I’ve been thinking about alignment, equilibrium, and Zhuangzi’s concepts of flow and attentiveness. Zhuangzi tells the story of a butcher and a carpenter, each are totally in flow with the grains of their mediums when they are cutting; they are less cutting than finding the natural seams and moving as one with the wood and the animal.
It’s the second day in July and the weather is perfect. Crisp. Hot. Wisps of clouds. Not too hot.
A day like today is easy to feel alignment with; the trick is to be aligned with all weathers, past, present, future. To enter into any day as a complete embrace of the wet, cold, hot, damp, dry. There’s not a lot one can do to influence these weathers, outside of clothing and influencing the progress of industrial agriculture, so the most one can do is accept them. One can look at the average weather data and choose a location accordingly, but there will always be accidents of extremes. And usually also seasons. There’s more to being in flow with the weather than being entirely accepting of a given moment’s temperature or precipitation experience; it’s imperative to develop a sense of the seasons that anticipates, remembers, and experiences. Winter is coming? A little bit of planning and specific remembering go a long way. It’s perfect out? Critical to remember that perfect weather brings out the self-destructive pursuit of perfection and rejection of any sort of failure or anticipated failure (a lack of cruelty from the weather leads to some unthought out cruelty from me to me; or maybe it’s the feeling of pressure to feel good and awe, giving way to goodly awfulness from time to time).
The operation of weather-memory, butcher-expertise-memory, and wood-carving-natural-motions are all allegories about the application and re-application of memory. They’re effective allegories in part because each is a physical thing and a thought thing simultaneously; there is no thing that is only one or the other, but it’s useful when the allegory is explicit about this. To remember the opposite extremes when feeling and thinking and experiencing an extreme is a component of equilibrium. When this memory becomes spontaneous, one has become one with a thing. To spontaneously think of the ice cold breeze and the frozen beard on a scorching, humid day. To remember the shoddy first carving when one is in the midst of the most difficult project of one’s carpentry-life. The extent to which one’s memory can extend to places where one has not “been” is the extent to which one can “comfortably” go anywhere (with that nonchalant aplomb that also must be remembered when there is no calm).
The master carpenter has read many books, the master academic knows when to stop reading. The wise person does not over-extend mastery and the attentive person does not overvalue wisdom. One who loves aphorisms learns not to get too drunk.
There is a unicycle obstacle course being built behind me. Perhaps I’ve had enough coffee. Perhaps I need one more.
Roman Ryan 