How Good Work Gets Done

We seem to have to learn about the illusions of speed individual by individual, generation after generation. Yet speed by itself has never been associated with good work by those who have achieved mastery in any given field. Speed does not come from speed. Speed is a result, an outcome, an ecology of combining factors in a person's approach to work; deep attention, well laid and sharpened tools, care, patience, the imagination engaged to bring disparate parts together in one whole.

Here is Michael Finkel of The Atlantic Monthly, describing Steven Allen, Britain's champion dry stone waller, in the midst of a wall-building competition on the Yorkshire moors, looking at the elements which combine to produce speed as a marvelous by-product:

I watched Allen work. He'd stand stock-still for a moment and stare at his wall with a calculating look on his face. Then he would swiftly turn around and bend down and select a stone. He'd twist it and jiggle it and flip it over and back, as if fiddling with prayer beads. Then he'd pick up his hammer, hold the stone to his thigh, and chip off pieces with a few sharp taps. One of the qualities that sets Allen apart from other wallers is his feel for the hidden seams snaking through a rock.... When Allen hit a rock, it invariably fractured along a plane as smooth as a sail.

The right touch at the right time in the right place. The right word at the right time in the right place. Effort and will used only at pivotal moments. How we long for that deftness and that mastery, the ability to tap and cleave the fault lines of our own stubborn, stonelike working difficulties. To crack the stonelike essence of our everyday work. But Allen's speed seems to arise from his ability to discern emerging patterns, even when most of the other competitors are making the mistake of putting speed first, sweating, and heaving their stones into place.

If he was setting (the stone) into a space between two others, the rock would literally click into place, wedged between its neighbors as tightly and neatly as if Allen were building with Lego bricks. He'd nod, reach down and sweep up the chips he'd broken off, and pack them into the center of the wall. Then he'd study the next gap for a second or two, spin around, and pick up another stone.

Moments of speed and urgency but dependent on a felt perception of the larger pattern. The ability to close on something and then let it go. The key seems to be to find a restful yet attentive presence in the midst of our work, to open up a spaciousness even in the center of our responsibility. To find some source of energy other than our constant applications of effort and will. If we attempt to engage the will continually, it exhausts us and prevents us from creating something with a pattern that endures. A well-built, dry stone wall such as Allen constructs, free of cement, can settle, move, adapt to temperature, and function as a good wall for hundreds of years. In the limestone area of Yorkshire, there are walls dating to the twelfth century; in Ireland, the remains of some dry stone field walls are 4,000 years old.

As Finkel remarks, "Cement walls do not reach old age. Cement walls do not move. They crack, and they fall. 'Cement,' Allen says, 'is a sin."

David Whyte
Crossing the Unknown Sea

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