Sehnsucht

A yearnful, wistful longing.

Graphic and web design are great, but sometimes you get a good case of the sehnsucht’s (a fancy new german word I learned and am probably using incorrectly). I’ll be the first to admit that even with all the “building” I do on the Internet, sometimes I get the ol’ sehnsucht’s to build real-life physical things. 

Like when my pop bought his first house. Saying he bought it isn’t entirely truthful, because all he bought at the time was the land. The house didn’t exist yet. He had decided to build that on his own. He’d never built a house before and I imagine had never before built anything even close to that scale. A few weeks ago I asked him how he learned and he said, “I spent my life watching your grandpa build things. If you have a desire to build things it’ll make sense.”

He ended up just getting started, renting a backhoe to dig the foundation, and setting all the footings himself. The part that really got to me and my little Adobe CS6 thinking brain, was when I asked how he managed to lift the logs up to the top of house without more equipment.

“Oh, your grandpa and I rigged up a crane using block and tackle,” he said. “We just hoisted them up.” Right. He just came up with a handmade rig to lift up huge 40 ft. tall logs to the top of a two-story cabin.

But my Pop probably views designing and developing a website the same way as I do about coming up with a homemade crane to lift logs to the top of a house. And that’s really what I’m “wistfully-longing” for, to be able to bridge that gap in my lifetime; building things on the Internet while simultaneously building goods in the physical world. The best of both worlds.