Every Step Counts
On slow progress and the steps that make the journey.
At times, I find all the steps annoying. I’ll just say that out front.
It takes steps to get where you’re going, and sometimes those steps are slow. They take time, and taking time means pulling it from somewhere else, which often means giving something up. There are days I wish projects worked like high-speed rail. Point A to point B, fast and direct, skip the walking. But that’s not how it works. The steps are the journey, and if you somehow arrived at the end without taking them, you’d find yourself standing there unprepared, holding something you didn’t quite earn yet and don’t fully know how to use.
I’ve spent the last few months paying down debt. This coming month was supposed to be the first month debt-free, outside of the house and the car. Then the lawn needed mowing, and I didn’t have a mower, and depending on someone else to get to it means the grass grows however tall it wants before they show up. Growing up on a farm, I can tell you that what’s out front of the house right now could put up a respectable few bales if I had the cows for it. So I financed a lawn mower. New debt. One step back on a goal I’d been walking toward for months.
I didn’t intend this post to be a complaint about lawn mowers or finances. I wanted to use it as an example of steps that don’t involve pots. Today was a day off, and my wife kept reminding me it was fine to actually take one, to step off the productivity treadmill where even resting feels like falling behind. She was right. Aside from buying the mower, I got my dad’s old Wheel Horse tractor started and running so I can haul bricks up to the kiln site. Overtime is coming at the paper factory this week, which means the kiln sits a while longer. That’s the deal sometimes. But here’s the part worth telling. I had a beer tonight in one of my wood-fired cups.
I threw that cup. Trimmed it, dried it, ran it through the gas updraft kiln for a bisque fire, then drove it out to Bill Moon’s wood kiln in Mills, Pennsylvania, where we fired for three days straight to get the surface it has now. I may have worked harder making that cup than I would have worked the same hours at the paper factory. But the cup has a story that belongs to me. The paper factory has a story too, but that’s not my story. Someone else wrote it and I participate in it.
The wood-fired cup was a journey I took step by step, on my own, from a lump of reclaimed clay to something I’m drinking a cold beer from on a Tuesday evening. Every step mattered. The first one, the last one, and all the slow ones in between. Miss any one of them, and there’s no cup. I’m lucky I got to take all of those fair and foul steps.
If I were living yesterday a second time: I would have sat down with the beer and the cup a little earlier in the evening and let the rest of the list wait. Some things deserve to be appreciated without rushing off to the next thing.
Things I am grateful for: A wife who reminds me it’s okay to rest.
If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12,676 days left. One of them went toward a lawn mower, a running tractor, and a beer in a cup, worth every slow step it took to make it. That’s a decent day off.
Originally published at Creek Road Pottery
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