Stained Glass and Sanity

I've never had a job I didn't like - well almost never.  But that doesn't mean I've never had a job that frustrated me. Working for a large organization, as I did for many years, had its peaks and valleys (sometimes chasms).  There was the excitement of grand hopes and the tedium of proposals, processes, procedures, edits, approvals, reworking, and sign-offs that seemed to render the realization of those hopes always on the unreachable horizon. That's what led me to stained glass - that and the long commute in slug-pace traffic that matched the glacial progress at work.

As I put it to my wife after a particularly long day of meager accomplishment: "I need to get involved in something I can actually finish." I had always admired stained glass in churches, but I had neither the artistic talent nor temperament to create anything that beautiful.  Still, there was a local class for beginners, so I took it.  My first project was a stained glass kiwi bird.  My wife loves that little creature who, try as he might, will never fly.  This seemed a fitting statement about my talent and something simple enough for it.  I could make it out of just two pieces of rounded glass. 

So, hobbyist I became.  I went from that to little flower boxes and then a small window panel.  That was thirty-eight years ago.  The piece you see in the photo is a recent project.  I am still a hobbyist.  I say this not only out of the humility appropriate to my skill but out of respect for those who have reached the heights of the profession after rigorous training and practice. 

If I have not achieved the level of art I might have with more natural gifts and harder work, the rewards have been nevertheless more than I anticipated when I took that kiwi, which still stands in the window, home from class.

There is joy in producing something that your mind dreams and your hands realize. Humans create. It is one of the wonders of our evolutionary journey, a need that helps define and nurture us.  I do my own designs and cutting and soldering of glass pieces.  To see what I imagined hanging in a window is immensely gratifying (once I get past pointing out how I could have done it better).  It is a satisfaction that is emotional, not cerebral.  The feeling of seeing light come through the finished work for the first time fosters a mixture of gratitude and grace that I have added just  a bit of beauty to the world.

There is the reward of the work itself, for it's one of the few activities where I become so absorbed that I lose track of time and my surroundings.  The Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has called this the flow state.  Being in this "zone" reduces my stress. It is akin to mindfulness, whose positive effects on physical and emotional health are well documented. 

My hobby has helped me learn patience, because impatience with glass produces broken pieces and bleeding fingers. I've also realized that it is the process of stained glass as much as the product that gratifies me.  It is not just the what results but what I become from the effort that matters.

Stained glass also connects me to our cultural past and the many debts I owe.  Producers of glass of intense color and variation and the developers of the techniques and tools on which I depend came before, gifts too easy to take for granted in a world so focused on "me."

There is also the joy of giving my glass panels away.  With only so many windows, older pieces must make room for new ones.  Knowing these will hang in someone else's window softens the pain of saying goodbye.  These gifts become part of my legacy, which is more than I can say for much of what I accomplished in that large organization.  Attention to legacy softens the losses that must come with my final years.

I don't diminish the value of my job-oriented work.  Yet that's work.  In the movie Sabrina, the young chauffeur's daughter by that name confronts Linus, the incredibly successful multimillionaire whose life is consumed by the office.  "That's work, Linus," she tells him. You're awfully good at it.  But where do you live?"  Stained glass is part of my answer to that question, part of a full life.  It brings a measure of sanity in an often crazy world.  

Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell