Some who do not necessarily know me may wonder a bit at the banner image at the top of my blog. I have been building bikes and cars since I was a wee lad. First with my father then with my friends and later on my own. I tinker with anything mechanical. I am not great with wood but I am good with metal.
I am also greatly disposed to older verses newer mechanical things. Typically I much prefer working on something that is twenty or more years old. The reason for this is the simplicity in older things. Regulations or our incessant need to modernize something that simply works well mechanically tends to ruin good simple designs with…progress.
Life is much the same, we tend to complicate it with progress. Simple things become difficult due to all the trappings we put around them. If one is good two is better. If it works but it is old, then new will make it better, right? Not necessarily.
We stack things on top of our lives, complicate it with our progressive ideas trying to make what we have always better. Yet, do we ever ask if what we have, where we are, is good enough.
Now, this may sound like I am saying complacency is better than progression. Not so. What I am saying is, we do not always need to replace what we have with the next best thing when what we have (or how we live) works. There are ample improvements we can make to what we have without replacing it with what we want.
This is about refinement over replacement.
We pay exorbitant prices for common things because we tend to be a replacement society. In a replacement society cost will continually increase due to demand. In a refinement society cost tend to be kept down or at the very least cost are constrained over a greater period of time. Meaning that we get more use out of something due to the quality of craftsmanship. A thing made well will last a long time and typically is much more capable of being refined. You pay for it once.
I have a group of finely made shirts that I paid quite a bit more than I typically would for something that is a glorified dress t-shirt. However, I have had this group of shirts for easily 15 years. Due to their nature they have never gone out of style and look good when I dress casually or under a jacket. Because they were made well and I have treated them well they still show almost no sign of wear.
I have other things I have acquired over the years that were older when I got them but extremely well made. These things have all gone through various forms of refinement by my tinkering (not the shirts) and each is better than when I bought it. Each also serves me continually without failure and if they should fail I have had them long enough and tinkered with them enough to typically be able to fix them myself.
There are certain designs that stand the test of time and I look for these designs in just about everything I purchase these days. Much of what I get, especially mechanically, will easily outlive me.
If we look at our lives they too could use some refinement over replacement. We have taken our replacement mentality and allowed it to integrate with our work and relational lives as well. We look to replace rather than work to refine them.
Granted some relationships and some jobs need replacement. However, probably far less often than one might imagine. With a little work and some attention to the details of these things we can often refine them into something far better than what the grass on the other side offers.
People change, as much as we don’t like to think they will, they do. We have to adapt to the seasons of our and our friends and relationships lives. Everything is ebb and flow.
Work is much the same. The longer I live the more I look over the “life” within the corporations, there is little new under the sun. Each place tends to need to solve the same problems time after time, place after place. I now believe that this is the order of the life of a business. It is about continual refinement. Yes, at times, new is needed to infuse life into a business. But more often than not it becomes a rehashing of the old instead of an embracing of the new. Thus, even in this instance a lack of refinement ends up being stagnation.
Refinement, I have found, tends to trump replacement each and every time.
