Making Bowls

I have been running this pottery as a business for ten years. Fourteen bowls in an evening should be routine, unremarkable, the kind of thing that does not warrant a post. But it does warrant one, because tonight was different from the ten years that came before it. Tonight I did not go to the wheel because a show was one week out and I was behind on inventory. I went to the wheel because I decided pottery was going to be a daily practice, the same way the writing became one two and a half years ago, and tonight was the first night of trying to keep that decision.

I was tired and had already put in a full shift at the big paper factory, and every part of me wanted to sit down, eat something, and let the evening disappear into the couch. Instead I went down to the studio and wedged up clay and stood at the wheel and made bowls. Not because I felt like it, but because I said I would.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. For ten years I have made pots when the calendar demanded it. That is not a practice. That is a deadline response, and deadline response and daily practice produce different kinds of things. Seth Godin writes every day whether he feels like it or not, and I adopted that idea for the Dailies years ago and it changed how I write. It never occurred to me until recently that the same idea had never made it out to the studio. I try to write daily but for some reason I did not throw daily. Ten years running a business built entirely on pots, and the pots themselves were never the practice, the deadlines were.

Fourteen bowls is not a large number. It is not going to fill a booth at the Harford Fair by itself. But it is fourteen more bowls than I would have made tonight under the old system, where tonight would have been a rest night because nothing was due yet. The bowls are not the point tonight, not really. The point is that I sat down tired and did the thing anyway, and tomorrow I intend to do it again, and the night after that, and the night after that, whether anything is due or not. I hope I can keep the streak going.

If I were living yesterday a second time: I would have made po.ts a practice sooner.

Things I am grateful for: My ability to still be able to create work.

If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12603 days left.

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