Slow making

What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship, hours spent in caring and practiced skill?

We’ve heard of the slow food movement. The idea of making things quickly and too easily, thus providing empty calories for the creative soul, is a notion we should explore, and then avoid as unhealthy for the human spirit. Fast food or corn chips? A passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home speaks to me as a woodworker.

 

“It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of hand-mind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”

 

One of the things that can slow a person down in woodworking is the knowledge that what one makes can last a hundred years or more. There are examples in museums of pieces that have lasted for their beauty and utility for years before our own. When an item is crafted with useful beauty in mind, it transcends not only the years it may last, but also the need one might feel to hurry in its making. What are the few extra minutes to do things right when each moment of attention is witnessed in the finished piece for such a lengthy span of time? What’s the rush in the light of generations? You may walk through the Frick Galleries in New York City and find things that took time in the making using skills that are now lost to most of us. …that may not be understood in the moment absorbed at a quick pace.

"Things men have made with wakened hands and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch and go on glowing for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them."— D.H. Lawrence

How long did it take to make that? The potential customer asks in the hopes of equating your work with some level of comprehension related to their own salary, thinking only that hours spent are the same as money. How long did it take to learn to do what you’ve done so well? is a better question that might relate to your own life.   

We have become so impulsive, so undeliberative in our actions, that I urge you to contemplate the very slow making of things. Through applying more conscious attention, can we invest greater mind in the making of the things that fill our lives and awaken our sense of beauty? And what would the effects of such actions be?

It seems that much of our hurry is driven by the metaphor, “time is money.” But time is not money. It can be the opportunity to invest care, carefulness, attention, serving and listening to each other. What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship?

Make, fix and create...