The human dimension and woodworking
Time, tasks, and trying to get a handle on how long something will take.
Hello and welcome to Hungry Woodworker, a newsletter about learning the art and practice of woodworking, and about what I think about when I’m in the shop. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do outside of woodworking is take notes and edit some of them into essays. I share those every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.
This morning I previewed today’s essay for my child, reading it to her as she ate breakfast. She told me it’s long. So long she couldn’t even remember when I started reading. Personally I didn’t think it was too wordy. I’ll let you be the judge.
Above are a couple of photos of bread boards from the shop. Dad and I planed and routed them in his shop and I’ve been sanding and finishing them in mine. I haven’t worked much with Cedar before, but have to say I enjoy how light it is compared to other wood I use. Those Black Walnut boards can be an upper body workout at times.
I hope this week’s newsletter finds you well and enjoying the start of summer. One quick quote that’s on my mind and that I wanted to share before the essay (pulled from Sarah Bakewell’s book, which I discuss):
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
—Robert Ingersoll, 19th-century American freethinker
The human dimension and woodworking
I got caught up solving math puzzles with my youngest child yesterday morning when I was meant to be writing and editing. This lapse seemed well timed because what I’ve been writing about lately is how time is not within my control.
Time dances and moves to its own rhythm; my smart intentions fly off into the ether.
Build a couple of dressers in a couple of months? Double that. (The months, not the dressers.)
Get all the lumber chosen and planed for a particular project in one work day? Inevitably a piece or two will have a twist or defect, hidden in its rough planed form only to be revealed at an inopportune moment, and it’s back to the lumber pile on a day set aside for final cutting.
In the shop, somehow Hofstadter’s Law gains primacy:
“Any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.’”
I pull this quote from Oliver Burkeman’s book (which I’ve already quoted many times in this newsletter, either because he’s so damn insightful or because I’m deeply in the trough of middle age). That wily cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is absolutely spot on.
Sometimes the dalliance away from my carefully planned schedule is my own internal weakness. I love solving puzzles (it’s why I’m a woodworker, which is simply a way of solving 3D puzzles with my hands all day long). To have my kid express interest in tackling a puzzle, well how could I say no to that?
Sometimes it’s mediocre planning. Which sums up my planning skills. Or to put a positive spin on it: optimism overrides practicality (of course I can get that complicated joinery done in a few hours!).
Sometimes it’s distraction. Have you ever been working on a project and had an insight halfway through, something akin to synaptic gold, an idea of how to get closer to the imagined perfection knocking around inside your brain?
And then there’s the rugged relationship with math. I’m using distancing language here. As if it’s not just me. I can’t be the only woodworker whose calculations on paper rarely hold up in the real world, right? Often it’s a 1/16” or maybe an 1/8” I’m off by, which can be worked with.
But other times it’s something bigger, like 1/4” or 3/8” and I’m standing there cursing my previous optimistic self, who clearly didn’t take the time she should’ve to factor in the 3/8” deep dado holding the back stiles in the top and bottom rails.
Those persnickety little dadoes. Whose idea were they anyway?
“Life, in a way, is a long opportunity for corrective experiences,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in their book The Good Life about insights from the Harvard longevity study.
Learning and practicing the craft of woodworking provides all kinds of access to corrective experiences. My favorites are the ones that leave my fingers intact.
However, to keep the focus on time, on its changeling nature, ever elusive and sliding through those intact fingers, I think an obvious corrective would be to learn from my experiences. And I sincerely try.
My project estimations have improved, but still fall short of the number of hours tasks end up taking. Burkeman writes that this is because it is in our very human nature to fill any additional hours we have, even if we initially intend to hold them sacred for something specific. Indeed, just knowing we have extra time can cause us to say yes to opportunities that we otherwise would’ve turned down.
Time, it seems to me, is not one whit bothered by our wishes or intentions. Any opening gets stuffed full with the “human dimension of life,” a reality, Sarah Bakewell writes in her book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, that is “neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual.”
“This is where we practice culture, thought, morality, ritual, art—activities that are (mostly, though not entirely) distinctive to our species. Here is where we invest much of our time and energy: we spend it talking, telling stories, making pictures or models, working out ethical judgments and struggling to do the right thing, negotiating social agreements, worshiping in temples or churches or sacred groves, passing on memories, teaching, playing music, telling jokes and clowning around for others’ amusement, trying to reason things out, and just generally being the kinds of beings that we are.”
Bakewell’s on to something here, for me, for my desire to understand why time in the shop feels so beyond my ability to control or predict. Perhaps it’s just my very humanness, the willingness to take detours that can’t be planned in advance.
Maybe the point is that time is not the elusive changeling.
We are.
It’s in our nature. Shaped by culture and biology and probably more forces than we will ever truly understand, we are the essence slipping through well-laid plans and intentions.
No wonder any task in the midst of being tackled takes longer than expected.