This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Swimming. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.” — Ajahn Chah
Everything is preparation. Over the years this has become an article of faith to me, and not just in the usual sense that preparation makes all the difference. It also means everything that happens is preparation for something else.
Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 4 a.m. Pacific Time and drive from Echo Park (site of three places I used to call home) to Santa Monica and north and then west to Malibu. It will be dark, but at the parking lots for Zuma Beach a line of taillights will form and people will buzz through the areas where they are to transition from swimming to biking and then to running. Someone will issue remarks through a bullhorn. A horde will gather on the sand in color-coded swim caps, sorted by age and sex. At 7 a.m. the first wave will storm the water and swim over and under one another, feet in faces and elbows in eyes, out to giant colorful buoys that mark the blocky figure of the milelong route north and back to shore. They’ll rush up the beach and shed their layers of foam and hop on their skinny bikes and latch their helmets and be up and away, twelvish miles up the Pacific Coast Highway through, if the weather is any good, the very dream of California, Vaseline on the lens over scene paintings of water and gold. The cyclists will turn around and go back the way they came, discard their bikes and slip on their running shoes, and complete what is both the most labored and least inspiring part of the route, a bureaucratic double loop through an inland parking lot, before being shot back toward the seaside finish line, where their last act of preparation will be to wipe the fatigue off their faces and unrumple their running shorts and smile for the camera, arms up.
And that will be that. The preparation will have succeeded or not, and the arc of it will end.
But everything is preparation. And for those of us who’ve found something to love in this event, its completion will be just a step on the way to the next one, which we’ll approach with the serenity and the economized attention of the already familiar.
When I did the triathlon last year it was my first one, and I was not prepared. In my efforts at preparation I’d swam the race distance dozens of times in a basement pool at the gym. I’d run 6.2 miles often enough to know my legs wouldn’t buckle. But I wasn’t prepared for the numbing ferocious drive of race-day adrenaline, and I wasn’t ready for the ecstasy of the color of the Pacific at that time and depth and in that light, and I wasn’t expecting the way that the symphony I listened to when my body was just barely holding it together in the second half of the run would fill out the air under my arms as if they were wings and vault me forward.
Tara Brach, the only slightly woo-woo psychologist and spiritual teacher, describes equanimity as the state of having “a heart that is ready for anything.” (Her talk I commend to you in its entirety, here on Apple Podcasts). This was the lesson of last year’s race: Yes, you have to do the physical work to prepare yourself for a physical challenge. But it’s meaningless without the conditioning of the psyche, whose task is to be ready not for one specific thing but for all things, and to be ready not because it has practiced but because it has opened a door and sustained the discipline not to shut it. We cannot and should not be prepared only for the things we can anticipate: They vanish next to all the things we can’t. Everything is preparation for everything.
Coming Tuesday: Dreams.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.