Of the many figures of speech you could apply to yourself, I think one that applies to me is "Jack of all trades, master of none." I have gained a certain competence in many things, but in none have I obtained mastery.
To obtain mastery requires singleness of purpose and total focus, often to the exclusion of everything else. Ancient Christian writer Paul said, "One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal ..."
While I have often admired those with mastery, I have sometimes felt sorry that the "master" knows nothing of anything else.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about "the Hedgehog and the Fox." It was a playful piece based on a piece of ancient Greek wisdom, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin characterized philosophers historically as either foxes or hedgehogs, those who saw everything under one big idea, and those who gathered "truth" from many sources.
If we can extend the playful metaphor beyond philosophy to the whole of life, I suppose I have been a bit of a fox. I've dabbled in a bunch of things, gained a certain competence, but never mastery. I have never become a master of anything.
I allowed my musings to wander. If I have never been a master of any particular skill or craft, what about life itself? Is there such a thing as the mastery of life? Whether one has mastery of playing a musical instrument, or mastery at carpentry, or at baseball, or is like me a "Jack of all trades," could one still be a master of life?
My pondering led me, as it often does, to work with the ancient wisdom of the Chinese sages in the Yiging. The wonder of the Yijing is that it always seems to address my question, and from reading to reading I see different things. This is what I saw as I thought about the mastery of life:
- Reduce things to their essence.
- Aim at the higher goal.
- Simplify.
- Cooperate with the ongoing process of change.
Like much eastern and mystical wisdom, this is more suggestive than analytic. In the west we are used to asking questions and seeking answers that have something definitive about them. In the east when questions are answered the answer tends toward an imaginative suggestibility. You make of the answer what you may by holding the aphorism. Sometimes enlightenment occurs. Sometimes not.
So, the mastery of life?
Reduce things to their essence. This feels to be like Ockham's razor—when there are multiple possibilities, choose the possibility that is most obvious. Life feels at times so very complex—like a juggler with several balls in the air at any one time, with one always threatening to crash to the ground. So reduce things to their essence.
Aim at the higher goal—the telos. The immediacy of stuff at ground level obscures the goal. Look up. Look beyond. When riding a bike, if you look down at your pedals, or your front wheel you are heading for a fall. Look in the direction you want the bike to go and it will.
Simplify. Over the last several months Jane and I have been clearing out our basement. Over the last year we had cleared out the "upper" house. But, my goodness!, what a lot of stuff in the basement. We have been simplifying. What a weight it lifts off you when you jettison, reduce, de-clutter, and simplify things.
Cooperate with the ongoing process of change. The Yijing is in English the Classic of Change. It's not surprising that the wisdom of the Sage returns us often to the reality of constant change and how to work with it. But, to "work with it" is a western view. In the Yiging you flow with change rather than work it! Perhaps, that is part of the problem with life. We like to manipulate, fix, improve on. We love the artificial. The mastery of life is more like watching which way the stream of life is moving and flowing with it—cooperating with life rather than working against it.
That is a mastery I would like to find.
The earliest versions of the "Jack of all trades" figure of speech are quite positive in tone. There is a a second line to make it a rhyming couplet:
"Jack of all trades, master of none,I'm not a master of anything, but I feel okay about that!
Certainly better than master of one!"
+Ab. Andy