The question of where you want to be and what you want to do

"You cannot remain unmoved by the gentleness and conformation of a well-bred and well-trained horse—more than a thousand pounds of big-boned, well-muscled animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever a menace with its innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight, and always a burden with its need to be fed, wormed and shod, and its liability to cuts and infections, to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles your chest, and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered."

— Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide

Borgmann draws a distinction between devices and focal things.

On one end, a device delivers a commodity without engagement—a furnace gives you warmth without the wood, the fire, the gathering around the hearth.

On the other end of the spectrum is the horse, which is all friction: feeding, worming, shoeing, the constant liability of cuts and laming, and heaves. It refuses to be frictionless. And precisely because of that, it can answer the question of where you want to be.

The burden is the gift. You can’t have the liquid eye without the maintenance.

Which raises the real question around maintenance: do the things we care for love us back?

Paradoxically, the more maintenance something asks of us, the more it tends to reflect something back—which is why we keep showing up to maintain it.

Care creates the relationship. The maintenance isn’t the cost of the love; it’s the substrate of it. A furnace can’t love you back. But the problem isn’t the furnace. It’s that nothing was asked of you. You bought a house with one installed, and you call a specialist when it isn’t working. If anything, it is debt in the background that compounds until someday you will have to pay for it. In this approach, we forget to notice the world around us—especially the systems that are working. You weren’t given the chance to care. The frictionlessness is what forecloses the relationship.

There’s a recursive component here, too. Maintenance shows you care, which deepens that care and makes you more willing to maintain. The relationship compounds.

This is the case with children—the maintenance is total, the responsiveness is total, the compounding effect goes on for decades. Nobody confuses a child with a device.

But the cut isn’t between what is alive and what is not. A garden responds. A practice responds. My writing at year ten isn’t my writing at year one, and the difference is the practice itself nickering back. Meditation responds even though nothing is visible.

Focal things metabolize care. Devices don’t. The horse metabolizes it into a nicker, the garden into tomatoes, the practice into whatever the practice becomes. What we call “love back” is the felt sense of your care having been metabolized—coming back changed, having been somewhere.

Which means the practice of giving something back isn’t a metaphor. It’s the same mechanism—the focal thing is just something you’re growing inside yourself instead of in a stall.