Sometimes, you may come across a quote attributed to a particular individual, but when you try to track down exactly where the individual said or wrote the comment, all you find are sites giving you the runaround. Multiple sites may attribute the quote to the individual without specifying which book or speech or poem contains those words. It may be disappointing, but more often than not, that no one seems to know where it came from indicates the quote was misattributed.
Other times, it doesn’t matter, or it may even provide a moment of joy to fail to find a source to hold onto. Borges enjoyed inventing imaginary sources, for example.
In a book I once owned about designing one’s way forward in life, one of the early pages featured a delightful quote. Online, I eventually found a mention of a source (“Shu-an’s preface to Wu-men’s Gateless Gate to Zen Experience“), but there the trail ran out for me. No matter:
“When one happens on a book of this kind, he is well advised to throw it away”
– Shū-an
Many tasks will demand to be done again. “Again” can be difficult, though, possibly because knowing a task won’t be completed “once and for all” can make the task feel like more of an imposition. It’s as if the task of doing the laundry today takes on an additional weight from all the future times we know we will have to do the laundry.
“Maintenance” can offer a similar challenge. Knowing how much better the house will be after performing some maintenance may not be enough of a motivation to do the work.
We may discover that the attitude we bring to certain types of work can make the work harder, but this self-knowledge isn’t in itself a cure. Fortunately, our attitude is not a fixed, unchanging thing.
First, I would like my spirit to be restored, so I can regroup, find new inspiration, and find new ways to create.
My employer would like me to do more work first, in the hope that additional effort will improve the work environment soon.
A common enough impasse, it scatters your force.
Having recently been tinkering with coding for the first time in many years, I am reminded how there are different reasons for something not to work. I start out on a project but don’t know how the programming language works or what the computer hardware expects to hear from the program software. Through trial and error, testing hypotheses, and looking online for clues and fragments of instructions or tutorials to piece together, I construct theories and accomplish small tasks that encourage me. Sometimes, I discover, after much work, that I am going about things the right way, but there is a flaw in the software or that the software does not work with the hardware that way its designers hoped or expected it to.
It’s also common to find, upon completing a project, that the result won’t contribute to a larger objective I had. If the point of my work were only to complete the larger objective, it would be fair to say I had been working on the wrong project.
That I keep going–and that I’m not overly concerned–is a good indication that I am playing, that I’m not solely focused on a conventional outcome. When playing, “doing it right” and “doing the right thing” coincide, even though an outcome orientation might suggest they don’t.
There are different ways to respond to a document that contains typos.
Sometimes, we don’t see the typos at all.
Other times, we see them but don’t seem to register them consciously. This can subtly influence how we feel about the document, the subject, or the author.
The typos may assert themselves into our consciousness and distract us. Maybe we grow annoyed or find ourselves becoming judgmental.
Or we may see the typos as a natural consequence of an author creating with bold strokes, not bogging down. Suggesting fixes in this case may not be a form of criticism, but a way to begin participating. Whether or not the author changes the document in response to the suggestions is less important than whether or not the feeling of participating starts to develop.
When facing a problem, we could say that we are stuck. Consider whether we ever solve a problem as it is originally formulated or perceived.
Maybe we learn a new skill and can now work our way through. But if we can work our way through, that means we are no longer stuck. If we are no longer stuck, there may still be work to do, but there isn’t a problem any more. The initial formulation of the problem hadn’t taken into account our new skill, and now that initial formulation is irrelevant.
Or maybe we find a different problem to solve than the one we faced initially. For example, instead of figuring out how to cross a flooded river, we look for a way to get all of our business done without having to cross the river. If we manage that, then we have again “solved the problem” by not solving the original problem.
When we are successful in solving a problem, maybe it’s because we have changed ourselves, changed the context, or changed the rules.
By studying how something has grown in one place, it will not necessarily be possible to ensure that something similar will grow somewhere else.
One may amend the soil and otherwise attend to the environment, and doing so may make it possible for something to grow. But one does not build a tree.
It is possible to talk at great length about the value of brevity.
It is my sense that the most effective, sustained work can be done when there is a give and take of divergent and convergent thinking, when generation and focus play well together. I find, however, that when I am in a mode of divergent thinking, I am not able to simply switch over to a mode of convergent thinking. I revolt at the thought of “sitting down and doing the work,” or of wrangling my ideas into single file. Similarly, when I am in a mode of convergent thinking, I am not particularly open to pausing to “try something else.”
Can there be a consistency when in the mode of divergent thinking, or an openness to multiple directions when in the mode of convergent thinking? In other words, instead of the give and take being a switching back and forth, can it be a presence of one in the other, similar to the black-in-white and white-in-black of the traditional yin-yang symbol?
I imagine so, but I do not always experience my own thinking working in that way. Rather, I can lose patience with myself when my modes of thinking do not play well together…as now, when I have come up with many networked thoughts in response to an academic call for papers, but I am frustrated by my failing efforts to weave the connective tissue of explanation.
“I can lose patience with myself.” Alan Watts might chide, “Who is the I? Where is the myself?”
With fine ingredients, it can be easy to make delicious food. Starting with good parmesan, butter, and garlic, for example, it is hard to go wrong. With poor quality ingredients, on the other hand, a cook will have to spend a lot of effort to conceal their shortcomings.
With good tools, a construction or repair project can be made as easy as possible to complete. Sometimes, “as easy as possible” might mean just barely possible. With poorly made tools or the wrong tools, the project may well drift from “barely possible” to “not quite possible” (or to “Now there are more problems.”) A worker will have to focus creativity on overcoming the limitations of the tools rather than attending to the work to be done.
It is not that we don’t go away; it’s that we return. But things change in the meantime, and so returning is different from repeating. That’s the idea, anyhow. Back from our recent travels, it is time to see what this year will bring!
If a system is rich in diversity, it can respond to changes in its environment in a nuanced way. In agriculture, the practice of monoculture, or monocropping, can leave the enterprise as a whole quite susceptible to environmental insults, whereas the biodiversity associated with polyculture can result in a more resilient farm. Even if an environmental change severely impacts individual crops, the system can be more able to adapt and thrive.
How might this be like the individual mind, filled with occasionally self-contradictory thoughts, rich in variety of perspective, but not a mind “made up,” a mind decided?
Here is a favorite quotation of mine, which I first came across fifteen years ago:
“When one happens on a book of this kind,
he is well advised to throw it away.”
– Shu-an
What inspired these words? Over a period of years, I occasionally looked to see if I could find the source of the quotation, or who Shu-an was. All I found were references to the book I already had and rabbit hole-like trails with impenetrable histories of centuries-old Zen schools.
While thinking the other day about untraceable quotations, I looked again, this time finding the context for the quotation with no effort at all.
In Laughing Buddha: Zen and the Comic Spirit, I learn that Shu-an wrote these words in his preface to Wu-men’s 13th century compilation of Zen koans, Gateless Gate to Zen Experience. And I am reminded how resonant a simple question can be.
Lowering the cost of transactions can make it possible to have lots of small transactions, and these in turn can make it possible to have lots of small adjustments. If you are standing up, keeping yourself standing is easiest when you make lots of little adjustments. We call this balancing (though it’s a misleading word, because the constant adjusting is necessary precisely because we are never perfectly balanced). Waiting until you are tipping over and then dramatically catching yourself is something else; in terms of energy expenditure and distraction, it tends to be much more expensive than balancing.
Can we imagine other areas of our lives where we could lower the cost of the transactions, where we could make adjustments and practice balancing?
We learn different things from following instructions than we do from guessing, experimenting, and observing.