Build That Dark Wood Stained Craft Table

There’s always been this trend of looking nostalgically towards the past. After a few decades, we look back. Either we hate the fashions or we wear them with pride. These last couple of years has been heavily influenced by minimalism. We crave the simple life: farms, rooster calls, summer linen drying in the breeze, homemade jam, shared gatherings underneath the stars. Currently, blogs are ranting about how you must DIY your life—drink mint lemonade or Tennessee whiskey out of mason jars, sew some flowers on your shirt, and collect shells for a necklace. It’s been enough solicitation that I am starting to get sick of it. Why do we need to be constantly reminded of the simple pleasures in life that already exist? If they are so simple, then we shouldn’t need to make an endless effort to complete them. Why has slowing down become exceedingly hard for us to achieve?

Perhaps our forgetfulness is linked to technology. We’ve got everything we could want at our fingertips. We are lazy. Let’s watch another episode of Portlandia. Take-out sounds good tonight. We aren’t required to physically work for our food like our father’s father’s did in the past—hunting deer and slow cooking it over the fire. Dinner comes in a can now. The grocery store has everything we could ever want, year round. Unfortunately, that isn’t how nature works. We shouldn’t be allowed to buy a banana from Jamaica or Kiwi from Australia 365 days a year. Nonetheless we do it because we have outsmarted Mother Nature. Thus, our own skills have turned society around full circle. We are at the point where we can’t think for ourselves. (I always use a calculator because I avoid doing mathematical equations in my head at all costs.) We longingly gaze back at where we started from: simplicity in the 1800s never smelled sweeter (minus the diseases).  

We don’t, however, live in the age of Thoreau where we can chill at Walden Pond for unlimited months and write about dandelion seeds scattered in the wind. We’ve got work to do. But, in today’s tech world, with everything able and ready for us, we should have a lot more time to make that dark wood stained craft table seen in Kinfolk. So what’ the problem? We are over stuffing our schedules with additional work. We are neglecting our leisure agenda and not setting aside enough time to do things we enjoy. Also, the thought of making something ourselves is tiresome when everything else comes instantaneously. What we need is to reprioritize.

I guess all of those fancy blog posts about listening to the sound of the waves or making your own apartment herb garden have worthwhile intentions. Though it’s all I see 24/7 on the blogs that I read, it is necessary to keep repeating the mantra: Slow down. Enjoy your life. Slowing down takes time. That is the entire point. And in the twenty-first century, every day gets harder and harder to move into this backward mindset. Just the same as setting a morning alarm, we have to remind ourselves that we are living to live.

Words + photo by Andrea Dumovich