On balance, I’m about the whole rather than the parts that comprise it. But when I struggle, and every start brings struggle, it comes from the part. I focus on it, obsess over it. And it becomes my demon, as if my life’s work, my legacy, will be connected to it, whatever the it is at a given time. Then miraculously, I continue on and barely remember what it was that so bothered me the next day. All struggles get replaced with others.
The it can be many things. A process. How parts fit. Or if they measure correctly. The struggle can be with a tool that doesn’t want to work when you do. It can be about, or with, the client. Because sometimes the client doesn’t want to work when you do. No matter what becomes the struggle, it will own me.
Sometimes I look at these smaller moments as part of the making of things, the organic charm that comes with the evolution of handwork. And from the maker’s time at the bench and any hand/eye skills that devolve from years of use and abuse. Not and never added for said charm, but allowed, or maybe accepted, as a way to speak to every man’s return to struggle, the very point at which it all begins.
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