Call our names and we'll come running

Introduction

Ever looking for music that energizes my workouts, a while ago I stumbled upon the Westend song "Running." This refrain (just this one) grabbed the coach in me - say my name and I'll come running.

Last week I remembered my "name" (i.e., my calling) when I returned to the brilliant modern day philosopher Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1974), which I first read (along with 5 million others) during a much-loved undergrad course on the philosophy of science. I then went on to read for the first time his second book "Lila" (1991), and his wife Wendy Pirsig's book "On Quality" (2022), compiled after Pirsig died in 2017.

Pirsig's contributions - his intellect and drive to define and understand reality - are incredible. Forgive me for oversimplifying the immensity of his life's tour and analysis of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual inquiry. I've quoted some of his writing at the end to tempt you to read or re-read his books - a journey you won't regret.

Our calling

What I took away at age 19 was a deep resonance with Pirsig's notion of the awesome experience of something of quality already created (e.g., art, music, writing, engineering, tech, innovation, scientific discovery, etc), and the even more awesome potential right in front of us in every moment to create something of quality.

Quality comes in unlimited forms encompassing all that is good, all that has value: the very best, even excellent, created through physics and chemistry in the universe, followed on planet Earth by biological nature, the human species, our societies, and our intellects. Pirsig argued, with a command of philosophical history and logic yet unchallenged, that quality is something beautiful in form and/or function, emerging from a "preintellectual awareness" of value that then directs action - including evolution. Quality is neither randomly generated nor self-oriented.

Quality can be as simple as making or enjoying a good meal, an engaging conversation, tending a garden, or cuddling a child, or it can be a deep understanding of the elements of a life well-lived, the elegant structure of DNA emerging from evolution, or the mind-blowing principles of quantum mechanics that human intellect has begun to fathom and harness. Step by step, the awareness of emerging Quality leads us through our challenges to opportunities and new growth.

Winds of potential good

Pirsig remarked that people are like trains, pulling with us all of our life's train cars filled with our past knowledge and experience, including traumas and triumphs. From life's front car or locomotive/engine, we typically look back at our train cars living life by watching the past recede into the distance. The future then sneaks up on us from behind, often by surprise.

The "Quality" approach, explains Pirsig, is to face forward toward the future in one's front car, and feel the winds of potential good (my words not Pirsig's). Then we can move toward realizing the potential, whatever it's source, to create new quality in the world that builds on or evolves what was quality before.

what do you think is the source - are these winds of potential good - positive psychology? spirituality? consciousness? quantum energy?

This way of living feels akin to the Buddhism concept of bliss, which I think of as directly experiencing the winds of potential good, detached from the past (or sense of self). The state of bliss can be accessed through a long, hard path toward enlightenment (Pirsig's path of all-consuming philosophical inquiry led to a hard submission to a psychiatric hospital), or a short path with psychedelics, a peak religious experience, or just having a good day or a good mindfulness practice where we experience or generate quality.

Coaching the winds of potential

What I didn't understand at 19 (and through my first career in biotech), and discovered early as a coach 20+ years later, is that the peak moments in coaching (and life) are when we hold the space of potential good so others can feel the winds of potential and go after something good in that moment and later.

Just as exciting are the moments as leaders (and we are all leaders of at least ourselves) when we free our own life's locomotive from the past's train cars and look forward, trusting that the winds of potential good are calling our names so we can come running.

Coach Meg

www.coachmeg.com www.wellcoaches.com www.instituteofcoaching.org www.nbhwc.org

About the Author, quoted from On Quality:

ROBERT M. PIRSIG (1928–2017) is the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which has sold more than five million copies since its publication in 1974, and Lila, a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He graduated from the University of Minnesota (BA, 1950; MA, 1958) and also attended Banaras Hindu University in India, where he studied Eastern philosophy, and the University of Chicago, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy. Pirsig’s papers have been acquired by Harvard University and his motorcycle resides in the Smithsonian Institution. Other Pirsig papers and tools are in the Montana State University archives and Museum of the Rockies, respectively.

Further Quotes: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Part III Chapters 23-24

“The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus [Pirzig before mental breakdown] felt he had properly identified as Quality.”

---

“Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.”

---

“Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It’s the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don’t have pure reason—you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.”

---

“If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.”

---

“a real understanding of what technology is—not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one’s own life, in a less dramatic way.”

---

“In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what “looks good” and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that “good” are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined.

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored.

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse.”

---

“At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts—thin art—because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.”

---

“So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.”

---

“I like it (the word gumption) because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits?

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.”

---

On gumption traps (of which there are many):

“...the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isn’t entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that you’ve just goofed, you’re not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you’re likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You’re always being fooled, you’re always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think you’ll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if they’re not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical. But not egoistic. There’s no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn’t know what you’re doing."