One Pulley

” An old man in Calcutta would walk to get water from a well every day. He’d carry a clay pot and lower it by hand slowly, all the way down, careful not the let it hit the sides of the well and break.

Once it was full, he’d raise the pot slowly and carefully again. It was a focused, time-consuming act.

One day, a traveler noticed the old man engaged in this difficult task. More experienced with mechanics, he showed the old man how to use a pulley system.

‘This will allow the pot to go straight down quickly,’ the traveler explained, ‘then fill with water and come back up, without hitting the sides. It’s much easier and the pot will be just as full with much less work.’

The old man looked at him and said, ‘I think I’m going to keep doing it the way I always have. I really have to think about each movement and there’s a great deal of care that goes into doing it right. I’d imagine if I were to use the pulley, it would become easy and I might even start thinking about something else while doing it. If I put so little care and time into it, what might the water taste like? It couldn’t possibly taste as good.'”

~ Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

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Last winter, someone recycled one of the wine bottles that I used to water my plants. For a while, I grumped every time I had to water, frustrated that I had to make so many more trips to the sink.

By way of orientation, it may be helpful to know that the wine-bottle disappearance happened at approximately the same time that taking care of the old bod became a near-full time job ’round these parts. I began, at that time, an all consuming effort to put myself back together again, which consisted and consists of more hours of exercises and dog and pony show theatrics in a day than I care to enumerate. Including, as one might imagine, some miles of walking appended onto each day. For walking was/is a key ingredient, and essential to every dog and pony show.

You see where we’re going, don’t you?

You likely made that little leap of logic faster than I, as I’m fairly certain it took a month of grouchy waterings before it occurred to me–like a flash of brilliant lightening straight from the heavens–that I was, indeed, begrudging all that walking to and from the sink because it was cutting into my walking time.

Mm-hmm.

*Insert best David Rose impression*

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The proud Calcutta gentleman and I live on wildly different existential planes, but some lessons are the same translated across time and space.

We so often manage our lives as if economy of time were the only consideration. We carry seven grocery bags in from the car at a time–wrecking our back and likely scattering the contents of at least one down the hallway–so that we can git’r’dun in two trips rather than six. We double fist the watering wine bottles–we would carry four if we could–to avoid the dreaded return trip to the sink. Why? Truly I don’t know.

We are efficiency experts, and we are ripe for anything that might help us to trim another second off of a tedious task, so we can get on to the next tedious task. It might not be a pulley. It might not be yet another wine bottle. But we all have our shortcuts that not only shave time but cut something beneficial or even essential out of the equation.

Of course efficiency isn’t all bad; of course it isn’t. We can’t spend a day at the well after all. We have lives to live and there are only so many hours in a day. But how often do we consider what we lose in all our gaining of time? How often do we give thought to the taste of the water and what essential nutrients our intention and attention might add?

May we slow down just one task today,
get a look at all its moving parts,
lay it bare.

May we gently assess the pile in front of us,
turning over each bit and studying it
for what it holds.

May we consider what goes into our task,
what we put in,
what we bring.

May we consider what our task produces,
what we are gifted,
what we gift.

And may we take the time to see
what might happen if we approach this one task
differently–
with more attention, more care,
more intention, more love–
just this one time.

If we remove just one pulley,
one wine bottle.

Just once.