A Shipwright in Training

I’ve been thinking; this blog has taken an almost exclusive turn to documenting my daily work with boats.  It’s not a bad direction, and I think it’s far more interesting than boat school gossip or attempts to wax philosophical about the place of the craftsman in modern society.  I’d run screaming from that blog. 

Nevertheless, the initial point of this little exercise was to track how one person manages a fairly radical career shift in late mid-life.  I should probably talk about that too.

Lots of folks have written to say how much they’d love to do something like this themselves and that they harbor a not-so-secret fantasy of ditching it all and running away with the circus, or to boat school.  So far no one has fessed up to wanting to run away with Paris Hilton, and really, if you want to do that it’s best to keep it to yourself.  I realize that I haven’t mentioned that from time to time I stop and say to myself:

“What the hell was I thinking?  This is hot and dirty and tiring work, promising only more of the same for hardly any money.  I’ve got to run back to a nice little office job while I still can!”  Usually there are more expletives, but you get the idea. 

These kinds of thoughts usually crop up when I think about the money side of things. Thinking too much about the money is a real a soul killer.  I find myself radically shifting away from my initial goals and going towards things that I have no interest in at all, other than they may pay well.

So, the exercise I’ve been doing while working on difficult or boring tasks is this:  I ask, “what’s the good in what I’m doing?  If I only had to do it for a little while, and then do something really dull, what would I miss about this?  Is this a part of the path towards what I really want to be doing?’  Sometimes I realize that I’m in totally new territory and that I have no idea if what I’m doing is part of what I want to be doing eventually. 

And then there are times, like today, when I realize that I’m more skilled now than I was a year ago.  I was doing a simple thing this afternoon, putting feathers in between planks.  Feathers are thin shims of wood used to close up gaps when the planks have shrunk open too much.  I realized that as I was shaving these feathers down to fit that I was moving quickly and only using my eye to gage how much to plane off after each test fit.  I wasn’t worried about getting it wrong or obsessing about getting it perfect.  I just knew what to do to get them the way I wanted. 

And that’s the kind of thing I’m shooting for with this career change.  It’s not that it’s essential that I end up a boat builder, or restoration specialist, or furniture maker.  It’s that I have a greater percentage of my time where I feel fully engaged in and able to handle the work at hand.  It’s the same thing I love about being relaxed and present with other people.

So, the state of the state is this: As I get more clear about what I value, I’m less wedded to the initial goal of building boats, but still committed to working primarily with wood.  The most valuable things these days are:

Working with people I enjoy

Generally interesting problems to solve

A mix of strenuous and detail-oriented tasks

The opportunity to do something approaching art, something where I have to trust my eye.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Mystic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.