TOOLBOXES

Toolboxes

The New Yorker published recently a Personal History essay by art critic Adam Gopnik. (June 27, 2011) It is a thoughtful piece reflecting on his drawing instructions with artist Jacob Collins. It is a good read and I commend it to you. 

I have some reflections that are triggered by a line near the end of Mr. Gopnik’s  essay: Drawing, I now think, need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment. (p.63)

This is my jumping off point: skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

When I was young I thought knowledge was all I needed in order to become accomplished. If I wanted to know how to do something, I looked it up in the book. Sometimes this worked for me. Because I had little (no) experience, I undervalued the gifts of time and repetitive acts that build up skills. 

How ridiculous. I had tried to play baseball once upon a time. Did I think I could hit a home run without a lot of batting practice? (Well, I couldn’t hit a home run with a lot of batting practice - but you get my point.) Even if I have aptitude for a certain kind of work, skill requires practice. 

Accomplishment requires skill – and skill is developed over time as one practices one’s craft. Often by rote. Even if one’s heart is not in the repetitive task. (Better still if it is.) A skill is being developed. It is a tool - and there will come a situation for which only this tool will suffice for the work that must be done.

I came out of theology school thinking I was a professional. I was not - not yet. I had a toolbox – theological education, a way of thinking about the world and about the divine. And I had some tools (not many yet) – mostly things I had learned in practicums and under supervision. But I was not skilled. I did not yet have a skeleton on which a body of work might be formed.

But now I am more than thirty years on, looking back. I see some “easy” sets of responsibilities that fell to me – that I failed to accomplish. And I see some very difficult tasks that fell to me that, even at the time, seemed natural and easy. 

Why? I developed skills in some areas (but not in others), Where I had been challenged and had worked hard and had sharpened my tools, difficult tasks that required just those tools became natural. And where I lacked experience (or had not or would not do the work needed to grow) even easy tasks were insurmountable when my toolbox did not contain the tool required to finish the job. 

At this point in my life, I have multiple toolboxes. Let me tell you about two of them.

The first is a black plastic box I have had since I was a boy. It has my name under the lid, written with a marker on masking tape, in a child’s hand. It first was my tackle box when I went fishing with my uncle and my father. In young adulthood, I replaced fishhooks and corks with jigsaw blades and toolkits. As I learned to use my tools, I have carried that tackle box with me everywhere I have lived. It has been by my side as I did many home repairs. I never open it without thinking fondly of my uncle, who died in 1966, and my father, who died in 2000. The boy needed a place for hooks and corks. The man needs a place for bits and blades. The box has been with me from the beginning and will be with me until the end.

The second box is made of wood and was handcrafted by someone who liked my work. 

On the ends of the tool box he carved my name and “St. Luke’s” and between them – the image of a winged ox, the symbol of St. Luke the Evangelist. I love the ox – a steer that has been trained daily to be a working animal. I see that symbol, I see my name. I am coming to think of myself as an ox trained to wear a yoke and to do my daily work. Bill, who crafted the box and gifted it to me, died nearly two decades ago. A lot of stuff breaks around here and I reach for the box. I remember Bill. And I take the tool I need from the box.

All of this is to say that accomplishment requires skill. Skill builds up laboriously over time and becomes just the right tool we can use at just the right moment. 

Over a lifetime, we acquire a lot of tools. We don’t know just when we shall need them but we know that we shall. 

Yesterday I reached into the wooden box. I had need of a tool I have not used often and had not used in a long time. Before the work was done, I cut my finger on the edge.

I will hold it more carefully next time. I will be better.