Stoic Meditation #10 - The Grand Canyon, Shu Ha Ri, Patience, and Action
"Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again." - Anais Nin
Q and I recently had the great good fortune to spend some time at the Grand Canyon. The sense of awe and appreciation I felt on my first visit 25 years ago had only deepened during the intervening years. The sheer scale of time laid out before my eyes left me speechless and reflective.
I learned on this visit that the geological events that made the Grand Canyon possible occurred long before the mighty Colorado River began wearing away the rock - at the rate of the thickness of a sheet of paper each year. And by long, I mean 2 billion years. The actual excavation by the Colorado River began about six million years ago.1 Invisible preparation: 99.7%. Visible action: 0.3%. Nature, it seems, has only just begun it's masterpiece in the American Southwest.
Walking along the edge of The Canyon, I could see the effects of Nature's unrelenting, yet patient process. As I reflected on many of the more enduring achievements of human kind, I could see similarities, albeit on a much, much smaller scale. The grand man-made cathedrals and monuments of the world often took decades or centuries to create. On a human scale, also driven by an unrelenting, yet patient process.
I thought, too, of traditional martial arts training. And by "traditional" I'm referring to Japanese and Chinese martial arts training as practiced several hundred years ago. Unlike today, where the progression of skill is obsessively measured exclusively by where a student may be on a rainbow spectrum of belt colors, traditional martial arts training included equal emphasis on the martial and art aspects. A student's training often included fine arts such as music, dance, singing, calligraphy, flower arrangement (Kado), and tea (Sado.)
Warriors were taught to wield a brush as adeptly as a sword. The motions to defeat a foe with a sword are the same used to create a magnificent painting or calligraphy. In a few strokes a foe might be defeated or a timeless calligraphic masterpiece created. To obtain mastery with either required a great deal of preparation and meditation - 99.99% preparation, 0.01% action. Same skill, different intention.
The truly great things in life are found by removing the unnecessary to reveal the beauty hidden within.
Like Nature's preparation before completing bold strokes of art involving eons of preparation, the samurai and martial artists of old dedicated themselves to unrelenting preparation. The difference between life or death, masterpiece or trash might be as thin as the thickness of a piece of paper.
Walking the Rim Trail reminded me of the progression along Shu Ha Ri - a process that cannot be rushed. Nor can it be completed with sporadic effort, hesitation, or procrastination. Progress is both fueled and clarified by hard work, discipline, and dedication. Along the way, wisdom is revealed as the cruft and veneer of illusion is washed away by the sweat of effort.
I could also see Nature's process reflected in my own history. Youth was rough, clumsy, and blunt. I moved with the grace and ease of plate tectonics as I labored to acquire knowledge and experience about the world. Beliefs and perceived certainties would clash with equal or greater forces and be transformed or destroyed. After many years, I've settled into the wisdom of a few Truths that rise above the rearranging of rubble that occupies so much of human effort these days.
The Canyon doesn't affect everyone in the way it affected me. I read years ago that the average length of time visitors spend actually looking into the canyon is three minutes. I couldn't find any reference for that number, so it's probably mis-remembered or a myth. A 1996 Chicago Tribune article claimed the average time as 17 minutes, again without corroborating references. I can say, from my observations, the time is short and most of that time is spent looking at the canyon through the lens of a camera...often in reverse as multiple selfies are snapped.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from this visit has been to remind me of a few of the Truths I’ve discovered at great cost.
Minimize the noise to reveal the signal.
Patience and action are equal partners in creative expression.
The truly great things in life are found by removing the unnecessary to reveal the beauty hidden within.
Footnotes
1 The Parks Service has a "Trail of Time" trail that follows the Rim Trail and does a great job of putting this in perspective. The trail is more than a mile long and along the way are markers in the trail counting back from 2 billion years in 10 billion year increments. Six million years is represented in the final twenty feet of the "Trail of Time." Our time on the planet is measured in inches.
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Photo: Gregory Engel