When my family and I lived overseas we noticed that if you wanted to get something done, you had to do it in person.

Pay a bill? Grab your cash and wait your turn.

Buy bread? Go stand in line (albeit with the smell of baking bread).

Find a specialty item? Talk to your friend who knows a guy (and then you’ll have to go see the guy).

Terribly inefficient though this was to our pay-by-app, purchase-in-bulk, order-on-line Western selves, we found over time that getting to know our neighbors waiting in line, or the baker who makes our bread, or the friend of a friend who knows where to get things, added so much depth and richness to our lives. Our lives were about those connections and being wonderfully mixed up in each others’ business.

We so often lack that interpersonal, local, community sense in the U.S., and never more so than these last few years. Zoom meetings, on-line church, and home isolation have been unavoidable to an extent, but we’ve lost something we need to get back. There’s a lot to be said for slowing down, going outside, and meeting our friends and neighbors face to face.

What’s that got to do with a woodworking company? This: making the stuff I make is slow and time-intensive. It’s tactile. Wood has a smell. My hands callous and my muscles tire. I see and touch the beauty in the grain. The folks at my local bank ask to see pictures of my boxes and offer to let me leave a few at the counter with my business cards. They tell me about an upcoming farmer’s market in town, so I get in contact with yet another neighbor to secure a spot. At the market my wife and I set up our table and spend the morning talking and joking with yet more neighbors. They feel the finish on the boxes and smell the quarter sawn pine as they open the lids. We sell some boxes. And we feel just a little more a part of where we live.

There’s something to be said for inefficiency. For neighborly conversations. For meals with friends. For things that are made slowly, by hand.

There’s something to be said for slowing down.