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We want to keep unpleasant things as far away as we can.
That’s probably true of everyone, I think.
If it’s hot, we turn on the air conditioner.
Tedious paperwork, we have someone handle for us.
Things that are hard to say, we settle with a message.
None of it is wrong.
In an age this convenient, there’s no reason to go out of your way to choose inconvenience.
But sometimes, a thought comes to me.
When was the last time I did something with my own hands?
Culture and civilization
The rakugo storyteller Danshi Tatekawa spoke of culture and civilization something like this.
Resolving discomfort and inconvenience with your own hands is “culture.”
Resolving them by relying on machines, money or other people is “civilization.”
Civilization isn’t a bad thing.
Air conditioners, washing machines, trains — all blessings of civilization.
Without them, life as we live it today wouldn’t hold together.
But the further civilization advances, the fewer moments there are when we solve something with our own hands.
When something is unpleasant, we avoid it.
When something is tedious, we hand it off.
When something isn’t working, we quit.
And that becomes normal.
On the other side of the screen
Open social media, and all kinds of words come streaming past.
On the other side of a screen, feelings are easy to let out.
There are more and more places where you don’t have to carry unpleasant things yourself.
That is a convenience, too.
But the time we spend facing things with our own hands may be shrinking, little by little.
At the table, no one can take your place
Step into a pool hall, and the air changes.
I stand at the table.
The balls are scattered.
What do you do from here?
There’s no one to shoot for you.
You can’t ask an app for the answer.
You can’t blame anyone else.
You think for yourself, decide for yourself, shoot for yourself.
If it misses, it’s your shot.
If it goes in, it’s your shot.
There’s something strangely comforting in that: nothing to hide behind.
Facing the ball that missed
In pool, things go wrong more often than they go as planned.
The ball you aimed at misses.
The cue ball rolls off somewhere you never meant.
The plan you’d been drawing a moment ago falls apart with a single shot.
It’s unpleasant.
But there’s nowhere to run.
All you can do is keep standing at the table.
All you can do is play the next shot with your own hands.
That “all you can do” may actually be something very important.
Facing discomfort with your own hands.
Finding the next answer with your own hands.
Suppose that is what Master Danshi meant by “culture.”
Then pool is culture on the table.
Little by little, you start doing it yourself
At first, a single miss was enough to make me want to give up.
But you set the missed ball up again, and shoot again.
No one is going to do it for you.
Little by little, “doing it yourself” becomes second nature.
At the table, that is what you repeat, again and again.
Think, shoot, miss, think again.
In that repetition, I feel the strength to face unpleasant things slowly growing.
Away from the table, too
Keep repeating “I have to do it myself” at the table, and something slowly starts to change.
That moment of hesitation before facing something tedious at work gets a little shorter.
You find yourself willing to say hard things in your own words, not through a screen.
When things go wrong, before blaming someone else, you look back at your own shot.
It isn’t a dramatic change.
But the experience of facing something with your own hands stays somewhere in the body.
Taking culture into your own hands
At the table, no one can take your place.
So you think it through with your own hands, and shoot with your own hands.
Perhaps pool is a sport that reminds us of that kind of culture.
In an age this convenient, that time is a small luxury.
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