Craftsmanship

Craftsmanship to me isn’t just about being good at something. It’s like a discipline, again like martial arts. It’s something that you continue to do for the rest of your life and it’s probably something you never reach the level of perfection on. Being good at it is absolutely no harm, but it’s a disciplined art form that you continue to try and get better at.

You can’t bullshit your way through it because whether I’m forging a horseshoe, making a knife or a flower, and even to include the martial arts perspective when you’re drilling down kata or application, the mistakes will be seen in the material of the metal and likewise the mistakes in your technique will be seen in the outcome of trying to make the application work on an opponent who’s non-compliant. You can’t really bluff your way through those obvious mistakes, and if you do try and somehow convince someone that you meant to block a punch with your nose, some people might not call you out on this, but you can feel in the room that the intent is not truthful.

I think one of the greatest mistakes that I made myself, specifically in the martial arts section of my career, was for the first couple of years not pressure testing the self-defence applications in real-life situations. It wasn’t until I unfortunately had to use them in certain situations that I realised there was a lack of understanding of how I would react when it didn’t go 100% the way I imagined and had trained in the dojo.

On top of that, the biggest mistake that I realised existed, or at least came to the surface, was the lack of follow-on combinations. You get that more from kickboxing and Thai boxing where we are continuously practising combos and you can roll from one combination to the next. A lot of the applications in traditional martial arts are taught in a 2 - 5 pattern movement, and unless you train your mind to flow to the next pattern, you can tend to end up pausing and glitching for a second. In that second, an experienced boxer, kickboxer or even just an experienced street fighter doesn’t have those glitches, and that’s when they can intercept you. That forced me to reevaluate my whole training principle.

And again to tie this back into forging, you’ll notice that a lot of what I write will revolve around the same things. Topics like forging, farriery, craftsmanship and martial arts, because those are the activities that have governed my life and that I’ve gained my life experience from and learned the hardest lessons in. So I’ll never profess to know all the answers to anything. All I can do is share my perspective with anybody who’s decided to look me up, because I’m not out here to force my world view or my opinions on anyone else. All I’m doing is sharing nothing other than my own meandering experience.

But back to my point, none of those disciplines that I practise give anything away for free. The lessons you learn come from learning things the hard way, often more than once before I learn the lesson, and progress is slow, which is why perfection is never obtainable.

Truth be told, you could spend years doing the basics and no matter how good you think you are at the basics, there’s always going to be someone else out there that can offer an insight for improvement. And even though people don’t like to be criticised, even if you take a look at some of the most horrible things, for example, that the online world can say to you by malevolent actors who are not out there for your best interest or your welfare, and they are just being horrible for the sake of being horrible, if you can emotionally detach from their ill intentions and look at the substance of what they’re saying, not all the time but sometimes there’s even something in that that you can take from and work with and improve with in your own time.

Whether you like it or not, there’s something in that to show you where you’re lacking, and there’s nobody out there better than your enemies to point out to you the things that you may not want to see about yourself.

And with that in mind, we live in a world that is also moving faster and faster. With technology and the way things are designed to be quick and cheap and mass-produced in enormous bulk, everything is buy one and get one free. Instead of repairing clothes now, like a pair of jeans, we just throw them out. Craftsmanship, or dedication to any discipline, can’t follow those principles. It’s much slower than all of that.

Now slow doesn’t automatically mean better, but there are certain things that simply take time to do properly. And I guess it also depends on what it is that you’re looking for. Some people are happy with something that looks universal and mass-produced, but there’s a certain group of people out there to whom patience is a virtue, which is seldom a quality that we see in this fast-paced world.

So what I’m writing about today and this idea of craftsmanship, it’s not for everybody because that patience is required. But there’s a difference between making something to get it produced and out the door and making something that you can respect and have pride in, that will stand the test of time years from now. And that requires a shift in mindset about how you perceive yourself and the things you use in life. Asking yourself the question, what comes down the road in two, three or five years from now?

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that what I’m producing is perfect because I don’t think any serious person dedicated to their craft or discipline would ever believe that about themselves. The more experience you gain over the course of time, it goes back to that old expression, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or the more you know the more you realise you don’t know.

But even though a factory knife will cut just fine, in my opinion when you pick up a good handmade blade you just notice immediately that it wasn’t made out of that metaphorical cookie-cutter mould template. The materials, the way it’s put together, the balance, how it feels in your hand, it just tells a story from the moment you pick it up rather than feeling like a detached universal item.

And in similar respects, farriery follows all the same principles because I think it’s one of the best examples of a trade that will take another long period of time before it can be replaced, or before the human beings doing the trade can be replaced. Even though you can make universal factory horseshoes and they come cookie-cutter mould out of the box, you still, for the purposes of meeting the correct technical requirements, have to heat that shoe in the forge. Sort of like buying a suit off the rack and getting it tailor fitted, you have to heat that shoe and alter it specifically for the horse’s hoof that you see in front of you.

And to do that and do it correctly requires pride, patience and a bit of time. It’s all too common in the farrier world that people come into a yard and slap on a set of shoes, charge a high price and get out the door. In the short term, like many examples in life, you don’t see the negative consequence. But as you extrapolate out over a period of time, the way the hoof is not trimmed with the correct balance, medial-lateral or dorsal-palmar balance, the way the shoe perhaps doesn’t fit correctly or is a little bit too tight and causes a contraction in the hoof over time, over multiple shoeings, you then start to see the problem with doing the job fast and rushed without the attention to detail.

And I think that principle can be seen throughout anything we look at in life. Small little things don’t seem like they matter at first. They could even be inconsequential, but then they go and have the butterfly effect. Sort of like a ship that’s leaving Spain headed for America that goes wrong by one degree at the beginning of setting a course. That may go unnoticed, but as you carry on over the course of the journey you realise you’re drastically off.

I think that’s where craftsmanship is interesting because you’re constantly in some sort of problem-solving mode. It forces you to contend with the reality that’s in front of you rather than the way you wish it to be.

And as you have noticed throughout the course of this blog, but if you look at the things I do overall, my writing wanders away from the specifics of horses, forging and martial arts and I’ll tend to dip my toes in the waters of philosophy, theology, poetry, like another blog I worked on which was breaking down the lines of Kipling’s poem If-. On the surface those things look disconnected and that they go together like a square peg in a round hole, but to me they aren’t so unrelated at all.

My own meandering experience has come to learn over the years that the same questions keep turning up in those different places. And those questions that we wrestle with tend to produce answers that revolve around the words responsibility, restraint, truth and courage over fear. These things show up again and again as being the guiding principles to answering those questions.

And the reason why those are the ideas that present themselves as the answers is because often we can have an idea what the answer is, but when we put it under scrutiny it has to hold up. What has been a mistake of mine in the past, and it’s something that I see with a lot of people and not just exclusively myself, is sometimes our ego wants to preserve the idea we have so we don’t really put it under the rigorous scrutiny.

That’s like a house of cards. One good gust of wind and the whole thing falls down. And you don’t want the guiding principles that govern you, your life and set the framework for your husband or wife or children or family to be built on a house of cards that can’t sustain a gust of wind.

And so that’s why craftsmanship, as well as all the other disciplines that I practise, interests me as much as it does. Because it isn’t really about the perfect end result. It’s about the process of moving from point A to point C and going through B, whatever that is.

It’s that process that teaches you how to reevaluate things, how to do things properly, and if you’re doing that in an honest way you’ll find the process that bypasses your ego sugar-coating things to try and convince you that a result is better than it actually is.

Because a horse doesn’t care how profound you tried to sound while you’re doing the work. It’ll probably just swish its tail in your face for taking extra time to sound so intelligent to the owner. And the same with forging. The metal isn’t going to care how potentially talented you think you are. Whatever blunders you make, they will show up for all to see in the end product.

So in a one-sentence summary, the work either holds up or it doesn’t.