12. Discipline

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Woo woo. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

— Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

The good times can’t go on forever. But neither can the indifferent ones, the unremarkable times, even if they might seem in better supply. To realize this—and to accept what it will require to achieve an aim in the time obtainable—I think that’s discipline. One of my favorite yoga teacher sayings is attributed to the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello: “Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” Discipline is what we do with the little margin of choice from which we carve our cooperation.

Cycling class this week was taught by a substitute. I used to take her classes now and then when she was on the regular schedule, and I like her: She’s an ex-triathlete who these days mainly lives in Spain (on a plain? I’m just asking the question), and she wears her not giving a fuck in an elegant sun-faded way. But as we rode she declared that athletes have the ability to make believe there are real stakes when they are only practicing. What she was describing was a trick, and I suppose this could count as a form of discipline. But when I looked back on it later, I thought—why would the stakes ever not be real? A competition happens once, a single time. The practice for it, the lead-up, is the substance of a life.

Only practicing.

I feel this way about writing my novel sometimes, too. When this first one is done (in six decades or so) it will be forever behind me—the finish line crossed in what I consider so far to be my defining race. Its only living effect, its bequest to me, may be the permanent daily act of writing. (Also hopefully a giant check from HBO and a music residency on the moon. But cart, horse, etc.)

To act in discipline is to approach something with love even when love is not what you concurrently feel. Sometimes the line between love and not-love is so thin that only this summoning of a lovelike thing can effect the crossover. But the reason it can be summoned at all is because of what discipline really is, in its core: It’s the thing that drives you more than all the other things that drive you—even, as an old friend pointed out to me the other night, if those things are more admirable or more valiant or more what you wish you were driven by. Discipline is just the truth. So discipline in pursuit of other things is something else—it’s not discipline—and as ubiquitous as that thing is I’m not sure we have a name for it. If we do, it starts with sub-. Or de-.

Discipline is listening. About a year and a half ago I took up a more time-consuming meditation technique, but whereas the method I used before always felt like a chore, this one feels like a refuge, or a pardon—like the end of the hike, when you can sit by the lake and watch the stars come out. I think of it as a meeting with my own essence—like the old couple in the rocking chairs on the porch, not a word between them, everything known. “To be understood, you must listen,” I once heard a holy man say.

Coming Tuesday: Recovery.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.