Pursuit or achievement?

Are our carnivorous souls destined to become lost in the wilderness of never-ending pursuit?

“Fire up the Silver Dart, Icky.”

This is said by my dad and it’s my cue to turn on the dust collection for the big planer. Dad feeds the wood in, I collect each board as it comes out.

What will the wood reveal?

Planing is the first step in most of our furniture or decor making, because the majority of the lumber Dad mills is anywhere from 1 1/8” thick all the way up to 2” or even 2 1/2” thick (usually because it’s marked for a specific future project). Which means it needs to be thinner. All of Dad’s furniture is the mathematically challenging 13/16” thick. Most of my work is the more traditional 3/4” or less.

We plane to find the right pieces of lumber for the different parts we need to make. We plane to test our hypothesis that this or that board will work for that apron or that charcuterie board. We plane to begin most new projects.

Planing more often than not means that something old is recently finished. (Something that likely took 40% longer than I'd originally planned.)

Present Tali is delighted to be done with Past Tali’s choices and missteps. Not like I’m naive enough to think this time will be without its own miscalculations, but it’s a relief to wade into the territory of new mistakes.

And so here’s what I wish: I hope that new projects never lose their luster, that boredom doesn’t sneak into the wood shop.

A friend recently mentioned that she was hoping to feel the magic in her creative work again. She felt she’d lost that a couple of years ago, though she continued to do the work. I wondered to her if everything we aspire to eventually becomes dull once we achieve it. Projects. Abilities. Goals.

I was listening to a recent episode of “Farewell” and those guys (who mostly write about performance in sport, but it also translate to performance in other areas), talked about how humans are evolutionarily wired to prefer pursuit to achievement. Were it not for this drive, our ancestors might’ve been too lazy to both with the needs of survival and procreation.

I'm wary of evolutionary psychology (I think it gets used too often to justify rather than explain behavior). However, there is something tantalizing and juicy about pursuit. I don’t know if it’s in our DNA (Damn it, Jim, I’m a woodworker, not a scientist!), but it feels like a primal, innate drive.

Could it be that it’s because pursuit is laced with a certain amount of pain? A twinge of uncertainty?

It’s not so neat and pat as attainment, that moment of dusting yourself off and stepping back to take in the scope of your accomplishment or finished project. That moment of, Now what?

I think that’s a really hard moment. I tend to deal with my discomfort with it by moving right along. Finish a project and put it aside, already thinking about the next thing. Waiting for my cue to start salivating over something new.

The line, “Fire up the Silver Dart, Icky,” comes from the 1950s show Captain Midnight. IMDB tells me that in each episode, Captain Midnight and his sidekick Ichabod Mudd would fight evil, zooming around the globe in their plane, the Silver Dart.

I've never seen the show, but I know about it the same way I know about the movie Young Frankenstein, from the oft-repeated lines I hear at home. (This horrifies Josiah, my partner and the man wincing right now as I come clean and say I’ve never watched Young Frankenstein and none of the many, many times it’s been quoted in my presence have made me want to change that.)

There is a consistency to Dad telling me to fire up the Silver Dart. I know what to expect from the ritual act of watching the rough wood become smooth, even if I don’t yet know what the grain will look like. I have a sense of where I’m going with the project, even if the exact path takes me into new territory.

Neuroscientists Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas write about making a gradient ascent in life:

“First, you look around at all the slopes near your starting point and determine which slope is steepest. You climb in that direction for a while, then pause and look around from your new vantage point to see whether there might now be a more favorable direction to climb—specifically, a steeper slope. By repeating this process over and over again, you steadily climb higher and higher until you reach a summit. While this process may not find the fastest possible route to the top, it will reliably get you there.”

I like this. I think this is my answer to balancing pursuit with achievement. With this gradient mindset, you can put your energy into pursuit without getting bored by it because you don’t necessarily ever reach a final summit.

I wonder if my relative inexperience as a woodworker isn't a blessing in this regard. There’s still much to learn. Each project is its own little world that I get to explore, that pushes me into new directions. That humbles me with new mistakes.

Each project is a perfect little blend of pleasure and pain. At least, that’s how it feels to me now. We are all taking circuitous paths toward some kind of meaning, I suppose.

Me at my bench, working on a coat rack. Actually, talking about the work to be done on a coat rack.

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Thanks for being here. Take care, be well, stay warm and I hope the next couple of weeks bring you the thrill of at least one starting bell in your life! ❤️