Wavelets

A boat is an outstanding place to ponder, at least when not crouching in the bilge covered in oil. It is my idea of an artist colony for one. Similar to institutions that sponsor artists in stately old mansions high in the mountains or in the flinty woods of the northeast, allowing them pursue their work isolated from life’s mundane tasks.

Of course, on the boat I have provided myself with a grant to sit and look out of the pilothouse. No one has to recognize my talent, and I do not have to submit a portfolio for anonymous judges to review. Just sitting and looking is my preoccupation, and while on the water simple things become important. Things like the surface of the water.

Nestled in the harbor wavelets predominate my visual field. The lake requires attention to Mother Nature: wind, water, clouds and waves. It requires all my concentration for navigation and for monitoring the fickle weather. These tasks become the preoccupation when underway. There is seldom time for contemplation.

The harbor relieves me of such duties and allows me to think about smaller, dare I say more inconsequential details. A harbor is a refuge that tempers the weather and lulls us into complacency. This is lost on many new boaters, drawing them out into uncomfortable, even dangerous encounters with the lake.

In my early days of boating and occasionally even now, when passing the red and green towers demarcating the harbor from the lake; if the weather is foul a sick feeling in my gut brings the realization that I should have never ventured out in the first place. And to make matters worst, once out it can take an agonizingly long time to get safely back and snug in your slip. Believe me when I say this, it is from hard won experience.

My point here is the minutiae of every day life, the things that make up the environment we become habituated to. As I sit, absorbed in the scene at the end of a long boating season, the surface of the water is disturbed by steady droplets of rain, by diving gulls, alighting Canadian geese and preening mallards, and by the death throws of the last few remaining salmon.

Wavelets radiate out from the nidus of raindrops in two groups of perfect concentric circles. The circles interact with the other ringlets created by the chilling October rain and intersect with waves generated from strong northeast winds and from the wakes of the few craft that still reluctantly ply the increasingly cold water.

The infinite variation, mind boggling as it is, follows physical principle and I am sure a physics professor has written equations to explain the phenomena. For me the changing nature of the universe is reflected on the surface of the water. It makes plausible the cliché that monarchs flapping their wings in the Yucatan can change the path of a hurricane.

Because of my interest in Japanese culture, especially chanoyu the tea ceremony, I take for granted that all this detail is not to be taken for granted. Nothing is as simple as it appears and everyday, even every second, is our last never to be repeated.

If it were a bright and sunny day my musings would take on a different tone. But today with winter, and the isolation that it brings not far away, these ponderings open up a rich world of experience that is always at our backdoor, but usually ignored in favor of images provided by the travel channel.

It makes searching for paradise in far-flung places unnecessary and relieves me of the burden of expectations. Things are just what they are…glorious, whether sitting in the pilothouse on a cold raining fall day, shoveling snow in my alley on Talman Avenue or walking amongst the graves under a canopy of ancient cedars on Mt. Koya-san.

Aimlessness

The first task of the day, after a cup of cappuccino, is to round on patients in the hospital. For those of you who have ever had the misfortune of being in the hospital, whether as a patient or as a practitioner of the art of medicine, you know the seeming aimlessness of much that goes on within the confines.

Having worked and studied in many institutions over decades of training and practice, I still find myself in awe of the shear mindlessness of much that goes on. I chalk it up to corporate culture, each hospital steeped in its own tradition, carries on in its own way.

But I digress, in medical circles the students term for aimlessness is "scut work". Examples being never-ending histories and physicals, interminable note writing, fetching any thing from Swans-Granz catheters to donuts and coffee and the most annoying of all, didactic education in the form of morning report and lectures given throughout a day that is already seriously overbooked.

Years ago I read a famous book called Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. This book, as I remember it, is basically a thesis on scut work and how the protagonist anguishes over the difference between his idealized concept of the teacher/master and the realities of his apprenticeship. There is much second-guessing by the main character that, without giving away too much of the story jeopardizes his relationship with his teacher.

The narrative is centered on his perceived privilege as a student. In medicine and I think in the Japanese sense of education, respect and privilege are reserved for teachers and earned by students. This contributes a vital link to the training process, producing confident, mature professionals that will some day replace their mentors.

Aimlessness is a fallacy for any serious student and thus the reason it is fought against so rigorously. But aimlessness, at least the way I think of it, is what teachers strive for. It is similar to the aphorism, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I think of it as a koan: the more an idea is concentrated on, the less chance there is it of ever being understood; the less effort given to solving it, the more futile the attempt.

We have all spent hours, even days, memorizing our notes and taking exams, but as the hours pass it is difficult to remember what was so judiciously studied. Facts are memorized and forgotten, but concepts are absorbed and it is in this that aimlessness is invaluable.

In Chanoyu, the tea ceremony, there is a place, and I think an idea, called mizuya. It translates as kitchen or maybe pantry. It is the physical space where various utensils, and oneself, are readied for the preparation of tea.

For initiates and advanced students of tea much time is spent in the mizuya. The Thirteenth Grand Tea Master, Ennosai, wrote that the mizuya is the training ground for the tearoom. It was here engrossed in mundane tasks similar, in spirit; to the scut work performed by medical students that chado (the Way of Tea) began to infuse into my soul.

Students need to put time in, doing whatever work their teacher deems necessary. Of course there is no reason not to gripe. It is a fine tradition to be shared with your colleagues as long as you remember that the educational process, however chaotic, has been honed over hundreds of years and is probably the same training that your mentor endured and complained about.

It is the need to master commonplace tasks that makes chanoyu and medicine so hard to pass on superficially. Short cuts leave both student and teacher unfulfilled. The vast under estimation of just how much “blood, sweat and tears” goes into either pursuit is one of the main reasons that chanoyu and pre-med have such high attrition rates.

But one day if you persevere with your study, as you enter the mizuya the fragrance of damp cedar, bamboo and linen will become evident, it is a fragrance so infused into our minds that we would sense it even if it were not there. Once preparations are complete, tea is made and served as the earth takes another aimless spin around its axis.