The wild and the Way

First light on the ridge above the creek, half past five, and fog all the way down in the cove.

The fog has settled in like somebody poured it there and nobody told it to leave. It’s still as a held breath.

The light has not reached anything yet except the tops of the oaks and one strip of the trail in front of my boots.

Bo is a white shape in the wet grass off to the left, and he has not moved in a while. He looks at that grass the way you look at a door you have decided not to go through.

So I’m going to tell you what I did wrong this morning, and I did it on purpose.

For about three days now I’ve been walking better.

I decided I was going to walk the way a person is supposed to walk. Feet first. Breath counted. Head up. Jaw loose. And I read about it, which in hindsight was the first warning.

I made myself do the whole first mile that way. I was checking my own posture like a man watching himself in a shop window, and it was awful.

Every step had a job attached to it. My left knee was a problem. My shoulders had opinions. Somewhere in the second mile I worked out that I was doing a hobby, and I don’t have a hobby, I have a walk.

Then I let go of it, all at once, the way you drop a hot plate.

And I found out what the walk actually is.

It is one foot, then the other one. That’s the whole of it. I had somehow made it into a small job with a uniform and a foreman. I was the foreman, and I was doing it badly.

Right about then a box turtle came out from under the sycamore at the second bend and walked across the trail.

It took him all of a slow minute and a half. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t check on us. He didn’t look like he was enjoying it either. He looked like a man carrying groceries in the rain.

Bo watched the whole crossing without moving one part of him, not a muscle. His ears were up and his mouth was closed and he just watched the turtle do turtle business in the middle of the trail.

That is the most at ease I have seen anybody on this ridge, including me, and it was a turtle doing paperwork.

I want to tell you I learned something from that. What I actually did was stand there feeling a bit foolish, which is a normal Tuesday.

So here is the question for today.

Why does it cost something to be relaxed on purpose?

I’m not asking about meditation or any of that. I’m asking about a walk, and about my own leg.

Zhuangzi is a name for a Chinese book nobody can prove one person wrote. Old. Somewhere around the fourth century before our era, give or take a fair bit.

Now there is a story in it about a man who keeps monkeys.

He feeds them chestnuts, and one day he tells them, three in the morning and four at night.

The monkeys are furious. Every one of them.

So he says, all right, four in the morning and three at night.

And now the monkeys are delighted.

Same chestnuts. Seven in a day, either way. Not one more nut anywhere in it.

I’m not going to tell you what that story means. That book has more than one way of reading it, and I didn’t write any of them. Here’s what I take from it.

The keeper didn’t argue with the monkeys. He could have stood there and shown them the sum. Instead he went along with what they were feeling, and the day came out the same.

The monkeys weren’t being difficult. They were being monkeys. And the man knew it, and let them.

And the funny part, the part that got me, is that I am the monkey.

That is what I was doing to myself on this ridge. I had a picture of what an easy walk looks like. Then the knee hurt, and the picture was wrong, and I didn’t ask the knee. I changed the picture.

And I should say that I’m standing well outside that book. I’m borrowing one story out of a tradition I don’t belong to, which is the polite way of saying I take the parts I like and leave the rest where it is.

Now the cost of that, because there is one.

A story like that is funny, and being funny at somebody is not free. You stand on a ridge and say a true thing out loud, in front of nobody who chose to be there. If it’s only a joke, then you’ve wasted your own morning. If it’s true, then you’ve made yourself small on purpose.

I don’t enjoy that. I keep doing it.

Every so often I say something on this walk that leaves me feeling about two inches tall, and then Bo comes round the sycamore and the morning carries on. I never go back up there to check whether I was right.

Zhuangzi would probably say I am fussing. He has a word for fussing, and I’m not going to use it and get it wrong.

There is a twentieth century writer named Alan Watts, nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventy three.

He spent a lot of years sitting with this old material and arguing with it in the open. I didn’t read him in order, I mostly heard him.

He made a point about the effort that I have never heard anyone else put plainly. Being a person who lives around other people is not a thing you do once and keep. It is a thing you are doing the whole time, every hour. Most of the time it runs by itself, the way a stove keeps burning.

And I don’t think he would have thanked me for calling the part of you underneath it a beast.

The way I have his argument, calling it a beast lets you off. It sounds like there is a wild thing down there that you are managing. But the managing does not stop. Nothing ever finishes it.

So you get a tired person at the end of a long day calling themselves an animal. The animal part is only the part that never clocks off.

I don’t know if he was right about all of it. He was very sure of himself, which is a whole other kind of problem.

Here is what I have got anyway.

I think the tamed mind and the wild mind are not two minds. I think they are the same one, doing two jobs at the same time, and neither job is finished.

And I think the wild one is not the opposite of being on the Way. That is the part I want to say out loud.

Because the Way, as I understand it, is not a road somebody else walked first and marked out. It’s not a list of the correct responses to a Thursday. It is closer to the shape of the creek. The creek is not tame or wild. It goes where the ground is low.

And here is the part where I get uncomfortable, and then I get over it.

Being wild is easy. Being wild costs nothing and goes well with the people at the picnic. I’m not talking about wanting a wood cabin.

I’m talking about the wild parts that are inconvenient, and those are the expensive ones. The part of you that won’t be managed is real. The people who love you have to live next to it, and some of them cannot.

I’m not going to tell you it is all worth it. Some of it is not. I have been the difficult one in a room and I know what that costs the other people in it.

The honest answer to my question is not all the way. Here is the part I do have.

It is easier to be around a person who is not trying to be anything at all. That is all. You can sit beside it. You don’t have to manage it, because it isn’t asking you to.

There is somebody in my life who eventually couldn’t do that. Nothing dramatic happened. It was a year of me being a lot to be around, one week after another, and the room got a little harder every time.

I still think most of it was worth it. I wouldn’t hand it back. I just don’t get to tell you it was free.

And I am not handing you that as advice. I’m handing it to you as a fact, because a fact is more use than advice.

The fog started burning off about halfway along, the way it does, from the top down.

I want to tell you about work, because this is what the walking turned into.

We have spent the last while sanding down a drawing of ours, taking the edge off. Nothing wrong with the drawing. It just got polite. It got to be the sort of thing nobody argues with.

And I kept looking at it, being able to say exactly where the trouble was and not being able to name the trouble.

It took the wild out of it. That’s all that was wrong. It was tamed, and it was correct, and you could hang it anywhere.

We fixed it by putting a bit of the animal back in. Not much. One loose bit, and now the whole thing holds together, because that is what the drawing was made out of in the first place.

I don’t think that is a special discovery. I think it is just true on a Tuesday morning on a ridge. Also true at a desk. Also true in most of the rooms I have ever loved.

Dao Yeh Ren. Three characters, put together a long time ago by somebody I’ll never meet.

The Way. The Wild. The Man.

That is not a contradiction, and it is not a slogan. It is a description of what is happening to me right now, on this ridge, while a dog sleeps on my boots.

All of us are the wild one. Every single one. Including you, including him, including me at half past five this morning with a bad left knee and a plan that did not work.

There was a deer standing in the timber across the cove when I sat down. She was not eating anything in particular. She was just standing there, being a deer, checking about four things at once and having no opinion about any of them.

And I watched her and I thought about how she is not relaxed and she is not tense. She is doing a list. That is the whole of her day and she does not have a project about it.

That is the part I want. Not her calm. Her list. The way she is not trying to get the day to come out right.

Because I know exactly where my own list is. The queue in the coffee place. The forty minutes before I answer an email. The group chat I read to be polite and then resent for the rest of the day.

Every one of those is the tamed mind at work, and I am not saying drop it. The tamed mind is why nobody gets hurt.

I am saying it is a job with no finish line. You are allowed to look up from it now and then and ask what the list is even for.

One more thing Bo did, since I’m telling you everything that happened this morning.

He got up, walked about eight feet, and lay down in exactly the same shape he was lying in before.

I am not going to explain that.

So here is the thing to try. It is small and it takes one walk.

On your next walk, count the times you catch yourself managing yourself.

That is all. Every time you notice yourself making yourself be a version of you, count one. Five is plenty. You can count out loud, or count on your fingers, or just feel the clicks.

Then stop counting and put the walk down. Let the shoulders have whatever they were going to do.

If you’ve got a longer walk and want more out of it, keep a second count going, and count the times something made you curious instead. The wild mind and the curious mind are close relatives, and that one is the other half of this whole thing.

If you skip any of it, you’ve got fifteen minutes of a man talking to a fog bank, which has its own appeal and no homework.

Bo is asleep. I haven’t decided anything. Go easy.