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The quality of our decisions
comments (0) October 10th, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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Every day on my way to work, I drive past a stone wall in the town of Bridgewater. Actually, I drive past a lot of them; this is New England, after all. But I always look at this particular stone wall, and more specifically, at one particular stone. It’s a big round stone that anchors one end of the wall, where there’s an opening to pass through.
If you know
anything about building stone walls, you know that stones with flat faces
are much prized. Flat faces turned outward help to make a good-looking wall.
Multiple flat faces make a stone easier to stack and easier to stack other
stones on. Most prized of all are the stones with two flat faces perpendicular
to one another. These you always save to make a corner, or an end. Round stones generally get broken or buried.
Not in this case, though. In this case, whoever built that stone wall placed a
big round stone on the end, and then stacked smaller flat-faced stones on top
of it. The whole arrangement looks awkward, precarious, and to my eye at least,
absolutely striking. I can’t drive past without looking at that stone. I don’t
honestly know if I love it or hate it.
I wonder
who put that stone there, and I wonder why. Was it a bad decision made at the
end of the day by a tired stonemason? Or was it a brilliant decision made by an
artist consciously trying to thwart my expectation and capture my eye? Or (most
likely) was it the only nearby stone big enough to anchor the wall?
I also look at that stone every day and wonder: Would I have put it there? Despite
years of contemplating the question, I still don’t know the answer. I suspect
that I would not have put the stone there because I’m too conservative. I also
suspect that I forestall answering the question definitively because I’m
reluctant to accept my own lack of daring.
That big round stone reminds me of a fundamental truth. We are all of us, to some extent at least, defined by our judgment. The decision to do one thing and not another, the reasons that underlie our choices, and the extent to which we let circumstances influence the choosing—those things say a lot about who we are, as builders or writers or human beings.
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
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