The Ends Are The Means To The Ends
Years ago, the philosopher Talbot Brewer was taking a yoga class in which the teacher noticed that many of the students were getting hung up on getting each pose exactly right. At one point, sensing how frustrated this fixation on perfecting the poses was making them, she said to the class, “Remember, the ends are the means to the ends.” The poses, in other words, aren’t really the point of doing yoga. Mastering the one-legged king pigeon or the revolved half moon is not ultimately what you’re there to achieve. You’re there to move your body, to break a sweat, to become more flexible, to get stronger, to quiet your mind, to relieve back pain, or perhaps just to spend an hour off your devices. “That’s what yoga is really about,” Brewer said. “Those are the real ends of the activity. Those are things you are really trying to achieve, not perfect imitations of this or that pose.”
Ends as the means to the real ends—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Goal And The Purpose
In his books Games and The Score, C. Thi Nguyen talks about the difference between the goal and the purpose of things. Nguyen is a recreational rock climber—the goal of rock climbing is to reach the top of a wall or cliff. “Galactically,” Nguyen says, “it doesn’t actually matter to me how many times I get to the top of the cliff.” That goal is a means to what is, for him, the purpose of climbing: “having a concentrated, pure, intense experience.” The tricky part is that the two are tightly connected: to get what he really cares about (the purpose), he has to temporarily care deeply about something he doesn’t ultimately care about (the goal). And because they are so tightly connected, it can be easy to forget which is which. Something Nguyen sees happen all the time with other climbers is they similarly get into climbing for the concentrated, pure, intense experience. But climbing also has a remarkably clear scoring system: routes are graded by difficulty. So over time, many of these climbers become increasingly preoccupied with those grades—with what level they can climb, when they will move up to the next one, how many climbs of a certain difficulty they can complete in a session. And the more those grades come to matter, the less they seem to enjoy the climbing itself. Nguyen suspects just about everyone has experienced some version of this: “at one point, you did an activity to have fun or to experience some mental or meditative state, and the outcome or the goal was just this little thing you used to get yourself into the mental state. But then you started pursuing the goal so hard that it drained what was good out of the activity.”
A Polarity of Reaction
While working on a profile of George Hartzog in the early 1970s, John McPhee joined Hartzog and Hartzog’s friend Tony Buford on a fishing trip down the Buffalo River in Arkansas. Then the director of the National Park Service, Hartzog was in the middle of an effort to make the Buffalo the country’s first National River. Ten days before McPhee joined Hartzog and Buford on the river, there was a major flood raising the Buffalo twenty-eight feet above its normal level. It had dropped some, but the water was still muddy and littered with debris. And so the fish weren’t biting, which brought out what McPhee called “a polarity of reaction” between the two friends. Buford kept reaching into the three-tiered tackle box spread open in front of him, trying different lures. He kept trying different spots, repeatedly telling the boatman to move on in search of better water. At one point he pointed toward a cliff and said, “Maybe that’s where they’re all hiding.” Hartzog, meanwhile, seemed perfectly happy to keep casting and reeling in an empty line. Every so often, he would point out something along the riverbank, say a few words about whatever had caught his attention, then fall silent again and flick his line back out. Most of all, for a man who spent most of his days in one intense meeting after the next, Hartzog was out there “drinking in the silence.” Eventually, Bufford had had enough. “God damn it, George,” he said to Hartzog, “this river is a mess. There is no point fishing this God-damned river, George. The fishing is no good…I think we ought to pull our lines in, turn up the engines, and go for the White River. We could be near there by sundown, make camp, and be ready to fish the White in the morning.” Hartzog looked at Buford for a few long moments, with a look of pity on his face, saddened to think that his friend could only enjoy fishing if he were catching fish. “Tony,” Hartzog finally said, “fishing is always good.”
A Useful Tool
In the early 1970s, Suzanne Ciani set out with dreams of becoming a touring musician. She quickly ran into a problem. Her instrument—the Buchla, a modular synthesizer invented in the late 1960s—is a so-called “quadraphonic” instrument: to perform it live, you need a speaker in each of the four corners of the listening space. Music venues weren’t equipped for quadraphonic sound, and venue managers weren’t willing to rig up additional speakers for a single show. Before a scheduled concert at the Lincoln Center, for instance, Ciani arrived to find there were no speakers in the back corners of the theater. When she pointed it out, the people in charge looked at her like she was crazy and refused to put up two speakers. “And that was that,” Ciani said. “I never did the concert.” And so, Ciani put her performing ambitions on hold, redirecting her time and energy toward changing the way music venues are designed, even starting a nonprofit—The Electronic Center For New Music—to promote her cause. She was a year and a half in, getting nowhere, when she approached the team redesigning a performing arts theater in New York. After offering some of her ideas, Ciani was told, “You’re not Leonard Bernstein.” And with that comment, she realized why she’d been getting nowhere: “nobody was listening to me because I wasn’t rich and famous,” she said. “So I decided to get rich and famous.” “It was all very practical,” she explained. “I think that’s an important aspect, which is that, motivated by a vision or a cause, money and fame is a useful tool. I noticed in my career: I would make money if I thought it was useful. But I was never interested in money itself as some kind of ultimate goal.”
For The Pleasures Of Striving
In nearly every interview I read or listened to after Alex Honnold free soloed Taipei 101—climbing the exterior of the 1,667-foot skyscraper without ropes or safety gear—he was asked some version of the same question: Why do you keep taking on these big objectives? You’ve accomplished so much—what more do you have to prove? “That’s what everyone wants to know,” one interviewer said. “Why do you still take on really big objectives at this point in your career?” Such questions reveal someone with a certain basic belief: that the only reason to pursue some ambitious goal is whatever accomplishment may be at the end of it. Honnold, and people like him, see it almost exactly the other way around. “Really, I just like having something to train for,” Honnold said. “The whole point of having a big goal like Taipei 101 is to put in all the training days. So I always have some kind of objective I’m working on because I love having a reason to get up and train every day. I love all the training. I love all the practice climbs that build up to the big climb. It’s for the pleasures of striving, basically, that I take on things like Taipei 101.”
The End Of A Melody
In Human, All-Too-Human (a collection of short aphorisms and reflections, many jotted down on walks during a period when he was breaking away from many of the ideas and ideals that had previously guided his life), Friedrich Nietzsche offers “a parable” titled End and Goal: “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has also not reached its goal.”