The wheelwright's secret

Duke Huan was reading a book at the top of the hall. A wheelwright named Bian was making wheels in the yard below. He put down his hammer, climbed the steps, and asked: what are you reading?

The words of the sages, said the duke.

Are those men still alive?

They're dead.

Then you're reading their dregs, said the wheelwright.

The duke was annoyed. Explain yourself or you'll be executed.

Bian said: I look at it from my own work. When I make a wheel and my strokes are too slow, the wheel comes out slack. Too fast, and it comes out tight. Not slow, not fast, the hand gets it right and the mouth can't say why. There is a craft in it I can teach my son but cannot transmit to him, and he cannot receive it from me without the hours. So at seventy I'm still making wheels. The sages died with the thing they couldn't say. What's left on the page is the part they could put into words.

The duke let him live, which is the real ending.

I keep thinking about this because our era believes the opposite: that anything worth knowing can be documented. Most of what makes your work good cannot. It sits in your hands, and it arrived by hours you didn't count.

MOJOWAY starts from the part that can't be written down and works backwards from there. Self-awareness is often the work of finding out which parts of your skill are still only yours.