Woodworking is a rewarding hobby, but it’s also humbling. Every project brings unexpected challenges that make things take longer than I expected. And all of my mistakes are carved in wood.
If I’m lucky, they are invisible to anyone who doesn’t spend their spare time cutting two-by-fours and joining boards together. But some of them are easy to see.
Gaps between boards, misaligned screws, cracked two-by-fours—we have them all here on the homestead. In every piece of furniture that I’ve built, you’ll find at least one mishap.
Recently, I built a chaise longue for my library. I was riding a high after successfully building a bookcase, and I needed a place to sit while reading. I’ve built several chairs before, but this time I wanted something that would allow me to relax.
Enter the chaise longue.
I watched several YouTube videos that described how to build one. I paced around my house with a tape measure, trying to envision where the new furniture would go and what its measurements should be.
Eventually, I decided on a size, shape, and location for my project, so I went to the hardware store to buy lumber. That’s where things got tricky.
I like to use framing lumber to build furniture—the type of stuff that would normally end up inside people’s walls or under their floor boards.
I do this for two reasons. First, I think the defects that you find in framing lumber—large knots, wide grains, and red streaks—look cool. Second, it’s cheaper than the hardwoods that are normally used for furniture, such as oak and maple.
Unfortunately, all of the two-by-fours were twisted or warped in various ways that made them unsuitable for my project. Making the best of a bad situation, I picked through the wood piles, grabbing the boards with the fewest bends.
When I got home, I started the process of cutting the boards to size and assembling the furniture. Once again, things got tricky.
The design that I had settled on for the chaise longue required that the front, back, and side legs be built separately, and then attached to the seat one at a time. But the pieces didn’t fit together perfectly. They were close enough that I could complete the chair, however there were tiny gaps in some places where the wood should have been flush.
If I were a better woodworker with better tools, I could have cut and sanded the boards so that they lay flat against each other. I might even have gone so far as to match the grains of the different two-by-fours and used more advanced joinery to attach the wood pieces.
But I’m not a better wood worker and I don’t have better tools. So I continued with my work.
The final set of mistakes came when I was screwing in the slats upon which the chair top would rest. I used a piece of 6.35-millimeter (1/4-inch) birch to make it—inserting plywood in a rectangle made from four two-by-fours.
I used clamps to hold the slats in place beneath the plywood, then set about fastening them in place with screws. Only I missed several of the slats when I was putting in my pilot holes. I got them on the second try, but the end result was that several of the screws had holes next to them, marking where I’d missed on the first attempt.
So my chaise longue is made of warped two-by-fours that fit imperfectly together. And there are holes in the wood where I missed when drilling pilot holes. Add all of this together, and one might think that this project was a disaster, but I couldn’t be happier with the result.
The chaise longue is comfortable and doesn’t wobble or creak when I sit on it. It’s perfect for reading or relaxing with some blues playing in the background. And a few times I’ve even caught the cats using it for naps.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have much to learn about woodworking, but it does mean that, while I made many mistakes during this project, I also did many things right. And the sum total is a piece of furniture that my family and I will enjoy for many years to come.
Oftentimes, when people come to Buddhist practice, they do so while carrying a lot of guilt. Perhaps they feel bad about things they’ve done in the past. Perhaps they feel bad about things they didn’t stop others from doing.
In any case, when they sit on the cushion and come face to face with their shortcomings, they become discouraged. Instead of enlivening them, the practice becomes one more in a long list of things that they don’t do correctly.
They can’t sit for long without their legs hurting. They forget the words to the chants. Their bows are awkward and haphazard. If a student has the wrong mindset, experiencing any one of these things could make them give up practice altogether.
But if woodworking has taught me anything, it’s that as long as our right actions outweigh our mistakes, the mistakes don’t really matter all that much, and the end result will be a good one. We’ll still end up with something we can enjoy.
This is true of building chairs, practicing Buddhism, and life as a whole. As we learn to balance accepting our imperfections with striving to do things well, we will derive more joy from the fruits of our labor.
We see the goodness in things, even if they aren’t exactly right.
Namu Amida Butsu
Related features from BDG
Mistakes Are Part of the Fun
Perfections and Imperfections on the Noble Path
Acknowledging Mistakes and Moving Forward
“We Have All Made Mistakes” – Teaching Mindfulness in Prisons: A Different Kind of Rehabilitation
The Common Western Understanding of Karma
Suffering and the Significance of Insignificance
