If I still own a Bible, it's packed away in an attic box. I still do, however, devote time to my personal "old testament" (Walden, by Henry David Thoreau) and my "new testament" (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig). I'm particularly fond of the latter, finding new wisdom and insights at each reading.Pirsig spends much of the book grappling with quality -- pretty heady stuff, especially in light of his personal struggles. His intellectual wrestling can present a challenge, but the persistent reader will be rewarded with intriguing discussion and enlightening conclusions. One of my favorite passages:
"The sun of quality...does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!"What I get from Pirsig (besides chills) is as much about continuity as it is about quality. All those things that we perceive as separate and distinct -- actions and beliefs, rational thoughts and irrational emotions -- are one, a continuum that's both intensely personal and undeniably universal.
In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote of Almustafa's return to the village of his birth, and of the villagers seeking his wisdom on a variety of subjects -- love, commerce, law, freedom, good and evil, pleasure and other temporal concerns. Near the end of the book, the chapter "On Religion" begins:
The priest, like many of us, had relegated his faith to its own sacred compartment. Almustafa reminded him that all those separate matters the villagers had been inquiring about, taken together, were, in fact, their religion."And an old priest said, 'Speak to us of Religion.'
"And he said: 'Have I spoken this day of aught else?'"
Pirsig echoes this truth in discussing the ritual of motorcycle maintenance:
"The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be 'out there' and the person that appears to be 'in here' are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together."Woven into that gem are two phrases -- "working on" and "grow toward" -- that bridge any perceived gap between the intellectual and the practical. It's more than the knowing; it's the living. Here's part of what precedes the passage above:
"It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. The...fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together."The continuum, then, is a given. Living in harmony with it is, practically speaking, a matter of intent -- it's the working and growing Pirsig is talking about, and that's where discipline comes into play.
A lack of self-discipline can manifest itself as a compartmentalized existence, the illusion that one's life can be separated into parcels. Think about the professional athlete who takes care of his body and trains obsessively, and yet recreates in a world of substance abuse and crime. Or the politician who's known for advocating "family values," but ultimately is discovered to have been living a secret, seemingly contradictory life. Or the model soldier who's dedicated to perfecting his tactical skills, but who runs his mouth with considerably less discipline than he applies to his warrior mindset.
Self-discipline isn't automatic, of course, and it's not a steady state -- it's learned and re-learned, lost and regained, maintained and reinforced with every experience. The principle, which can be tough enough for adults to grasp, is especially difficult to impart to children, those ever-changing creatures who still are accumulating experiences and defining their own personal continuum. Even our best efforts won't prevent them from living their lives like they're clicking a TV tuner, and that's that.
Still, there comes an age at which we need to stop making excuses for our kids and start cultivating an attitude of self-discipline. That's what's happening at the KintlaLake household these days -- and (at my peril) I'm going to use our older spawn as an example.
On opening the door to this 17-year-old's room, one's first impression is that of a rummage sale after considerable rummaging. I have no idea how he (or anyone else) can tell clean clothes from dirty -- everything is on the floor, every garment is wadded into a ball. Dirty dishes and half-eaten snacks have been known to linger in the room for weeks, giving rise to disturbing life forms that I, for one, don't recognize.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that this spawn had earned himself a speeding ticket. Recently he added a rear-end collision to his brief résumé -- he wasn't hurt, but his crunched car, though not a total loss, is out-of-commission until it's been repaired.
The car now sits in our barn, just as it has for the last eight days. Our spawn has spent the weekend and his after-school hours removing dozens of bent pieces and broken parts -- thus creating a pile of bent pieces and broken parts next to a car that still needs fixing. There's been activity, but there's not been much progress.
What's missing isn't skill -- it's self-discipline.
Step one, it seems to me, would be to recognize that without a car he's lost his mobility and can't hold a paying job, followed by deciding that the goal is to do what's necessary to fix the car. Assess the situation, define the task, execute the task, drive away.
The wrecked car itself is neither the problem, really, nor is it the point -- with apologies to Pirsig, the real car he's working on is a car called himself.
The most valuable lesson our spawn can learn from this experience is that he can benefit from adopting an attitude of self-discipline -- from the way he keeps his room to the quality of his schoolwork to the choices he makes in his social life. Ideally, he'll see that the absence of that attitude is directly related to why, over a week later, he's still no closer to having a road-worthy car.
I'm not saying that he has to clean up his room before he fixes his car -- if you ask me, he should start with the project in the barn. As Pirsig asserts:
"...if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren't going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six."It's a process. When we dispense with our artificial compartments and embrace the continuum, it can be quite an enjoyable process.
I hope that's so for our spawn.
