I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Supplies for this week: Mexican sunflower and cosmos seeds to grow as a screen for the one area of my backyard not shielded from the neighbors’ eyes (plus bags of garden soil and potting mix to plant them in), stone tile sealer and sanded grout in light smoke to fix an area of deterioration in my main bath, silicone spray to stop the upstairs window from squeaking when I open it each morning to run the attic fan and cool the house.
When I was married, I let my husband to do any fix-it tasks around the house. After the divorce, I began a slow process of learning to do those tasks myself. I replaced a flapper valve in a toilet. I bought a drill and a set of drill bits and figured out how to use them. I followed YouTube videos to replace headlight bulbs in my car. I stained my fence; I replaced rotted molding in my bathroom; I discovered I needed to replace the filter in my humidifier regularly lest hard water buildup prevent its operation.
I now own a lawn mower, a weed wacker, and a leaf blower and know how to use them reasonably competently. When I need to till soil, I do it myself with my own spade. I bought a handy device to aerate my lawn. When I recently wanted to clear a flower bed of overgrown raspberry brambles planted by my house’s previous owner, I grabbed that spade and went to work.
While my ex-husband was reasonably competent mechanically (and was trained as a mechanical engineer even), I gravitated towards even handier men after divorce, because their skills and manliness were attractive to me but perhaps more because I wanted those skills for myself. I dated a carpenter (who imagined himself an Indian-style Jesus), a guy who fixed his own Jeep, and, most recently, a self-described “mechanical genius” (he was indeed). These relationships — no, these men — offered me the opportunity to develop more manual competence under their tutelage, and I relished the chance to do that, even as I also enjoyed having someone around who could handle tasks I wasn’t comfortable with. Or wasn’t strong enough to handle.
In his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford argues for the significance of these kinds of efforts, against our culture’s aggrandizement of knowledge work:
In this book I would like to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.
Today, I want to speak up for manual competence, and how glad I am to have developed it at midlife. Later than I should have, but at least I did it. Crawford suggests that in exercising manual competence, I am aiming for individual agency, seeking meaningful work and self-reliance at the same time.
He writes:
With hard economic times looming, we want to become frugal. Frugality requires some measure of self-reliance—the ability to take care of your own stuff. But the new interest in self-reliance seems to have arisen before the specter of hard times. Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.
Crawford’s work is newly relevant today as knowledge workers find themselves staring into an abyss of unemployment possibility brought about by the rise of generative AI. Now, college seems less like a sure path towards economic success and more a way of getting yourself into debt thinking you can do someithing better than a machine can. Now fifty-something technologists like myself facing layoffs find it’s almost impossible to get a new job, even as openings for those without any experience in the workforce disappear.
Manual competence and craftsmanship are fashionable again.
This week
Plans include
- Continuing to plant seeds and seedlings in the back garden, for both screening and beauty
- Fix the squeaky windows by cleaning the tracks and lubricating them with silicone WD-40
- Complete the tile fix-it job in my bathroom
- Family dinner at my house Wednesday — my sister and her son are in town
- Continue decluttering the house to make room for my daughter — she moved in over the weekend
- The usual – walking the dogs, trading options and stock positions, painting (have a couple new ones in process).