The months tick by in steady cadence but progress on our construction project feels more halting, its classification more subject to the whims of one’s own patience and perspective. Our hands are rarely idle but some elements of the build are more confounding than others. Occasionally, the work is followed by a second draft, of sorts: or a revision, or a recreation. On other occasions, active hands would be a blessing, a sure sign that some intervening puzzle or other has plausibly been solved. The sheer demands of real-time alchemy of design and build has proven a bit of a revelation to me. Two of us–my uncle and myself–are building his house on the rocky banks above one of the last rapids of the Umpqua River before it melds into a brackish tidal waterway and then empties outright into Oregon’s Pacific Ocean. As offices go, the location is very nearly unimpeachable, except for the omnipresent rumble of traffic on the neighboring State Highway 38, beginning at 2 am with the logging trucks off to clear-cut pillage the monoculture fields of Douglas Fir we deludedly refer to in these times as “forests.”

Over the years, many seasons of work have already gone into this project, though this is the first in which a house is finally springing forth and taking shape. Trees have been felled, logs milled to beam and board. Boulders the size of your mom’s old minivan have been shattered, split by split to make way for the reinforced foundation of concrete and rebar. The bones of a Midcentury house in Stinson Beach, California have been torn down: lovingly wrested away and repurposed for this unforseeable encore. Architectural plans begat the engineer’s pages and, at long last, embossed with county permit stamps giving the luz verde to pick up our hammers. In truth, I didn’t always know that the build itself was to be an endeavor populated only by our four hands; I find myself alternatingly enthused and dismayed. The challenge, the scope, the rural location, the opportunity to work with family: these are all fodder for conflicting, multi-faceted reactions which, I guess, for me is just about as close to philosphical home as I could ever dream of conveying otherwise. I truly don’t know if other people have a consistency of inner disposition but as I’ve lamented in many fashions over the pages of this blogroll, I don’t. And, yes, it’s as exhausting as it sounds.

I do enjoy this work, though. What an opportunity to learn, to remain physically active, and to be utterly unable to overlook the fruits of my labors, even on my sourest day. In the timeframe of mere months we have assembled a pile of sticks into the shadow figure of a home. What’s that you say, a home needs a roof–especially as we descend into the dark, wet months of coastal Oregon’s fall and winter?? Ah, I knew we must have forgotten something. Fear not (well, maybe a little) the roof is in the works, if a month later than last forecast, itself already later than anteceding intentions. If nothing else we have unflinchingly demonstrated that delays are clearly not proprietary to the commercial scale of construction: time may not free but hour over hour is spent very nearly as though it were to work something out of nothing. Constant motion, the need to confront ever-new challenges standing on the shoulders of the vanquished giants of the past days and weeks mean that there is not much opportunity to sit back and languorously appreciate our progress but that progress is inescapable and even in small swallows tastes sweet. Then there is the sick appreciation of the toil itself. I have long held an examined-but-still-unexplainable tendency to Puritanically conflate the notion of a strong work ethic with virtue. So pernicious is the association, in fact, it might be the “virtue” that I tend to elevate the most in my bizzare hierarchy of societal norms. And sure, who doesn’t like a humble go-getter in the mold of George Eliot’s Adam Bede? (at this cuttingly contemporary example cue the sound of scores of laptops folding shut). But it is a mentality that can easily lead one into danger and exploitation.

Several lifetimes ago I held a six month contract at a winery in New South Wales, Australia. I was paid a salary of $1000 AUD weekly, which sounded a decent enough wage until I realized it was the minimum salary that allowed my employer to skirt around protective labor laws limiting hours worked. Still, I–fairly young in my career and eager to learn and impress from a mammoth of the industry–gamely tapped into the type of robust energy reserves plausibly found only in one’s 20s. I was on my way up and this opportunity proved it! Type: be the mouse churning the butter, and all that. I have a distinct memory of when that palace of cards all fell apart. I don’t know what you consider to be a long work day but at the peak of harvest there was a stretch of three days where I worked 21 hours out of 24. By some time into the third day I stopped caring. I didn’t care about my career, about the winemaker, about the trucks of grapes, or the tanks of juice. None of it. And this wasn’t a passive sensation, nor was it some trifling chip on my shoulder. This was perspective-altering, in the way that a psychedelic trip (or perhaps wild multi-day sail) might be. Perhaps this isn’t how I actually experienced it at the time, but with the benefit of time and context and a mind ever-seeking to create connections through arcs and storylines, the moment has evolved to hold dramatic position in my memory as a before-and-after type experience. Before, I believed hard work to be the tonic for all measure of blah blah blah probably in a very Ayn Rand sort of way. After, I saw blunt work ethic as yet another avenue for non-magnanimous actors (or, say, the system-at-large) to prey on people. But some things you can put down but never truly leave behind. So I continue, reliably, to find myself pushing into hazy areas of health and safety in my employments while all the while feeling amongst ideological brethren in, say, the Occupy Wall Street movement or the antiwork subreddit, for example. Like I say, the discontinuity is exhausting.

Here the hours and the perils are not so extreme, but also here, too, there are moments spent wading through those dark corners of the mind. I am running up against the limits of my physical stamina in ways, I think, more than ever before. Perhaps this is recency bias, or this could be a manifestation of the inevitable arc of aging, or it could reflect some ancillary health woes (just wee things like internal organs threatening spoilage like milk during a July power outage) or it could be that I’m just working really dang hard and I feel every bit of it. Regardless, there are moments in which my resolve falters a little bit and I start to feel that dark and dirty temptation of just getting it all done, rather than done well.

This period has me dwelling a lot on the concept of craftsmanship. Related: I highly recommend reading Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson for a memoir-type rumination on working with family, craftsmanship, and identity. So it isn’t without consternation that I come to the realization: I am not a perfectionist. Even just the conceit of that admission feels like an implicit self-critique, a shining of light onto a personal failing. I’ve sat with and developed this understanding at great lengths of the arc of this summer and beyond. Further, I take umbrage with the very conceit of perfectionism: I actually loathe it, and not (always) just because I can’t achieve it. I feel like we insidiously proffer the very subjective concept as though it were a measurable and organic truth, the inherent Omega of all assessments, which also has the nasty byproduct of devaluing the role of context in a particular installation/assessment. Small aside: this year I start most mornings picking at my guitar, and I use an app to help learn; on those occasions when I’ve played a song/lesson while only missing a few notes it asks me if I want to “perfect it” instead of “play again” and I am just so baffled by that as a motivator. It is an entirely ineffective carrot for me.

So what is the artisan’s ideal of craftsmanship, if not perfection? As many of my questions, that is not rhetorical, I can’t seem to untangle that knot. What I do know is that in my core pursuits (certainly: music, wine, writing, wrenching, sailing, and building) I gravitate towards something other than technical perfection. Exuberance, creativity, unapologetic warts; these interest me so much more. I do appreciate precision, in planning and execution. I’m in no way advocating for wholesale abandonment of ideals. Is attention to detail the same as craftsmanship? It certainly isn’t a facsimile of perfectionism, though my argument is that they are too often treated as such. I aspire to better my craft in all the above activities and lament the real world shortcomings when I manifest them (which is to say, every time) but I find myself utterly unmoved by the foggy and unknowable enticements of perfectionism. Realizing this about myself is funny because once I digested the slow-growing epiphany it felt so obvious, but I’m 43 years old and up until this summer I most likely would have been a self-purported perfectionist, if pressed. Unquestionably I would have felt a chagrin at declaring the opposite. Is this what aging is on this side of the inflection point? An untying of all the knots tied during the past ascent? Still, it begs the thorny question of what’s good and whats good enough and whether the border between is a simple line or perhaps something more meandering and less predictable.

In my own context, I rarely judge my work favorably which either means I’m too self-critical or I’m an astute observer of the highest order or I simply have eyes. I’ll kindly venture that even though it is well-established that I’m not a particularly skilled carpenter, at times there’s a dash of column A along with columns C and B. Still, skimming back over my sentences here, I am struck that a likely barometer of my isolation from society is how purple my prose becomes (never without hue even in the best of times), as though on some level I need to dust off the unused words from the closet for my version of the cry, “I am not an animal, I am a human being! I am a man!” Never mind the contrary effect of not letting a reader see the forest for the trees. So it isn’t just my sawing and nailing that could benefit from from practice and refinement, I guess. And post haste! Just, please, not until we finish the roof and I’ve had a little winter hibernation.