A few months back I got around to reading On Quality, the notes of Robert M. Pirsig—author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—edited by his wife Wendy K. Pirsig and published after his death. Both books attempt to articulate Pirsig’s theory of Quality, or “the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.”
I’d do a terrible job of trying to explain it, but I’m not totally sure it’s worth explaining in great detail anyway. You could tie yourself up in knots considering the stuff in On Quality, but I think that most of us intuitively get what he’s talking about (which is sort of the point)—broadly: you perceive quality before rational thought.
A few weeks back I was watching a conversation between Jony Ive—who needs no introduction—and Patrick Collison—who likely doesn’t either, and joked that Jony doesn’t even need a last name. At one point, Jony said something that summed up what I took from Pirsig’s writing, and that I think would likely resonate with more of us:
I really do believe—and I wish that I had empirical evidence—that we have this ability to sense care. You sense carelessness, you know carelessness, and so I think it’s reasonable to believe that you also know care and you sense care.
To me, this is both unambiguous and true. It might not be your truth, but I suspect that it is. I suspect that you enjoy golden hour as much as the next person. I’d bet that the sound of the ocean brings you some peace. I’d wager that you don’t need to rationalize it before you feel those feelings.
Let’s say for a moment that all of that doesn’t resonate, though. In that case, I’d still suspect that the opposite is true. That—as Jony is suggesting—you can sense carelessness immediately, and are repelled by it immediately. I’d bet that even if you do rationalize and articulate it after the fact, that the perception and the feeling existed regardless.
It’s why I’ve struggled—increasingly—with the idea that all beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I don’t know if I ever did—I simply repeated it ad nauseam because that’s what people do. I think that some things are just more beautiful than others. That we can sense beauty as we sense care. That they are the same thing.
That’s the main idea for me, actually—that our sense of care comes from experiencing quality and beauty, and that the care it encourages creates more beauty in the world. A goofy example, but if you wipe the water droplets from around the airplane bathroom sink, I suspect that the next person is more likely to do the same (and vice versa).
There is beauty and quality in nature, of course, which is why I think it’s so important to get out there and experience it. If experiencing that quality makes you act with more care, we get to transfer that beauty into the things that we make ourselves. We get to make the world more beautiful and act as a catalyst for more care, and so it goes.
I believe that we have this ability to sense care. I believe that we have the ability to express care. I hope that reading this makes you take even more notice, and to bring it back into your life, home and work.