The Untuned Self

The car was in neutral because that is how I park it, and the brake was off because I forgot, and I forgot because my hands were full of food I never asked for.

I had been fasting that week. I attended a dinner where I did not eat. At the end of the meal, a friend insisted that I take a party tray home to my parents. They were very persistent. It would have been more difficult to refuse than to accept. I was standing in the driveway holding the tray with both hands. Behind me, the parked car began to roll.

It rolled the length of the driveway and put its corner into the side of my parents' van.

I yelled. The yell was real. The neighbor across the street can vouch for it, and from her porch she saw everything the situation appeared to contain: a man, a dented van, a ruined evening. But inside the yelling man something else was going on, and it had no witnesses. Inside, I was laughing like a kid.

I looked at the view instead of the damage. In the second the bumper met the van I saw the whole chain of events at once: the fast, the dinner, my friend's insistence, the tray in my hands, and the brake I skipped. Behind this evening was an earlier evening, when the same car in neutral had rolled six feet into a curb and cost me nothing. I had made nothing of it. I declined the free lesson and now the bill was arriving. It was the funniest thing I had seen in months, and there was no way to say so, because the man in the driveway was still yelling, the neighbor was still watching, and only one of us could be heard.

My phone fell frequently that summer. I do not use a case, and one pair of my shorts has pockets that are too shallow to hold the device securely. It first slid out and hit the pavement while I was exiting my car. The phone was not damaged. I ignored the incident, which was a recurring pattern for me. A few weeks later, it fell again and landed on its edge. The glass cracked across the entire screen because that part of the phone has no flexibility. I stood there and thought that the second fall was the warning sign. However, that was incorrect. The first fall was the warning, and the second fall was the consequence of ignoring it.

Here is what I did about it, and notice how little it resembles insight.

The obvious repair was resolving to be more careful. I had resolved exactly that after the curb, and the resolution kept the shelf life resolutions keep. What I did instead was demote myself. Parking now runs a fixed sequence, no exceptions and no votes: first gear, so the transmission holds the car even brakeless; then the brake anyway. The phone has its own rule: shallow pockets, and it rides in the dashboard tray. I did not become a better man. I wrote a procedure for a worse one, because the worse one is who shows up to park.

In October of 1935, the Army Air Corps assembled at Wright Field in Ohio to watch the future of the bomber fly. Boeing's Model 299, the prototype a newspaperman had already christened the Flying Fortress, had outflown every rival in the trials. It took off, climbed, stalled, and fell back onto the field in flames. The crew had never released the elevator lock, the clamp that holds the control surfaces rigid on the ground. In the left seat was Major Ployer Hill, the Army's chief of flight testing. He was the most experienced test pilot the service had. When the inquiry ended, nobody proposed more training, because there was no such thing as better trained than the man who forgot. A newspaper concluded the plane was simply too much airplane for one man to fly.

The test pilots who still believed in the machine produced, instead of a better man, an index card. The critical items, in order, read aloud and confirmed, every takeoff, forever. The same airplane then flew one point eight million miles without an accident, and no cockpit since has been without the card's descendants.

The card does not contain the knowledge. The pilot in the left seat already possessed the complete knowledge required for the task. Hill understood that lock as well as he understood the entrance to his own home. The card does not provide new information. It functions as a message. It was written by men in a quiet office who were thinking about the recent crash. They addressed it to a specific type of person they would never actually meet. This person is a competent professional working in the middle of the afternoon. He is currently following a different checklist while managing many moving parts. The authors knew he would be careful. They also knew he would be busy, which presents a greater risk.

In 1907, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein had an idea that he later described as the happiest thought of his life. He realized that a person falling from a roof does not feel their own weight. This concept occurred to him suddenly and completely. He believed that this specific feeling contained the fundamental basis of general relativity. Einstein then spent eight years developing the mathematical framework required to communicate this idea to others. He needed that time to translate a momentary realization into a formal system that other scientists could follow to reach the same conclusion.

Ask what the eight years were for and you learn what proof is. He did not need it for himself. He had the thing itself; he could have kept it privately, the way you can know a street is dangerous or a marriage is over long before you can defend either claim at dinner; the proof was postage. It was the cost of shipping what he knew across the gap between his state and everyone else's. Knowing does not travel. Only its translations do, and translation is charged by the distance.

And the postal system has a known flaw. In 1978 the psychologist Ellen Langer had researchers cut into copy-machine queues: a bare excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the machine? got waved through by six people in ten, and adding because I'm in a rush cleared better than nine in ten. Adding because I have to make copies also cleared better than nine in ten, even though everyone at the machine had copies to make. The envelope was inspected, but the letter was never opened. A reason can persuade even when it transmits no new information.

For a long stretch of the evening I am describing, I thought all this was about other people. Why Einstein owed the world eight years. Why the wise counselor cannot simply hand you the answer. Why the master craftsman, asked how he knows, shrugs and leaves behind a checklist. You know something true, the way you know your mother's voice on a bad line, and between you and everyone who needs it stands the whole expensive apparatus of reasons.

Then the car rolled, and the apparatus turned around and faced me.

Because who was first gear, then the brake addressed to? The man who saw the entire chain in one second and laughed was real; he understood the curriculum completely; he was not angry. He told his parents the story that night while he was still smiling; that man was gone by Tuesday. The man who parks the car is somebody else; he is an untuned man. The state in which you know a thing is not durable. It cannot be summoned at the hour of use. It does not come down to the driveway with you.

Everyone has written the two-in-the-morning page: the one where your life feels legible, showing what matters, what was noise, the thing you must stop, and the call you must finally make. Everyone has met that page again over breakfast. The handwriting is yours, but the perspective has changed. You read it like mail from someone who loves you and overestimates you. The one who wrote it was focused, while the one holding the coffee is not. Every vow, practice, list on a refrigerator, and journal that embarrasses its own author a week later is correspondence between these two versions of yourself. These are letters to the untuned self.

Once you see it, the world is full of this mail; the sticky note on the monitor. The rule about not sending the email the same night. The sober friend's number written, at the sponsor's insistence, on an actual card in an actual wallet because the man who will need it is the man who will not remember he has it. Every one of them was written by someone who knew, for someone who won't. Both of them answer to your name.

Paramahansa Yogananda told a story about how long this correspondence can run. A man who loved God, but had a few wants left, is met at his death by an angel offering the next life on request. He has been weak and sickly all his years, so he asks for a strong body, and receives it, and is born poor, and starves inside his fine strong frame. He asks next for health and wealth, receives both, and grieves in the middle of his plenty, having no one to share it with. He asks for love, receives a good wife, leaves her for a beautiful young secretary, and the secretary takes the money and a younger man. Life after life, the angel grants cleanly. There is no trickster in the story, no fine print, and no monkey's paw. The catch is not in the granting. Each life solves the previous lack and uncovers the next one, and the learning never carries because a lifetime is a state, and death clears it. He is the breakfast man reading the midnight page at the scale of lifetimes.

The story ends when he writes a letter that reaches its destination. He dies again and receives the offer of another wish. He refuses to continue the cycle. He understands that every wish brings a new problem despite his physical condition or social rank. He stops requesting specific results. He asks only for the Giver. The structural logic of this choice is clear. He has tried many options and now requests the only one that stays the same in every situation. This is his final letter because he does not need to revise it.

The fifteenth chapter of the Tao Te Ching describes the old masters of the Way in similes: cautious as someone wading a winter river, alert as someone afraid of the neighbors. This vigilance sounds exhausting. Then the same chapter asks whether you can hold still while the mud settles and the water clears, and whether you can wait until right action arises by itself.

That is the other technology, and it is the older one. Not: write to the untuned self. But: have less of one. Sit daily, walk daily, keep the silence daily, and the distance between the midnight man and the breakfast man begins, slowly, to close, until what once required a vow shows up on its own, the way the water clears without being instructed to. Every tradition that prized the arising also prescribed the daily hour that maintains it. They knew the state was perishable. The practice was never decoration; it was the maintenance bill on tuning.

But nobody stays alert at every hour. The most watchful pilot the Army had still needed the card, and the monk who has sat for forty years still keeps the bell. Alertness has holes in it. I have stopped believing the card and the water were rivals; the water is for fewer holes; the card is for the holes. A serious life runs both: tune daily, and write to the one who will wake untuned. Write it short, write it kind, and leave it where he cannot miss it.

First gear. Then the brake.

The old accounts describe what happens when two Zen masters meet: almost nothing. A bow. A cup set down, and both of them satisfied that everything necessary has been said. This is the same arithmetic as Einstein's eight years, run in the other direction. Translation is charged by the distance, and here the distance is gone. The letter shrinks as the states approach, until, between the fully tuned, it weighs nothing at all.

Most of us live at the far end of that scale, posting long letters across wide gaps: to the board, to the spouse, to the friend who will not hear it, and every night, whether we notice or not, to the stranger with our handwriting who will wake in our bed. The wish-man's discovery, at the end of all his lifetimes, was that one of his correspondents had never actually been at a distance.

I park in first gear and then apply the parking brake. I follow this routine because I could not maintain the realizations I had previously. On some evenings, I think about the two versions of the man in the driveway. The version of him that shouted was loud enough for the neighbor to hear from her porch. Her understanding of that night is based on that noise and is incorrect. The version of him that laughed was silent and could not be shared or preserved. He was gone by Tuesday, and I have been handling his affairs since then. The first occurrence showed the situation. The second occurrence was the cost of learning. I use the card to ensure it does not happen a third time.

And the laugh is what it sounds like when, for one second, there is no distance to cross.

From the Road

I wrote this while the repair estimate sat in a drawer. This reminds me of the cost of my insights and how quickly they fade. You might have a page written at two in the morning that you no longer believe at breakfast. One version of you possessed knowledge and another version is reading this now. Mail is piling up between these two versions of yourself. I wrote this for both of those people. You should send this to the friend whose midnight self you have met and miss. They will know which of their own letters they need to reread.

— The Pilgrim Age