At first I tried to seek those answers in books; in old books. I tried to read Walden. Thoreau is supposed to be the grandmaster of those who enjoy the outdoors, but I have slowly formed the opinion that he was at least slightly delusional, and honestly a poor writer. I don't think I can forgive him for dedicating a few pages to buying shingles. I tried Emerson next, and didn't get very far. I read some Muir, and while I liked his writing style for a change, it wasn't providing answers for the questions I wanted answers for.
For college I managed to actually read a few primary sources of Eastern religion and philosophy. I read the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching, and greatly enjoyed them. I think they started to open my mind in the right direction, and I imagine I will reread them in the future to gain previously missed nuggets of wisdom. But they still weren't really taking me where I wanted to go.
Unintentionally, I began to find some direction in music. Although music had never really been a huge part of my life, a few years into college I began to discover music that I truly liked. It was music that no one else that I knew really liked. I was liking it because, well, I liked it. I didn't feel like I had to like it. I didn't feel like I had to like it in the same way I'm supposed to like Thoreau because I like the woods, or that I'm supposed to gain great wisdom from the Tao Te Ching because Eastern philosophy intrigues me. It spoke to me on a level I still don't quite understand. But it's not really telling me enough. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly aren't telling me how to live my life. They're giving me pointers, but they are outdated, too topical, too narrow. They're just helping me realize the answers were inside of me the whole time.
Then I started to work on bikes. I began to look beyond the computer screen, beyond the written page, and look at steel, aluminum and rubber. I stretched my hands, feebly picked up a wrench, and found I knew how to use it. I was born to use it, my genes know how to use it, and I was raised to use it. I understand it. I understand it without understanding how I understand it. This feeling was mostly new to me: most of the things I've liked in my life have partly appealed to me because they were mysterious, and I wanted and needed to figure them out.
I've recently started reading Robert M. Pirsig's infamous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I picked it up partly on whim, partly inspired by reading and liking an excerpt from it years ago while backpacking in Utah's Uinta Mountains for college. I wasn't really sure what to expect. I guess every noun in the title appeals to me: Zen, Art, Motorcycles and Maintenance. I'll admit so far it hasn't really been what I thought it would be. It's been surprisingly easy for me to read, mostly, and has introduced some interesting subjects. But perhaps most importantly is that it's speaking a language I understand: the language of the mechanical world. I get it. Most of it anyways. It'll need another read sometime in my life, for sure. Not that I'm done with it now, I'm not even quite halfway through the book. But a paragraph stood out to me tonight, a paragraph that I think perfectly describes a feeling I have been thinking of for several months now:
"What's really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there's only one way to put this rotisserie together -- *their* way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it's very unlikely that they've told you the best way."
page 166
I've preached to my fiancee Keri for a while now that what I do has an artistic quality. I wasn't exactly sure how to describe it or even why I felt this way, but I knew I was right. Talent can't be conveyed and transmitted from a book of instructions or in a manual. Sure, text can help give direction where intuition fails, but it can't encapsulate the entirety of what is needed to do it well. Something unexplainable resides within individuals such as myself, something that allows us to take up tools and use them to do things that most others can't. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't just pertain to mechanics: the same is true for musicians, artists, writers, athletes, philosophers, teachers, programmers, engineers, and just about anyone else who does something and does something well. You can't teach a writer to become Stephen King, just as much as you can't teach someone to have an intuitive grasp of what they're trying to do. It's born in us, and that is what makes it art.
That same art was in my dad, it's in me and my brother, and we have to work hard to keep that alive. I'm finding some of the answers I've been wanting in this book, and it is an indescribably happy experience. To anyone else reading this who considers themselves even somewhat mechanically inclined, or at least interested, I feel I can recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance even at this point, having not finished it yet. It's a good read.
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