A Lifetime of Tinkering
Inhabiting a Life
“Philosophy practiced is the goal of learning.” - Thoreau
There comes a time when a man has to decide whether he is still in the arena of life. I do not mean whether he is winning, or whether anyone is watching. I mean whether he is still willing to take part: to remain curious, test himself, change his mind, work on his body, learn something difficult, and to be altered by what he learns.
I see men around my age beginning to throw in the towel. They are turning to mush physically, mentally, and spiritually. I do not say that with contempt. Age brings real losses, and every man carries burdens that are invisible to everyone else. But I want no part of surrendering before surrender is required of me.
The image that stays with me is the man in the arena who refuses to leave. He may be slower than he once was. He may have scars, limitations, and less time ahead of him than behind. None of that disqualifies him. He is still practicing, paying attention, and becoming.
This essay is not the announcement of a philosophy I have finally completed. If anything, it is a report from the workshop. My life has been a lifetime of tinkering: trying something, observing what happens, making an adjustment, discarding what no longer works, and beginning again. The phrase may sound modest, but I have come to think that tinkering is serious business. It is how an abstraction acquires hands and feet. It is how a belief becomes a practice, and how a practice slowly changes the person who performs it.
I have read philosophy, Eastern and Western, for most of my life. But Thoreau’s sentence provides the standard: philosophy practiced is the goal of learning. An idea may be elegant, moving, or profound, but what does it look like when I get out of bed in the morning? Until an idea reaches life, it remains unfinished.
For years I might have said that I practiced martial arts. Increasingly, I think martial arts have been practicing me. I began with techniques, forms, teachers, traditions, and the ordinary desire to become more skillful. Somewhere along the way, the boundaries became less clear. I may not have found many answers, but the questions kept dropping away. What I learned in practice began appearing in the rest of my life, while changes in the rest of my life began appearing in my practice.
Training under a senior Japanese instructor in Aikido taught me something about Budo, which is the study of the Way by means of Japanese martial arts. I found that idea useful, but limiting. There are plenty of Ways, so I coined the term for myself: "Budo with a small b."
This may be what I mean by budo with a small b. Not a particular martial art, not necessarily even a martial art, but the habits of attention learned through sincere practice and carried into the whole of life. The small letter prevents the word from becoming monumental. It brings the Way down from the sign above the dojo and places it underfoot: meeting resistance, receiving correction, and beginning again.
“If you cannot find the truth right in front of you, where do you expect to find it?” - Zen Master Dogen
That question turns my attention away from some imagined elsewhere. The material is already here: this body, this marriage, the dog walk, the books at hand, the Taijiquan form I have practiced. This is not the scenery surrounding the real work. This is the work.
Recently, while practicing, I noticed tension in my shoulders. The tension had probably been there for years. I did not defeat it or command it to disappear. I noticed it, simply stayed with it, and allowed muscles that had been freeloading to begin doing their proper share of work. In the days afterward, my posture changed. I stood straighter, my chest opened, my shoulders moved back, and perhaps my thinking became a bit clearer. Nothing had been added. Something unnecessary had begun to fall away.
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Michelangelo
That small event contains much of what practice has taught me. Progress is not always the acquisition of another ability. Sometimes it is the removal of interference. I do not imagine that a perfected self is hidden inside me, waiting to be uncovered. But I do recognize the carving away of unnecessary tension, old fears, habitual captivity, and limitations I once imposed upon myself. Much of my tinkering has been a process of subtraction.
What is actually necessary here? Once I can perceive what is actually happening, I may discover that much of what I was defending was never under attack. The body learns to stop wasting itself.
This has changed what training means to me as I grow older. Physical training is not an attempt to pretend that I am young. It is a refusal to become absent from my own body. Strength and mobility are ways of remaining available to life. The workout, the walk, and the form practice are ways of inhabiting the only body through which I will ever meet the world.
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” - Thoreau
A tradition is not a cage, but neither is it raw material for whatever I feel like inventing. It is a standard against which I can test my understanding. A tradition may be received intact, but once it has been deeply absorbed, it can only be expressed through the individuality of the person who carries it.
I remain loyal to several traditions, even though I no longer feel the need to be bound by them.
"I am an artist at living. My life is my work of art." - D. T. Suzuki
Are we not all artists with our lives as the canvas? That statement once might have sounded grandiose to me. Now it seems practical.
Art is not a performance staged for an audience. It is made from the ordinary materials of a life: conversation, attention, and repair. Much of it disappears as soon as it is made. Its medium is time, and its only proof is the quality of the life being lived.
Art is the artist and any artifacts he's made are the flotsam and jetsam of his passage through life.
You cannot paint with someone else’s brush. I can learn from teachers, borrow methods, and submit myself to standards; I should. But no teacher can perform my practice for me, and no philosophy can inhabit my particular life in advance. Eventually, what I have learned must pass through my own hands. This is not a license for self-indulgence. It is responsibility. If my life is my work, I cannot blame the brush.
The metaphor of art also leaves room for experimentation. Reality supplies the test. I have become less interested in defending every past choice as though consistency were a virtue by itself. A discarded opinion may be evidence that attention is still alive.
I have noticed opinions and preferences falling away, as have some self-imposed limitations. This is not indifference. It feels more like becoming less encumbered. Each abandoned certainty returns a little energy that was being spent maintaining it. There is more room to see what is in front of me. Recognition is different from figuring something out.
Figuring proceeds step by step and can tie itself into a Gordian knot. Recognition cuts through the knot. Suddenly I see that I have been tightening my shoulders, living by a borrowed assumption, or obeying a boundary that no longer exists. The change may have been prepared by years of practice, but when it comes, it arrives all at once: of course.
The movement works in both directions. When I discover a new connection or release unnecessary tension in my practice, something may shift in ordinary life. When something loosens in ordinary life, my practice changes too.
This reciprocity has made it impossible for me to regard practice as a compartment. A dojo can have walls, but the Way does not. The real measure is not only how the Taijiquan form looks during an hour of practice. It is how I stand in the kitchen, how I respond when plans go wrong, how quickly I notice that I have contracted, and whether I can release what the moment does not require.
The same principle applies to reading. I own more books than I will ever finish, and I am content to close one that is not speaking to me. This is not disrespect for books. It is respect for attention. The purpose of reading is not to accumulate completed titles or borrowed conclusions. It is to encounter something that can be recognized, tested, and perhaps lived.
A sentence may become a seed crystal. Around it, scattered experiences suddenly assume a pattern. But the pattern remains provisional. Life continues to add material for me to test and either integrate or reject.
I no longer imagine a final version of myself waiting at the end of all this work. "A work in progress" is not an apology attached to the title. It is the nature of the thing. Completion, for a living person, would be indistinguishable from stopping. The goal is not endless dissatisfaction with myself, nor a frantic program of optimization.
I cannot claim meaningful mastery of anything. But I think I have come to understand something large. The form is never merely the form. The body is never merely the body.
Tinkering begins with affection for the thing being worked on. I adjust my practice because I intend to remain in it. I train the body because I live here. I examine a belief because truth matters more than possession of the belief.
A discipline sincerely followed opens into everything else. We begin by trying to learn an art and may discover, years later, that the art has been teaching us how to learn, notice, change, and remain.
Discipline is not rigidity. Discipline gives me a structure within which I can become less rigid. It is a gentle persistence, a “returning to the mean” after whatever life throws at me. This is the essence of tinkering.
I haven't, by tinkering, assembled a system so much as accumulated an ecology of practices which interact with and illuminate one another.
A life of tinkering depends upon things one does not casually discard. Change becomes meaningful because it occurs against a background of commitment.
The Stoic concept of amor fati - the love of one's fate - belongs here too. On social media, people sometimes ask what we would change if we could go back in time. My answer is nothing.
Alter one event and I do not merely repair an isolated mistake; I create a different life, populated by different people and culminating in a different man looking back. Who can say that life would be better?
To inhabit a life is to accept its material. The artist does not begin with every possible canvas. He begins with this one: the one in front of him. Give me this life, the one I am living right now.
Acceptance is not passivity. Loving the material does not mean refusing to shape it. On the contrary, it makes the work possible. I can accept my age without surrendering to it, accept my history without being imprisoned by it, and accept my limitations while continuing to test whether they are real.
The art lies in knowing what must be borne, what can be changed, and what can simply be released. That knowledge does not arrive once and for all. It is cultivated through a lifetime of tinkering.
So I remain in the arena. Not to prove that age has no effect, and not because I expect some final triumph. I remain because participation is the point. There are still things to learn and assumptions to examine, still strength to build and friendships to deepen. There is still more of this life to inhabit.
Philosophy gives us castles: courage, wisdom, tranquility, the life of an artist. Practice lays the stones beneath them, one ordinary day at a time.
Acceptance without resignation. Discipline without rigidity. Tradition without bondage. Practice without a fantasy of completion. Tinkering without dissatisfaction with the thing being tinkered with.
The work will never be finished. That is not its failure. That is its life: a life inhabited.
