Prompt: Write about something that took longer than expected.
The prompt for today, June 9, 2026, is: Write about something that took longer than expected.
First off, I’m an incredibly impatient person. I thought I had patience. I really did think I was more patient than I am. I remember once my mom was visiting, and I was talking to her about—I don’t know what. Anyway, I brought up the topic of me being patient, and before I could get the sentence out, she said, “No.” That’s not true. She said I am terribly impatient, and I understand that.
I think what I’m trying to work on—especially last month, with the prompts being about slow living, and this month, with the prompts being about finding your craft—is figuring out how to slow down. How to slow things down so that they do take longer, in fact, but they’re done better.
When I think about woodworking, one thing I want to do once I get my hand back in good order is move into more hand-tool woodworking. When I got the shop, I quickly started filling it with power tools, and I think that was great for what it was. But I think I would have done better to hone my hand-tool skills and make things that way.
It takes much longer to cut wood, plane wood, shape it, and do all of those things by hand. But I think the end result is a better product. It’s a craft. It becomes more of a craft.
Now, I’m not saying power tools take away from the craft. It’s a different way to approach it, I should say. But I think, for what I need to get out of woodworking, hand tools would be a better approach.
We’ll see how that goes. I have some nice chisels that I bought a year ago and haven’t touched. The same goes for a really nice dovetail saw.
Maybe I’ll start making some boxes. That would be ideal. That would be a really nice direction.
If I’m thinking about woodworking more broadly, I think that if I had started off slowly—if I had focused on hand tools, developing those skills, and learning how to sharpen my tools properly—I would be further along now. The range of things I would have made would have been smaller, but I think the quality of the things I made would have been greater.
I took too many avenues with woodworking, and I think I need to scale back and focus.
I think this is true of many things. I’m trying to get back into reading. I’m just not a good reader anymore. Not that I was ever a particularly good reader. I think that was one of those skills I had to learn in university.
But I’m especially bad at it right now, and I need to figure out how to read again. What that’s meant is reading slowly and doing it intentionally. Not trying to get to the end of the book so much as focusing on reading the book.
Things take time.
I think a lot of the things we do should take longer than we expect them to take. Our expectations are largely dictated by what we’re seeing on social media, where everything is happening so fast. But in real life, things don’t happen that quickly.
Anyway, you can find this prompt and more at Letters’ Lounge, www.letterslounge.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or any of the other prompts, so please leave a comment or a link to your blog, audio journal, or anything like that.
Take it nice and slow and easy, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow, folks.
This transcript was lightly cleaned up with the help of AI to improve readability while preserving the original voice and intent of the recording.
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