When I was a student at Delhi University, I spent a carefree year skipping classes, and then the examinations loomed and I had to teach myself, in a panic, everything I had blithely ignored. Most of it yielded. Tensor calculus did not. I read and re-read, I worked the problems, I battered my head against it for days, and it remained a wall of dead symbols – something I just could not understand.
And then one day, with no warning, there was a click. The equations came alive. They were no longer marks on a page; they were almost living things, floating in the air about me, and I saw – all at once and completely – what they meant and how they moved. What had been a wall became a window. I have never forgotten the suddenness of it, nor the long, fruitless, indispensable labor that came before it.
I tell you this because everyone wants the click, and almost no one wants the labor. They are not two things. The labor is how the click is purchased, and there is no other currency.
Here is a principle I return to again and again: quantity precedes quality. You must do a great deal of indifferent work before you do any good work, and you cannot leap to the good work by wanting it badly enough. P.G. Wodehouse’s earliest books are quite bad. He wrote them anyway, and kept writing, until one day out came Leave It to Psmith and the others that have given the world so much delight. Or think of learning to serve a tennis ball. You toss, you swing, you hit the net. You toss again, you swing, the ball sails long. You are frustrated; nothing is happening; it feels hopeless and mechanical. And then one serve drops in. Then you miss again. But something has begun, and if you keep at it, a real serve assembles itself out of a thousand bad ones.
It will feel mechanical. It will feel pointless. Do it anyway. The feeling that nothing is happening is simply your mental chatter, complaining — and your mental chatter is not a reliable witness. Do not set yourself a timeline, either. This is not the work of days or weeks. It is the work of months, of years, sometimes of decades. With my coaching clients I call it constant gentle pressure — applied not in spasms of enthusiasm but steadily, lightly, without cease.
There is a saying I love: the purpose of washing dishes is not to get them clean. The purpose of washing dishes is to wash the dishes. Their becoming clean is a byproduct. Bring your whole attention to the act, again and again, not straining toward the result, and one day the result arrives of its own accord. And here is the good news: once the shift begins, it moves swiftly and sweeps you up, and you find yourself wondering how you ever failed to see what was there all along.
To what end all this practice? Above all, to learn to live as the witness rather than the role. Suppose I cast you as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. You throw yourself into the part with everything you have; you live his disappointments, you crumble as his world crumbles. And yet, at the back of your mind, the actor sits – calm, aware, knowing that a great performance may earn an Oscar, and wholly untouched by Willy’s despair, because the actor is not Willy. Identify with the actor and you are golden. Identify with the character – the body, the mind, the intellect, the whole bundle of fears and cravings you take yourself to be – and you are sunk.
The entire practice is just this: the slow migration of your sense of “I” from the character to the actor standing behind him. It grows more naturally by degrees. And it takes, I will tell you honestly, not days and not weeks, but the better part of a lifetime — which is all the more reason to begin, in earnest, today.
Peace!
