Mistakes and moving on
A little update: I’m taking my work home with me lately in the form of bruises and sawdust; I imagine I make a baffling, troubled sight at the end of the day, but this is the path of the apprentice. Or, at least, this apprentice. And while I may baffle my partner (the foundation of a long-lasting relationship) and certainly my kids (I can already feel the gratitude of future therapists filling their coffers), I take relief in noting I am not troubled. Looks, in this case, are deceiving.
I just finished helping the kids in my oldest child’s classroom make boxes. I talked all about the importance of measuring correctly, adding and subtracting fractions (you should’ve seen their youthful eyes all aglow on that topic), and being cool with making mistakes. Throughout it all, I’m kicking myself because I never even made a joke about the fact that the construction we used required gluing up butt joints. A real missed opportunity.
My essay is below. Any funny stories you want to share? I’d love to hear them (and am only a click of the reply button away).
Last week, in the car with my kids after picking them up from school, we talked about the importance of mistakes. It’s a conversation we’ve had many times before. I imagine family is like a baklava, thin layers of the same narratives told and retold until they bake into some kind of coherent identity.
In our family, one of those narratives is that mistakes are useful because they stick in the mind better than getting something right. You remember the startled pulse of realizing something you’ve done isn’t quite right, is absolutely wrong, has consequences for the future, or is somewhere in between. If we’re being real, I tell them, even the best choices have consequences, but a glance at their bored, distracted eyes tells me this concept is a bridge too far.
Nothing like being pulled up short and forced to confront reality. The phyllo of this particular narrative clearly needs a few more layers before I learn that I talk too much on subjects of only middling concern for others.
I don’t want to speak universally, but for me, as a woodworking apprentice, mistakes happen with greater frequency than I’d prefer. I’ve tapered the wrong side of too many legs, put mortises where they needn’t be, cut the pieces for doors too short, and even made a table a good inch or so taller than it was supposed to be.
Josiah looked at that table and said, This is a bit higher than I expected, but on the flip side, no back pain because I won’t have to bend down to water the plants.
Too right. I wish I could say that was the plan, but actually I just miscalculated.
“But all woodworkers occasionally make mistakes. We make them for various reasons: bad luck, lack of skill, not approaching the task logically enough, fatigue or distractions. Little foul-ups, like sawing a part too short, are inconvenient at best and can disrupt work flow. More serious errors, like ruining a pair of book-matched panels, can take the wind out of our sails and make woodworking tedious instead of fun. For professionals, blunders and slipups can lead to overtime and drain the profit from the job. Because the universe of possible foul-ups is limitless, it’s just as important to learn to deal with mistakes as it is to learn to sharpen a chisel or adjust a tablesaw.”
—Sandor Nagyszalanczy, Fine Woodworking, July/Aug 1992, Dealing with Woodworking Mistakes
Nagyszalanczy sums up neatly the variety and consequences of making mistakes in the shop. I don’t know that I have anything to add except, Yep.
Who am I kidding? You know me—I always have more to say.
Lately I’m most aware of the location of my fingers and hands in relation to spinning blades. My dad says that a piece isn’t finished until you’ve bled on it, but I do try to defy this maxim with every project.
Years ago, when I was building a bookshelf (another colossal thing that I didn’t understand would weigh a staggering amount when completed but have appreciated every time we’ve moved since), I ran the tip of my middle left finger through the saw blade. Given my proclivity to swearing, if there was one finger to cut, this seems the most obvious.
I can’t even quite remember how I did it, but suffice to say, I was tired and just trying to finish the last pieces before dinner. The blade cut to the tip of my bone, quick as a dart, quicker than pain. I pulled my hand back, swore (loudly but calmly, the damage was done so panicking at this point seemed superfluous), and turned off the machine. Wrapping my hand, which was bleeding freely, and throbbing, the pain having caught up with the action, I called up to Josiah while unplugging my table saw and told him I needed to go to the hospital to have a cut on my hand checked out.
At the time, our kids were probably around 3 and an infant, I believe. The closest hospital was a half hour drive away. It would’ve been inconvenient for him to drive me, hauling the kids along for a wait in a strange place for who knows how long. He wanted to know if I was okay, as did our oldest child, so I told them I was fine and I’d be back as soon as I could.
Then I drove myself to the hospital, hand held aloft to try to lessen the bleeding, feeling grateful for the rest of me that was intact.
While waiting at the hospital, my dad called, and I debated not answering. At the time, we were still living in Massachusetts, so we didn’t see or talk to family as regularly as we have since moving to Minnesota where we all live now. I hesitated to answer because I felt deeply ashamed of what I’d done. But I answered because I was alone in the E.R. and though an adult, it was nice just to get to be someone’s child.
The background noise of a beeps and hospital people saying medical things to one another gave away that I wasn’t at home. He asked where I was. I told him, explaining what happened, feeling increasingly worse about myself in the retelling.
Then he told me that he’d done the same thing just the other day in his shop. He’d cut his finger, stopped the work, gone up to the house, cleaned and bandaged the wound well, then headed back to the shop to finish work.
And here I was at the hospital, feeling oddly coddled that I hadn’t just cleaned my injury at home and moved on, too.
My finger healed. I completed the bookshelf and have since paid much more respect to fatigue. Though there are minor scrapes, bruises, and scars on my person, in the last few years my injuries have been superficial, and as far as those kinds of mistakes go, that’s my goal.
Strike that—my goal is to not hurt myself at all.
But what about all the other mistakes, the non-injurious ones? Trying to get through life without making them—or fixating on minimizing them so much that it stifles action and creativity—runs counter to the point of life. Life is the mistakes, the messes, the puzzles. It’s not about being free of them.
I’m drifting into universal bromide territory. Let me get back on track and speak about my experience and you can let me know if it any part of it rings true for you as well: I’ve begun to believe that the only freedom we’re allotted comes from embracing each moment of challenge—this is what is. What now?
Yet I do try to be mindful. Mostly I try to learn from my mistakes, like not woodworking when I’m tired. Or being generous with the chalk when I’m marking up wood for the lasting changes that will impact it’s future.
I asked my mentor, How do you handle mistakes? She replied, Ah, that shows me how good a woodworker is. Mistakes are a given. How you deal with it demonstrates mastery.
Striving for perfection isn’t the solution. We’ll never achieve it anyhow. And, at least in woodworking, if we did the outcome would be something that looked like it was made by machine, not by human hand, she told me.
I’d like you to know that every piece by me has more than a whiff of “made by human” about it.
However, I’m making different mistakes now than the ones made earlier. And I am better at fixing and correcting those I do make. It’s only in reflecting on this that I realize I am growing as an artisan, taking on more complex projects, and as a person, accepting flaws alongside the few things I get right, not waiting for the mythical future of perfection and mastery.