You spend your working days fiddling around Excel sheets and having tons of Zoom meetings. That is a routine that will leave your hands clean but will fill your head with garbage. You need some hobby that will give you real tangible results, not just status report. Woodworking is the answer to this desire.
First of all, sawdust smell nicer than old coffee in the office kitchen. Woodworking process demands all your attention and gets rid of all distractions provoked by endless stream of Slack notifications. It is impossible to do anything else if you operate table saw without risk of loosing your finger. Singular attention to the task becomes the meditation in its core for modern professionals.
You should not worry about the necessity to have a huge garage to start with. You can build yourself a pretty good woodworking bench even on the regular apartment balcony or in empty room. It is worth to invest in expensive tools, like DeWalt 735 planer or Festool sander. Even though they are pretty pricey, they will work longer than your subscription services.
It is going to be quite hard and you are going to make a lot of mistakes at the beginning. You will cut your boards in the wrong place and screw something wrong. It is perfectly fine, because the point of this activity is the learning process and not perfection immediately. Accept chaos of first few projects as the necessary part of the ritual.
There is some kind of bliss in planing walnut with hand plane. Watching curls of wood peeled off the surface is mesmerizing. You establish a connection with an art that existed for a long time before the internet was invented. This connection gives you some grounding amid hectic modernity.
Weekend spent in workshop will help you establish a certain discipline. You will acquire the patience which you normally do not have time to develop due to your quarterly targets. You learn to appreciate the material and process of working with it. Such change of attitude starts to influence your professional life positively.
One day you will make a cutting board and gift it to your friend. Satisfaction from watching a person enjoy what you have made is something special. This tangible result of your efforts is priceless. Moreover, you will find yourself an excuse to buy that bandsaw that you dream of.
Leave your laptop at home this weekend and take a chisel instead. Emails will wait while you try figuring out how to cut a dovetail joint. Brain and hands deserve such kind of relaxation and rest. Your shop awaits for you to make the first cut.
Thanks for reading this post! – MyPlugin
