naivete

The hardest skill to learn is the ability to be completely unskilled.

Let me try to clarify:

When first we learn a new skill we are filled with inspiration of the thing we want to accomplish with this skill. Your inspiration strains against your limitations and you knock your head against your clumsiness with your tools. With each step mastered a silent kind of joy permeates your being as you move along your course.

Let us fast-forward a few years. Now you have mastered many skills, you may even have developed new ones of your own invention.

But where has the joy gone?

What happens so very often is that your skills have taken over from your inspiration as a motive force and transformed you into a mere vehicle for the skill to exercise itself.

This is a good time to throw away your tools, set fire to your workshop and take an axe to your instruments. Not.

What is required is much harder than that.

We need to return to that state so many years ago where our inspiration was constrained by our toolset. We need to become unskilled.

But how do we unlearn all that we have learnt ?

Do we take up drinking in the hope that we can kill off all the brain cells containing our knowledge ? Of course not.

Do we tackle even more ambitious projects ? Hardly.

We become unskilled again through the simple act of starting to closely observe our actions as we practice our craft.

When do the twinges of dissatisfaction the loudest ? During what operations do we feel ourselves retract into ourselves ? When is it that the boredom peaks and you reach for another cup of coffee ?

This is the moment at which to strike with the full force of your still-dormant capacity for utter ignorance.

What we are feeling in these moments is still the original feeling of frustrated inspiration, but it is now our great skill which constrains full expression, not our lack of skill.

Do you remember how it was? You couldn't quite realize your vision precisely with your limited skill, but as you learnt you got closer and closer till you attained a measure of satisfaction and then you put away your tools and meditated upon the fullness of the result.

The very subtle deception which played out at that moment was that your satisfaction was based upon your ability to perceive the difference between your inspiration and the result.

Yet, our perception becomes finer as we grow in our practice. We just don't realize it.

So, the next time your skills try and convince you that the result is still indistinguishable from the inspiration, take another look and consider that maybe you are not capable of portraying what you really sensed.

voice

So, publishing by mere mortals has been subsumed by blogspace. Could have been different. It wasn't. But I still want that big green Edit button on my toolbar. Along with rollback, per-profile content filtering and synchronized local storage. But don't look at me, Ted Nelson said it all long before I shuffled into the room.