stuff tagged with "craft"
The records that people respond to seems to be that unfiltered communion from one person’s creative impulse manifested into reality somehow, and that’s what people are responding to in music.
On Craft
🔗 a linked post to
drcathicks.com »
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originally shared here on
Grandpa loved craft. He didn't put it that way but other people did. My dad said grandpa was a craftsman. I didn’t understand what this meant until one day when we were visiting. We sat down at a restaurant table and it wobbled. We ignored it. But Grandpa dropped as quickly and efficiently as a seal, vanishing underneath the table to fix the cheap, badly-screwed leg with a coin for a screwdriver.
He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.
I’ve got a few posts in mind that I’ll get cracking on soon about my recent malaice and regression towards a mid-life crisis, but this post helped me keep one thing in perspective.
As someone commented on Lobsters, caring is at the root of a craft. How else could you possibly spend your life?
No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.
I'm going to adjust your perspective a little bit. That was no will. What you were using, what Michael Jordan uses and what I use, is not will. It's love. When you love something, it's a bottomless pool of energy. That's where the energy comes from. But you have to love it sincerely. Not because you're going to make money from it, be famous, or get whatever you want to get. When you do it because you love it, then you can find yourself moving up and getting really good at something you wanted to be really good at. Will is like not eating dessert or something that's just forcing yourself. You can't force yourself to be what you have made yourself into. You can love it. Love is endless. Will is finite.
