imperfect material; and as he searched for it and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance as he could not overcome him. Before he found a stick in all respects suitable the city of Kuoroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole star, and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and no more time had passed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful.