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.
