Why knives?

Desire to produce something useful that will last

I work in the field of online education. Without question, there is a place for this in the world, it provides a livelihood for my family, and I’m grateful in this economy to be gainfully employed. I also happen to like my job. My online work occasionally provides opportunities for a creative outlet, but I often feel the impermanent and intangible nature of the end product does little to foster the soul. 

As years go by I, like a lot of folks, find myself thinking about “after” more than I used to. The work I do on a professional basis is digital in nature which means, ultimately, it can be reduced to 1’s and 0’s. A hundred years from now, it’s entirely possible that all that I “produce” in my line of work will be gone. Conversely, it’s also entirely possible that a hundred or more years from now a knife I have made or have yet to make might still be in use, and useful.

Desire for tactile stimulation

For 95% of my job, I use a computer. This means a lot of sitting, a lot of typing, a lot of staring at an electronic screen; clicking a mouse and keyboard is about as tactile as it gets. Shaping hard materials with my hands and tools puts me in a completely different head space, so it’s a good cleanser for those times when the senses and mind need a reset from what can sometimes be a rather numbing experience.

Desire to do something related to (healthy)food

There is a certain pleasure that comes from using a tool that performs well at the intended use. This is true of any field, but for me it’s particularly relevant to food preparation. I love food. Always have, always will. I’m no gourmet chef, but I can hold my own in the kitchen and I like a good restaurant. I’ve held an interest in cooking from an early age, and over time I’ve come to respect how much more enjoyable it is to prepare food using a good knife. We cook a lot in our family, so this enjoyment has added up to a deep appreciation.

I could be reaching, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that if you own a good kitchen knife, you’re more likely to eat healthy food. Why? Because the healthiest food is the food that you actually have to prepare, fresh food; not the stuff that someone (or a robot) vacuum sealed or shot into a can. You probably don’t need a good knife for that, though you need might need a decent can opener. If you own a good knife, you’re more likely to use it, which means you’re more likely to eat things that actually need to be cut, sliced, chopped, diced, etc.. While there’s no guarantee that you’ll be chopping local organic kale all the time, there is an excellent chance that the things on your cutting board are far better for you than the processed junk that gets passed off as food these days.

Desire to attain flow

Much has been said about “flow” in recent years, an idea that’s bounced around in positive psychology for quite some time yet only recently articulated as a mainstream concept.  In the interest of keeping things mainstream, I’ll cite this Wikipedia entry which defines flow as “the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)]

Flow can occur while doing any number of things but it often seems to be associated with athletes and artistic types practicing their craft. This makes sense because the immediate nature of such activities requires urgency and focus: the quarterback timing the throw, the painter finishing strokes before the paint drys, etc. When I’m making knives, time melts away and it’s not uncommon for me to spend what feels like 10 minutes on some task only to realize that I’ve been there an hour or more. Staring at a roughly 2” area with fingers millimeters away from an abrasive belt moving at around 2000 rpm takes a great deal of concentration: when I’m grinding all else fades to the periphery and becomes inconsequential. From the outside this might seem like a waste, a tremendous time suck, and yet it never feels that way, even when I make mistakes (and I make many) which set me right back to square one. Sometimes I’m eager to finish the work because I want to see it finished or I want the new owner to receive it, but often I’m motivated more by the doing and less by arriving at the end, and I’ve come to feel alright with that.

Desire to shape metal

Metal has always held a certain mystique for me. For most of my life I viewed it as a static material, something that was in a particular form and, short of catastrophe or industrial intervention, would stay more or less exactly the same. When I was a child my father would sometimes cut or weld metal with a torch and those things scared the crap out of me, so I accepted metal as unchangeable within my own abilities. And yet over time I became more acquainted with slight alterations to metal: hack-sawing this or that for some erroneous repair, using a file here and there. I began to see some similarities between working wood and shaping metal. Watching high-grade drill bits bore holes in wood and steel alike was thought provoking. When I got a cheap set of diamond files and filed a pattern into the spine of factory-made knife, it was an eye opener. When I held that first blank of steel to the grinding platen and saw sparks fly, it was astounding. Those experiences have profoundly changed how I look at metal and other hard materials: where I once saw the immutable, I now see a trove of possibilities.