I'm making dinner. Cooked rice and butter are snapping and crisping in the big cast iron skillet. Another skillet holds sliced carrots, a bit of water, salt, and pepper. I'll add butter and spice to that in a bit. Soon I'll cook eggs to go over the rice, douse it with a few shakes of soy sauce and a bit of sesame oil. Our version of fried rice.

While I simmered dried rice in water, I tried once again to sharpen my knife with a stone and oil.

I'm not very good at it.

There are devices for sharpening knives. Friends say they work well. I should probably get one, but I won't. I want to learn how to use a stone and sharpen by hand. I'll likely ruin my knife in the process and have had to work with a knife far from properly sharp, but I want to learn how to do this.

I've watched videos and read tutorials, but sharpening a knife is best learned through a teacher present in the room, who corrects the mistakes I make.

In this, I'm a poor teacher and student at the school of trial and error. I require so many trials to figure out even one of my errors. Learning to refill my fountain pen, I wore ink for years. Sharpening knives, I may not even have the right stone and I'm sure there are whole levels of the process I'm not yet imagining.

However, I sharpened the knife best I know how. Cutting carrots afterward, there was no denying I'd given the knife a better edge than it had and a better edge than I could have given it last year. I'm learning something.

Why not just get the device that will sharpen things properly? Why not go with what works?

I like working things out and, much as I complain, I like the practice of learning through trial and error. I like developing skills even when no one will notice. The knife isn't talking.

There are easy, efficient ways to do things, and then there is oiling a stone and drawing the knife against it, working out the proper angle and best motion. There are the ways that others do things and there are the ways I choose, ways that take me against the current and into strange new worlds.

Later, when the family comes to the table, we will all eat. The food will taste good to all of us — it's one of our favorite meals — but it will taste even better to me as recall the knife slicing through each carrot, the shine on the stone, the ways in which this dull boy is a tad sharper now, and how much sharper I might become.