Embracing Imperfection
My baby brother tuned eighteen this past Sunday, which definitely makes me feel old, considering I’m fifteen years his senior (however, according to our ninety-one-year-old friend, old is when you take your adult son to collect social security). Since it was my brother’s golden birthday, I wanted to make sure his birthday gift would be a special one.
For the past few years, he has been learning how to forge and make knives. Recently, he has been working hard to upgrade the shed at my parents’ home into a forging workshop. My brother had tried coming up with a logo for his forge at one point, but never settled on any designs. I thought it would be a fun surprise to design a logo for him and then have my husband burn the design on a piece of wood with the laser attachment he recently acquired for his 3D printer.
I spent a couple of hours on Saturday working through style ideas and fonts before landing on the final design. My husband then stayed up into the wee hours of Sunday morning, printing a plethora of test prints in an attempt to get the laser attachment to work correctly. After getting the settings mostly figured out by Sunday afternoon, and knowing we had to leave soon for my brother’s birthday dinner, we decided it was time to laser burn the piece of wood that was to be my brother’s gift.
Everything started out perfectly at first. Lasers are very precise and it was fascinating to watch the logo I designed appear on the wood, perfectly burned into place. Unfortunately, when the print was a little over 80% finished, the 3D printer bed became stuck and was unable to move forward the way it needed to in order for the print to finish. With the gears of the printer bed grinding in protest, I realized the laser was stuck on the same position, burning a deep groove into the design. The laser attachment then started to go haywire, moving all over the place. Thankfully, I was able to hold a piece of cardboard under the laser light before it burned any unwanted lines on the wood, printer, or my husband’s desk. My husband was able to turn off the laser before it did any damage.
Inspecting the print, I was quite disappointed and frustrated that it had messed up. As it was the only piece of wood we had for the gift, we didn’t have the option of reprinting it. I decided to try and fix it the best I could with our hand-held wood burner. After a little bit of trial and error, I finally finished burning the rest of the design on the wood. I was still upset that the entire design wasn’t perfectly engraved, but I had done the best I could to incorporate the mistake into the design.
Thinking back over the experience, I realized how much it correlated to how we live our lives. We have expectations of how we want things to happen and dreams of how everything will turn out perfectly. Life is messy though and not everything always goes the way we hope. We have to choose to embrace the imperfection and learn how to still make beauty from the mistakes. It’s all about our perspective of the situation that shapes our attitudes and reactions, hopefully for the better.
Oh, and good news, my brother absolutely loved the gift and the logo design!
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