“When are we going to get going?” Chris says.
“What’s your hurry?” I ask.
“I just want to get going.”
“There’s nothing up ahead that’s any better than it is right here.”
-Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
An Inquiry Into Values

 

The most inspiring book I read in 2008 was written by Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning. The movie Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) is based on Josh who is an eight-time National Chess Champion as well as martial arts champion who holds both National and World Champion titles.

The book is a life-affirming tale about the learning process which allowed him to achieve such extraordinary goals. In the chapter: Making Smaller Circles, Waitzkin describes a passage from Robert Prisig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintance (1974), as the inspiration (in part) for the principles lying at the heart of connecting chess and martial arts and the learning process.

The scene begins with the protagonist of the story, a brilliant and eccentric fellow named Phaedrus who is teaching a rhetoric student with writer’s block. Her assignment is to write a five-hundred-word story about her town.

To her the town seems too small and incidental to find anything of interest to write about. Phaedrus frees the girl from her block by changing the assignment. He suggests that she write about the front of the brick opera house outside her classroom on the small street in a small neighborhood of the dull town. And, she should start with the upper-left hand brick.

At first the student becomes incredulous, but soon a torrent of creativity turns into twenty pages of inspired writing which she brings to class the next day.

Waitzkin nails the message of this little narrative by identifying the theme as depth over breadth—which he says has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The message is coming from someone with a proven track record. He states the learning principle is; “to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture.” We never fully attend to the micro (awareness) and only skim the surface of the macro (half asleep).

Patricia looks up at the night sky and replies, “My father says that almost the whole world is asleep – everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.”
-Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

It’s what Jennifer James, PhD, describes as an environment around us, the media in particular, that conditions us with a mechanism that “both speeds up our thought and limits its depth.”

I call it “provocative-surfacing” and it leads to a dearth of systems thinking—that is, seeing how things are connected. Those small daily choice points we make that end up as larger patterns shaping our lives. In the speed culture we are always in a hurry to get going to the next thing sacrificing the present moment (“what’s right here”), which can be exhausting.

Focusing on the single brick (the detailed mystery of the micro) increases our awareness of what’s present and puts us into the moment; where creativity lives. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we feel so strongly about aging in place and so love being home; a place for letting our guard down and self-expression.

Home can be a cocoon from the pace of the culture where we can rest, recharge, and be in the moment.

See

The Art of Learning