My craft is dying and I can't pass it on fast enough — what now?

You can hold a piece of stock and know, before the machine tells you, what it wants to become. You earned that. Decades of hands doing the same true thing until the thing became true without thought. Now the shops close, the apprentices don't come, and the schools teach something else. You grieve — rightly. This is a real loss, not a small one. But look under the grief and you'll find something you haven't said aloud: the fear that when you go, the knowledge goes with you, and no one built the road to carry it further. That fear is doing a job. It's keeping you waiting — for the right apprentice, the right institute, the right moment when someone finally cares as much as you do. That moment is not coming. Waiting for it is how the knowledge actually dies. You cannot save the craft. That was never within your power, and pretending otherwise is what's exhausting you. What is within your power is smaller and harder to romanticize: write down what you know, find whoever is willing to stand still long enough to learn, and teach them one true thing today. Not the whole craft. One thing.