Knowing What's Normal

There are times in everyone's life when things can seem less normal than at other times. Sometimes the time, periodic moments and extended periods alike, can seem less controlled for a while, but you put the steps in order and try as best you can to stack up up the not-so-obvious priorities. As I worked through the past weeks and months moving house and home, workshop to workshop and garage workshop to garage workshop, I recalled the many times I have gone through these phases. Boxes for shipping become wall cupboards for tools and pieces of odd wood record historic moments in your life. They're important records as are my toolboxes and other boxes holding tools but not toolboxes. Each sliding lid records a message. My first big move was to the US. From my smoking days a cigarette burn leaves a shallow hollow in the hickory shaft and then another box framed with pine tells me of days creating them before my booking five flights to Dallas Fort Worth airport. With my family we had 13 pieces of migration luggage. I made a dozen shipping crates for my tools, the children's personal things and then my wife's treasures too The bridges were burned back then in '87. Imagine almost 30 years of your life packaged away at different times and the only things that made any real sense were the tools you had in boxes, the designs you had gestating in your head and the trust you had that your hands could use these elements to support your family. 

Many of you have said the moves are highly distressing emotionally and physically but the hard moves make the next moves all the easier. Soon after you are settled in you wonder what the fuss was about. These various aspects of the moves seemed quite seamless to me. Resetting the workshop and settling it do take effort and thought. many things never change. My saws have hung in their place at my bench for three decades. There is no reason to change it. These three I reach for avery few minutes throughout the day. Where would they go? I don't want to turn for them, reach for them with my left hand, clutter my bench with them.

Tomorrow we begin filming again. It will seem different to me because what was common to me before is changed even if only by a little. I will search for the camera at times because of the changes, but soon I will find it normal again. I know this. If my tools are in their rightful and usual place I will be anchored, settled, peaceful. This would be the case whether filming or not. My tools bring normality to all things for me. When stresses inevitably happen and I search for answers beyond my sphere, I can find solutions as the chisels slice and chop and the plane shaves, fits and finishes the arguments I encounter in the grains I work with. So it is with life as a working man and a craftsman. I suppose some might say that's an empty-minded way to go but that's irrelevant. Fitting tools into places, placing planes and chisels and then clamps and gauges. These things, they make sense of life. With my book written and my tools and workbench set in my new workshop, the start to a new season of filming becomes anchorage. Here I feel knowing what's normal settles all issues. Never forget the normal things in the workshop. Develop patterns and placements as you create your workspace and then the workplace you work from, work in will usually be replicable. This is saneness.