The Joy of Building Things By Hand
A few weeks ago, my coworker and I had a conversation about the value of deliberately spending the time to do some activities purely by hand. We had been debating the aspects of services that allow us to outsource some of our core chores (i.e. Prim for laundry, Exec for house cleaning, and more) and whether that should be considered progress for humanity or not. If we outsourced these core rituals that all humans share, does that no longer make us human?
My coworker has chosen to chop his own wood to heat his home. When I asked him why, he said that he liked being the provider of heat, by carrying the whole process from raw materials to end result. That’s a statement that resonates very clearly with our current predicament in middle class America, given all of the processed foods and tools that come to us from hundreds of thousands of miles away — things that have the history and production completely detached from the finished products. If we don’t understand the origins of the very things that support our humanity, we cannot fully appreciate the value of the journey they took from raw materials to our hands in their final forms.
A month ago, my grandfather passed away. One of my sharpest memories with him (and of my childhood in general) was the time he spent teaching my little sister and I how to make our own swings in the summer. We took tires and wound several lengths of rope from Home Depot around them, tying knots to keep the rope from slipping around the tires. Then we threw the ends over two thick branches of the apple tree in our backyard, and tied it all together. My hands were raw and splintered by the end of it, but it was inconsequential in the face of this amazing new toy. My sister and I swung on the tire swings for years, competing with each other over who could touch the highest leaves with their toes and meticulously cleaning the tires after every rain. We took care of them because we were deeply aware of the cost of creating them.
Sure, we could have saved time and effort and just bought swings for the tree. But building it ourselves taught us that there is value in doing things by hand, even if it violates the time efficiency rule we often prioritize our lives by. Those swings stayed there for 3 years, and even now more than a decade later, I still marvel at the fact that my sister (6) and I (10) were able to build something that could sustain our weight and provide us with so much joy. And that pride and joy is how I imagine my coworker must feel with every loud chop of the wood.
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