Breaking eggs
1) Good writing again, keep it up.
2) I think a lot of physical activities become easier if you’ve played a sport a lot, and devoted enough hours to it. It generally helps all your motor skills, not just the ones you honed for your given sport. You start to think of your body as more of a tool, and begin to understand the subtleties in your motions, which you can change at a subconscious, but conscious level. Hard to explain, but if you’ve played a sport a lot you’ll know what I’m referring to…I think.
3) Wisdom has always been defined for me as the slow piece by piece accrual of tidbits of knowledge gathered from experience. But I understand that a lot of people think of wisdom as something you just get when you turn 75.
4) Ray, I challenge you to a cook-off. Accept if you dare.
Monday mornings are omelette mornings. My preferred omelette is the traditional French one: two or three eggs, cooked quickly in lots of butter, seasoned only with salt & pepper (sometimes fresh parsley), and delivered to plate before color is allowed to form. Over many Mondays, I have made good omelettes and I have made bad omelettes, ones with perfect colorlessness and others with too much color, ones with sloppy insides and others with sublime insides: just barely coagulated and held together improbably, as if by a combination of magic and good feelings.
That omelettes are an apt gauge of a cook’s skill is a piece of kitchen truistics that one comes, over many Mondays, to accept as sufficient proof that one is basically bereft of cooking skills. But it stands in of course for a much more general idea, that of the painfully huge amount of practice that certain abilities demand in order to be meaningfully incorporated into consciousness. Physical intelligence of the kind required to hit a golf ball or make good omelettes—how precisely to tip and wobble the pan to produce even tone and texture, how to flip the eggs in the pan without losing them—is honed and accreted over a lifetime of doing careful things with your hands and eyes. Moving along in this process and observing gradual, legible improvement is intrinsic to these activities’ pleasure.
But other kinds of intelligence, too, require lifetimes to fully dominate: how to understand other people, how to create meaning, how to be happy. That they appear grand and irreducible and not easily separated into component steps obscures the fact that there is as much a process of rote accrual involved in learning, for instance, to be a tolerant person as there is in learning to hit a tennis ball. This is sometimes called wisdom, but rarely have I seen wisdom framed in these terms, as an accumulation of small knowledge gathered through repeated exposure to simple tasks and basic feelings.
