Using the wrong tools – in our eyes – often leads to the right result.
We curse and toil because, once again, someone has failed to provide us with the technically state-of-the-art special tool for our work! The top tool that would enable us to do exactly what we think is good and right. Yes, not only that, but which itself has already been provided by its creator with a vision of how it should be used and what results it should enable! Instead, we fumble around and our hands get all rough and bloody and our work looks nothing like what we imagined and a beautiful, elegant and appealing vision doesn’t seem to have been given to this oh-so-inappropriate tool we are forced to use either! What is to become? What will people say! – And then we have finished fumbling and cursing in the sweat of our brow and look in wonder at the work. Maybe we are surprised because it has nothing to do with what we wanted to create in the first place. Maybe we are surprised that it turned out so well. – Maybe we are also disappointed and only much, much later do we recognize the meaning in our work. And then it is a meaning that is special to us and not a vision that has already been entered into the top tool by someone else and that is made available in cheap mass production to anyone who simply wants to create, leading to the feather-light and effortless production of someone else’s vision.
Perhaps we will then realize why the paths cannot always be level. And why easy is not always good. Because easy is often the seduction to go the way the masses go. To appreciate what everyone appreciates. And to follow those who say where to go and what to value…
If someone tells you that you are making it easy for yourself, then you are going the right way. Your own way. And that’s actually the harder way… because of the people who say you’re taking it easy.