It’s been a couple of months since I decided to interrupt my work routine, take three days off, and sign up for a woodworking course in Italy.
For a few years now, I’ve felt the need to return to non-digital, practical skills, to work with my hands again, to learn something tangible outside the digital realm.
Easy to say, much harder to do.
The last five years of my professional life have been intense, at times even dramatic. I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of Renaissance man: drawn to aesthetics and functionalism, but also to technology and engineering. That duality naturally led me into product design, and later into design operations and management. Over time, though, day after day, month after month, I found myself in a role where my creative energy was slowly drained by constant context switching and cognitive load, leaving very little space for my creative and practical side.
For a while now, it’s been clear that if I want to change direction, I need to carve out weekly time for something rooted in craft, manual work, and physical design.
Last November, I finally acted on it. I started looking for a woodworking course in Italy, something that would push me out of my comfort zone and allow me to learn from scratch. I wanted to feed that persistent hunger to get my hands dirty, to focus on something tangible and usable, and, potentially, to open up new possibilities for the future.
After some searching, I came across a school in Viterbo: Scuola del Legno La Malaspina.
I didn’t overthink it. I signed up, booked a Ryanair flight from Kraków to Italy, and found an Airbnb.
A few weeks later, I found myself starting a three-day journey into a new creative territory: unexplored, yet somehow familiar, given my background in fine art.
It turned out to be one of those experiences that quietly but decisively shifts your mindset. The kind that exposes how easy it is to fall into routines and mental traps: “I’ll never be able to do that,” or “I can’t do that because…”.
The school itself—the space, the atmosphere, the diversity of people studying there full-time, the nine-hour days—was transformative. The assignment was simple: build a small wooden box, learn basic joinery, and work with simple, almost ancestral tools.
I can’t remember the last time I was so focused for three consecutive days. Fully present. Less distracted. Entirely absorbed in listening to the teacher’s guidance, to the material, to my hands.
And now? Now come the next questions.
Could I find a place of my own to set up a small workshop? Could I return, regularly, to building something physical, less ephemeral, more grounded, and more aligned with my past and future me?
We’ll see.