The soft wheel

First light, and the cart is out on the lane where I left it.

The squeak is gone. That’s the good part, and it took most of an afternoon to get.

The other part is that the wheel doesn’t turn.

There’s a shop rag packed down inside the hub of that wheel. I put it in there myself, on Tuesday, with a screwdriver and far too much confidence. It’s staying in there until somebody with a thinner opinion than mine gets it out.

Bo is lying across the tongue of the cart, which is the one part of this that has nothing to do with my mistake. The air is cool, there is mist down in the cove, and none of that’s weather anybody would call weather.

So I’m going to tell you what happened. Then what I went and looked for. Then the part where the looking didn’t help as much as I expected.

Here is the whole of it. The cart has two wheels, and it has had one squeak since about the middle of summer. One wheel, one squeak, one squeak per push, on the side you lean on.

It wasn’t a bad squeak. It was the kind that gets into a morning. I’d push the cart, hear it, and that would be the start of the thing I was doing.

So on Tuesday I did what a man does. I got down there with a flashlight and a rag, and I put the rag in the gap where the wheel turns.

Now I want to be fair to myself for one sentence before I say the rest of it. I didn’t think I was doing anything clever. I thought I was putting a cushion under a hard spot.

The squeak did stop.

And then I could not turn the wheel by hand at all. Not stiff. Not slow. It would not go.

The rag was the reason. The rag was in there because I had put it there with my own hands on a Tuesday afternoon in a bad mood.

So I have a cart with one dead wheel, one working wheel, and a squeak that comes back the second you take the rag out.

I want to go further, because there is a bit further. I did not have any trouble fixing a gate last month.

A gate is a different job. A gate has a hinge, a post, and a gap where a hinge is supposed to be. Get the gap right and the gate swings for twenty years without anybody thinking about it.

A wheel is the same and it is not the same. A wheel has a hole in the middle on purpose.

That is the whole of the trouble. That hole is not a mistake. It is a hole because a wheel is not a solid disc with a squeak in it. It is thirty things going round an absence.

So here is the question for today.

Why is the empty part of a thing usually the part that makes it work?

I want to say straight away that I do not have a clean answer to that. I’ve got a good answer to about half of it. The other half is a story I told myself in a hardware store, and I’ll get to the story.

The half I’m sure of is the wheel. I’ve got one on the lane and it won’t turn, and I know exactly which part of it’s empty and why.

So I went and got the book.

Here is where I’m borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole old tradition and taking one thing out of it, which is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Lao-tzu, and I was on this ridge with that book a few weeks ago and spent ten minutes on one word. So I am not going to do the history again.

Short version. Old Chinese book. Tradition puts the man in the sixth century before our era. The book is probably younger than that. Nobody can prove one man wrote all of it.

The part I want is near the front, and it is short, and it is about wheels.

He builds a wheel out of thirty spokes, and all thirty of them run to one hub in the middle. Then he says the part that made me put the book down.

The wheel is useful because of the space it goes round. Not in spite of it.

And then he does it again with a pot. The clay is no use on its own. The pot is the wall the clay makes, and the pot is no use without the space inside it where you would put the water.

And then he does it a third time with a room. A room is a room because of the door and the window. Those are holes. The holes are the reason it is worth being in.

Three pictures, one shape. A thing and the space that the thing is built around.

I want to say one more thing about why this picture and not another one, and it is about the kind of book it is.

The book is full of advice for people who are pushing. It keeps coming back to the trouble with fussing and forcing, and with being certain you’ve got the shape of a thing exactly right.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you what he thought about anything. I do not know a man’s mind from a book that old, and I’ve been caught guessing at one before.

But I can tell you what kind of company he was keeping company with, because you can hear it in the pictures he reaches for. A pot. A room. A cart wheel. Ordinary made things, with a person standing next to them, in a world where a person was always being told to manage themselves better.

That’s the situation the book is arguing in. Everything in these three pictures is already built. Not one of them is a diagram of how to build it.

The clay is already fired. The room is already walled. The thirty spokes are already cut and fitted to the hub.

What is left over after the building is the space, and the book is pointing at the space.

I am not going to say his words. I am going to say mine.

Here is what I take from it. An absence is not the part of a thing that has not been built yet. It is the part the thing was built to have.

That is the line. I am going to say it once, and then I am going to find out what it costs.

The first thing I noticed, on a ridge at first light with a dead wheel in mind, is this. The line does not tell me how to fix anything.

Here is the hard part, and I am going to stay in it for a while.

A wheel with nothing in the middle is not a wheel. It is a plate. A bent plate with a rim on it, and you can hang it on a wall, and it will be fine on a wall.

The empty part only works if everything around it holds. That is not in the book. That is what I learned on Tuesday afternoon with a rag and a flashlight.

So the first cost of the idea is this. It sounds like permission to have a hole and not care what the hole is attached to.

A pot with no walls is a hole in the ground. A room with a hole where the door is, in February, is a room you cannot be in. I do not need a book to know that, and neither do you.

The empty part is not free. It is the most expensive part to build, because it is the part you can only get by getting everything else right.

That is the first half of the honest objection, and I got there on my own, which I want on the record.

Now the second half, and this one came out of the book.

The reason I was in the hardware store is that I’ve been trying to be a certain kind of man for about forty years. That kind of man doesn’t sit with a squeaking cart.

So the squeak wasn’t really a squeak. The squeak was a small complaint. Small complaints are the easiest things in the world to fix, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t leave them.

And then I found the old idea about not forcing, and it went round my head the whole drive home. I want to be honest about how good that felt.

It felt like permission. That’s the sentence.

And I want to be fair to the other side of this, because the other side isn’t stupid.

There are mornings when the only honest thing in the world is that something does not need doing. I have not got a book for that, and I have got a fair number of mornings.

The idea is bad for one person in particular. That person has a real problem in front of them and is looking for a reason to put it down.

I have been that person twice this year. The book was in the car both times.

Here is what I think I was actually doing. I had made a mistake with a rag, and undoing it would have cost me an afternoon. Then a piece of old Chinese wisdom arrived and offered to make the afternoon not count.

That is not wisdom. That is a way of feeling clean on a Tuesday.

And I want to say this carefully, because I like that book and I am not turning on it. I do not know that he was arguing against fixing things. I do not know that well enough to say it, and I have been wrong about a man in a book before.

All I know is what I did with it on a Tuesday, and I used it to get out of a rag.

So there is a third cost. It is the one that made me laugh out loud on the ridge, which is not supposed to happen.

I’ve been carrying that line around for a week saying it to people. Not out loud, mostly. But I’ve caught myself using it as a small weapon in a conversation.

Somebody was complaining about a project. I had my line ready, and I was going to use it to make somebody feel better. It wouldn’t have made anybody feel better. It is a description of a pot.

And that’s the thing about taking a thing out of an old book and putting it in your mouth. You stop being able to tell whether you’re thinking it or using it.

So I gave myself a rule, and I’m telling you the rule, not the lesson. If I want to say that sentence to somebody else, I’ve to have looked at the thing first. Not the book. The cart, the gate, the pot on the stove.

The line does not work on a person. It only works on a thing you have actually got your hands on.

Back to the ridge.

The mist is going out of the cove. You can see the bottom of it now. The creek. The sycamores along the water. The light is coming up on the far side of the hill, doing the thing it does where it hits wet leaves.

I sat down on the cart tongue. That made the dead wheel turn about a quarter of the way, and I could hear the rag move in there.

That’s a good sound. That’s the hub, with the rag in it, going round a quarter turn because I leaned on the handle.

And then Bo came over and put his head in it. Right in. Both front paws, the whole neck, straight down the hole to find out what the noise was.

He came out with a leaf in his ear and no opinion. I’ve not got a rag out either, so we’re both still waiting.

And here is the thing that got me, sitting there. A cart wheel is not mostly hole. That is what I got wrong about my own wheel. It is mostly spokes, and rim, and a lot of wood somebody cut.

The hole is what is left over when they have finished. The hole is not a feature I chose. It is what the wheel is after you have done all the work.

And there is a second thing about that hole that I did not know until this morning.

You cannot get to it from the outside. There is no door in a hub. You cannot wash it out, you cannot paint it, and you cannot put a hand in there and feel whether it is all right.

The only way anybody has ever found out what is in a wheel is by taking the whole thing apart.

Which is a long way of saying something I already knew. The useful parts of a thing are the parts that cost you something to get at.

There is a mark on the wall of the shop with three characters on it. The first one is the word for the Way. The middle one is the word for wild. They’re in the same mark on purpose.

I didn’t put those two next to each other to make a joke. Somebody a long time ago put them together, and I’m not going to argue with them. I’ve never worked out whether that was brave or careless.

I’m not going to explain them. They’re three characters on a wall, and I say the word the wild and mean it as a compliment.

What I will say is that this is the first time I have seen the two of them be the same thing rather than opposites. It took a dead wheel on a lane to show me.

Because the hole in that wheel is not a wild part of the wheel. The hole is the most built part of it. It is the part where all thirty spokes had to arrive.

Wild is not the hole either. Wild is the whole wheel. Nobody who cut thirty spokes out of wood was being tame about it.

Now. The pot.

I’ve got a pot on the stove at home that I’ll not throw out. It has a chip in the lip about the size of my thumbnail.

Every time I see it I think that a pot is only a pot if it holds something. Every time I see it I also think that the chip is on the outside, where I can see it. That’s why the pot is still a pot.

If the chip had been on the inside, I’d have thrown it away in a second.

And the room. The room where I do the work in has one window in it, and it’s not a good window. The desk sits in the exact spot where the light comes in sideways in the afternoon.

I’ve moved that desk four times in six years. Every time I’ve ended up putting it back.

The window is the hole. I didn’t cut it. Somebody in this county cut it a hundred years before I got here, and I’ve never once thought of that wall as a wall with a deficiency in it.

Which is the whole of what I’ve got, and it’s more than I had at first light.

I’ve just spent twenty minutes on a cart wheel and a chip in a pot. From up here that could look like a small morning.

It is a small morning. I am the one who made the wheel matter.

Here is the shape of it, and I have been wrong about shapes before. The squeak was not a squeak. It was me, not liking a thing about myself, and looking for a job to do about it.

The hole in the wheel was not a hole. It was the part thirty spokes had to agree on.

Those are the same sentence about a squeak and a wheel, and that is the part I did not expect.

Somewhere out there, you have got one right now. A thing that rattles. A drawer, a boot, a job, a habit. A gate that does not latch, and a chair that leans, and a car that makes a noise when you turn.

And the first thing you do about it is get down there with a rag.

Not because the rag is wrong. Because the rag is a way of not looking at the noise.

I do not have a way to tell you which noises are which. I’ve got a rag, and I’ve got a line about pots, and on Tuesday the line won.

The other wheel turns. Same cart, same axle, same morning.

I’ve pushed that cart a hundred times with one good wheel and one bad one. Before Tuesday I’d have told you the good wheel was the lucky one.

It’s not lucky. It’s a wheel that nothing is packed into. That’s a smaller thing than luck, and a much better one to be able to repair.

I’m not going to make a speech about that. I’ve made enough of them today, and the dog is asleep.

I’ve started noticing the space in things this week in a way I didn’t expect to. The noticing is mostly in the shed.

There’s a gap above the bench where the light gets in. There’s a gap in the fence where the light gets in and the deer get in. I’ve told myself for years that I should fix it. I’m not going to say that word again this week.

There is a gap between two boards on the shed door that you can put a finger through sideways. The shed is warmer for it, and I’ve never once thought of that gap as a fault in the door.

Here is the odd thing about that, and I have sat with it for a while. I have never once thought of those gaps as faults. I have only ever thought of the dead wheel as a fault. It is the same absence in the same week, three feet apart in a different building.

So the difference was never the hole. The difference was whether I was standing on the side of it where I had to answer for something.

That is not from the book. That is from a shed in Missouri, and from a man who does not want to pull a rag out with a screwdriver.

And I have been chewing on that for a while, so let me say the whole of it out loud.

There is no difference in the wood. The good wheel and the bad wheel came off the same cart on the same morning. The difference is a rag, and the rag is in there because a man was in a bad mood on a Tuesday.

Which means the thing I have been calling a dead wheel all week is not a fact about the wheel at all. It is a fact about the rag.

And that is the first half of the sentence I actually needed, and I did not get it from a book about wheels.

The second half is that I still have to take the rag out.

Knowing what the noise is about does not put a hand in the hub. It only means I will know what I am doing when I finally do it.

I’ve spent a week trying to find a reading of that book which doesn’t require me to do anything. There’s one. It’s a very good reading. It’s not worth having on a Tuesday.

So here is the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

The leaving one, and here it is. On the next walk, put one small thing down at the end of the walk and leave it there.

It has to be small enough that you are not sure it counts. A stone off the path. A receipt. A bit of bark. Something nobody is going to tidy up.

Put it down and then keep walking. Do not go back and get it. That is the whole assignment.

Pick the thing before you start, not after. If you wait until the end of the walk, you will pick something with a bit of weight on it. A heavy thing left in a ditch is litter, not an exercise.

And do not leave it somewhere a car can find. That is not a rule from the book. It is a rule from a county road.

For a longer walk, do it more than once. Once at the first end of the walk and once at the other. Two things left in two places is a habit, and one thing left in one place is an accident.

And here is the part that’s actually about today, and you can leave it alone if you want.

When you put the thing down, notice the second. There’s a second one. Most of us get to a certain point in a walk where we put something down and feel a small clean lift.

Then, about four steps later, we start planning how to pick it up again on the way back.

The leaving is the four steps. The four steps after the lift is the part that is actually hard, and it is the part that says the thing was not left.

I do not know what to do with that. I am not going to pretend the walk fixes it.

If you skip it, you got twenty-five minutes of a man sitting on a cart talking about a wheel that does not turn. That is not nothing. It is not wisdom either.

It works on the way to the mailbox. It doesn’t need a ridge and it doesn’t need a squeak.

The rag comes out tomorrow, with a screwdriver and less confidence.