I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His quest to understand Quality and his thoughts about the joy he finds in keeping his machine running have gotten me thinking about all kinds of things I do: writing, teaching, teaching writing, photography, blogging, and blog maintenance.
Mostly blog maintenance. First, I want to think about keeping it running as a piece of software on a machine as opposed to writing the content that appears on the screen.
Pirsig writes eloquently about the process of maintaining a motorcycle:
The thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind that does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.
[…]
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.
The difficulty lies in the various traps that Pirsig labels value traps, truth traps and muscle traps. Falling into these traps steers one away from Quality, the idea the book explores.
The more I read, the more I realized I actually understand most of what he writes about motorcycle maintenance, but not because I know anything about motorcycles – I don’t – still, I’ve been there and have intuitively come to similar conclusions. Doing the backend maintenance necessary to run a self-hosted blog or any website, I assume, is exactly like motorcycle maintenance.
A question I frequently ask myself, though, is why bother. There are so many blogging platforms out there where all I would have to do is write and put up my posts. Why go to the trouble to maintain the thing myself? Why deal with upgrades that don’t go as planned and potentially could screw up the database? Why mess with plugins that sometimes gum up the whole system? Why bother with themes that break?
I think the questions led me to the same issue Pirsig wrestles with. It has to do with Quality. With the relationship between the machine, the user and the process. Spending hours tinkering with the backend code and pieces of this blog are not really about the blog. It’s never even noticed by anyone reading it.
It’s about learning. It’s about growing.
Pirsig writes:
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
It all has to do with “living right.”
There is beauty and joy… life… to be discovered in doing things fully and completely. The more I approach life’s tasks with a quiet peaceful mind, the more fully, I think, I live.
Now I need to think of maintenance in the broader sense as it applies to this blog. Like Pirsig’s motorcycle, the blog is a machine with an engine that makes it go (the WordPress software), and it is a vehicle that takes me places, in this case the writing, which transports me into my head as I do it.
(I must admit I wish it would transport me physically to the Montana Rockies like Pirsig’s bike, but all good things must have their limits, I suppose.)
Maintaining (in both senses of the word, now) my blog suddenly seemed more important because I came to see that it is through this process that I can stay in tune with these lessons about right living. It is because of the hours spent working on it, that I have been able to relate so easily to what Pirsig writes.
Further, he reminds me that:
If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?
[…]
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be as sloppy as the preceding six.
And so because maintaining a blog is two things – keeping it running and writing, I’m back.
For the backend aspect of maintenance, I upgraded to 2.6.2, which is why some things are a little off while I work through the kinks.
Because maintaining the blog also means writing, I am reminded that through writing here, I ensure that my thinking is at its sharpest and that I approach closer to true Quality whenever I write and especially when I am sitting down to focus on a manuscript.
I never really thought of this silly blog as a way of thinking about life, but as I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it is because of this blog that I know and understand exactly what Pirsig is talking about in his book.
