O.P.V.
Other People's Videos
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste the experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." She was a wise woman indeed.
We will all pass on one day, and I feel it is good to remember that eventuality. It is good to remember our mortality, not because it is a terrifying fact, but because it can cause us to do something meaningful. Keeping in mind that we are all born to die helps me to focus on the bigger picture and to put life's little moments, good and bad, into perspective. We weren't all meant to paint the Sistine Chapel, sculpt David, theorize about relativity, or solve world hunger but we all leave something behind.
In my mind, it makes sense to try to leave something lasting and useful. I think about this every time I make something, "this will likely outlive me, so how do I want to be remembered?" Frequently, I know about half way through a project that I am in fact creating a failure, however, sometimes it surprises me and turns into a success. The successes are what I strive for, and with enough practice in a new task I find I can achieve them more frequently. In fact, the morbid truth of fleeting life has always nudged me to venture into the necessity of the unknown. To a fault (ask my wife) I have a primal urge to constantly try something new. I even get regularly bored with the way my furniture is arranged (yet another perturbation of my wife). This is why I love making things, especially tools, with my hands. There is constantly something new, some new material or set of skills to be learned when making tools. They combine metal and wood (and occasionally many more materials) and a variety of skills in a neatly orchestrated and often elegant package.
When I came across the video below I couldn't help but think how perfectly it aligns with my beliefs about tools. From the potential of helping the economy with job creation and stabilization, to just simple self satisfaction Liberty Tool has got it right. The shop owners and employees of this institution will be leaving a legacy much further reaching than I'm sure they can even imagine. On another note, Etsy has produced a lot of similarly themed, excellently filmed and edited videos. Their "Handmade Portraits" videos are all worth checking out. Enjoy the video.
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