My Workbench Life

I started calling my office my playroom. I thought that was a better description for the place where I was going to make all my creative dreams come true. I didn’t want it to feel like work. It should feel more like play. From the whimsical posters and colorful mugs full of brushes and pens, to the baskets filled with notebooks and stationary supplies, every place my eyes landed filled me with joy.

This was the perfect place for finishing the things I had in mind.

Looking at all the paraphernalia of my daily life in here, I always thought it would be temporary. This was just a holding station until all my wishes were finished. A place I used until I finally became organized, disciplined, complete.

Now I think some people are meant to live here, right here, at the workbench.

It took a while to get here. Dedicated readers may remember when I tried to force myself into systems that belonged to other people. Buying into rigid productivity culture, I developed schedules that looked impressive, but collapsed quickly. I was always trying to become the ‘kind of person who’, but I could never finish the sentence. Those borrowed blueprints were too stifling.

I tried to find my way back by proving my capability. Reminding myself of past successes in my life and the many careers I had, I saw my ability to pivot and remembered anything was possible. However, being capable of many lives delayed committing to one rhythm. Capability kept me adaptable. It also kept me hovering.

Hovering led to drifting. With so much freedom of time and space, I eventually realized too much openness creates friction instead of freedom. The routines were in place and my playroom was always welcoming. But where was the structure I could hold on to? At some point, freedom stopped feeling spacious and started feeling slippery.

Finally, the biggest shift of all. That ideal version of myself needed to take a backseat for me to thrive on ordinary Tuesdays. The ability to leave whatever I was working on unfinished as a breadcrumb for the next session helped me to create momentum over intensity and begin to recognize seasons instead of streaks.

I thought back to my father, a truck driver for many years. Every afternoon he would make the 70-mile trip from our rural town, including the 4-mile bridge over the Chesapeake Bay, to the city of Baltimore, where he would make overnight deliveries throughout the surrounding area before returning home mid-morning. Monday through Friday. Week in and week out. Steady. Repetitive. Unglamorous, but oh, so meaningful.

Maybe I inherited more than work ethic from my favorite trucker. Maybe I inherited the understanding that meaningful things are often built through repeated crossings.

You see, I am not ‘cured’. I’m not consistent every day. I’m not deeply disciplined or fully certain.

But I am returning more often. I’m building gentler systems and I am trusting those smaller efforts. I’m staying longer and respecting my actual energy, while abandoning myself less dramatically. I’m no longer trying to build a perfect life. I’m trying to build one I can return to.

Maybe that’s all a workbench life really is – not finishing yourself, but learning how to keep returning to the bench.

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