The finger and the moon

The Buddha told a story about a man who pointed at the moon and said to a companion: look, the moon.

The companion looked at the finger.

The Buddha's point: the teaching is a finger. It's useful. It is not the moon. If you take the finger for the moon, you've lost both.

Everyone laughs at the fictional companion. Meanwhile there are people with 40,000 hours of journals who cannot tell you what they want, and people who have done every personality instrument twice and still can't name the situation that makes them lose it.

The instrument was never the point. It was the pointing.

I notice this most around frameworks. A client will use the language of a system with great fluency, and I'll ask what happened on Thursday, and the language disappears, because Thursday is not in the framework.

The test is always the concrete. Your method should be able to survive a specific afternoon: what did you do, what did you feel, what did you avoid, what would you do differently. If the vocabulary is beautiful and the afternoon is unavailable, the finger has eaten the moon.

Try it this week. Pick one thing from your favourite model and translate it into one sentence about a real day.

MOJOWAY records the day, then the pattern, in that order. The pattern is the moon, and the file keeps you honest about which one you're staring at.