The long wait

It Takes Weeks to Find Out

Everything around us happens now. Pottery makes you wait weeks for the thing you made with your own hands. I have come to think that wait is the best part.

October 24, 20266 min read

By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah.

Illustration of a curly-haired woman in a green apron holding a gray pot on a pottery wheel and looking up with a hopeful, worried face, with a kiln in the background.

Your phone can get you a burrito in twenty minutes.

A package can show up the same afternoon you ordered it. The next episode of whatever you are watching starts before the credits are even done, in case you were planning to have a thought in between.

We have built a whole world around never having to wait for anything. When was the last time you waited three weeks for something you were really excited about?

And it is working on us.

Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, has spent about twenty years timing how long people stay on one screen before they switch to something else. In her first study, back in 2004, it was about two and a half minutes. In her studies from 2016 to 2020, it was around 47 seconds.

Forty-seven seconds.

That is not long enough to center a ball of clay. Not if you are me, on a Tuesday, anyway.

Then you walk into a pottery studio and do the slowest thing you will do all year.

You throw a bowl. Then you wait for it to firm up to leather hard before you can trim it, which takes a day or a few, depending on the clay and the weather and the bowl. Then it has to dry all the way to bone dry, slowly, because clay that dries too fast cracks (clay has strong opinions about this). Then it goes into a bisque kiln. Then you glaze it, and the glaze looks nothing like what it is about to become. Then it goes into the glaze kiln, which takes a couple of days to heat up and cool down on its own schedule.

Weeks, start to finish. Sometimes more.

You cannot rush any of it. Clay does not care about your same-day delivery.

Most people, at first, treat that wait like the bill, the annoying part you sit through on the way to the fun part. The thing you pay before you get your bowl.

I think it is the other way around. I think the wait is the good part.

Remember being a kid in December?

The paper chain on the wall that you tore one loop off of every night. The toy catalog with the corners folded down. Lying in bed on Christmas Eve, sure you heard something on the roof, absolutely positive you would never fall asleep.

Christmas morning was great. Of course it was.

But the morning lasted about forty minutes. The countdown lasted a month, and it was glorious.

That is not just nostalgia talking. In 2010 a team of Dutch researchers led by Jeroen Nawijn followed 1,530 adults and measured how happy they were around their vacations. The people with a trip coming up were happier than the people without one. Once they got home, most of them were no happier than anybody else, and even the ones who had a truly relaxing trip were back to normal within eight weeks.

A lot of the joy was in the waiting.

A few years later, researchers at Cornell found something similar. People waiting for an experience, like a concert or a trip, were happier while they waited than people waiting for a new thing to arrive. They even went through news stories about crowds and lines, and the people waiting for experiences were in better moods and better behaved than the people waiting for stuff.

A bowl you made with your own hands is somehow both. A thing and an experience. Pretty good deal, if you ask me.

The morning lasted about forty minutes. The countdown lasted a month, and it was glorious.

And the waiting is not empty time. It is full of the good stuff.

Here is something nobody tells you about the wheel. You cannot check your phone with slip up to your wrists. You can try. I do not recommend it.

What else in your week asks you to sit still for two hours and do one thing? So for a couple of hours, you just... don't. Your hands are in the clay and your brain finally gets to stay in one place for a lot longer than 47 seconds. People call it meditative. I call it the only time some of us sit still all week.

And you are not doing it alone.

The person at the next wheel is waiting on their own pots. So is the person at the glaze table, and the one who just asked if you know what that glaze looks like over a speckled clay. Everybody in the room is counting down to something.

So you talk. You ask how their mug came out. You show them yours. Somebody you met three weeks ago knows exactly which bowl is yours on the pick-up table, and is almost as excited to see it as you are.

Which, if you remember those Cornell crowds, makes sense. People waiting for an experience are better company.

Now, a countdown works a lot better when you know what you are counting down to.

That is why we built the kiln tracker. It shows the drop-off deadline for the next load, the day a load goes in and the day it comes out, an estimate of how hot each kiln is right now, photos of every unloading, and a countdown to your pick-up deadline.

Use it to plan. When your piece needs to be bone dry and on the table. When to save a night for glazing. When to make the drive, so you are not crossing the valley for a shelf that is not ready yet.

It will not make the kiln any faster. Nothing will. It is not a burrito tracker.

It is an advent calendar.

And yes, okay, fine. NORAD has been tracking Santa every Christmas Eve for decades, so we were not exactly first.

But in all seriousness.

The world is moving at a speed none of us ever signed up for. Everything is instant and almost nothing feels finished. You scroll, you swipe, and you forget what you saw ten seconds ago.

Pottery will not do that. It refuses.

A bowl takes as long as a bowl takes. You make it with your hands, you let it go, and then you wait, in a room full of people who are waiting too.

I do not want you to put up with that part. I want you to enjoy it.

This is what I have come to believe, with thousands of pots through these kilns. The wait is not the price of the bowl. It is part of the gift.

So here is my invitation. Enjoy the quiet at the wheel. Enjoy the people at the next table. Enjoy the countdown.

Unloading day still feels like Christmas morning. You find your bowl, you turn it over in your hands, and you see what the kiln did to it.

But the weeks before it were good too. Maybe better.

Just don't leave cookies on top of the kiln. It runs over two thousand degrees.

Dan Pearce

Founder of The Clay Hole

Check the kiln tracker

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Dan Pearce, author, artist, and potter, at work on pottery at The Clay Hole studio in Draper, Utah

About the author

Dan Pearce

Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah

Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.

In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.

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