@july

I've been thinking about archery a lot lately. I've barely done it, and I don't even intend to do archery this year in 2026. Funny story, I know… it's easy to sum up archery as practice where you have to get the arrow to hit the target, and while this is absolutely true from an external perspective viewing the process of archery happen - an archer shooting an arrow hitting the target, I think the practitioner of the art of archery themselves do not have an intention to hit the target. I think it's more an art of self-management and practice. No - it's about learning who you are in the topology of how you react to the world, how you feel things, what you think. So — this is done through the case of archery shooting the arrow over and over again. The goal is to hit the target once again, but that seems to me less the goal because in the practice itself you're learning how to learn something so inside out that you don't think about doing it anymore. That is a surprisingly difficult task when you are a true expert at something. For example, I think you are an expert at your language that you grew up with. There's a tendency to forget that language is a very complex task, social interactions on a daily basis, nodding social cues, what to say when - all these things are very complicated and the whole entire process is a learned thing that you don't do so much and forget how easy it is for you, but you do forget how hard it is for anyone who hasn't done that for years or hasn't grown up around that culture or doesn't know the language. I feel similarly about sticking with this example archery. You see someone who often does archery better than you. It's not that they're just inherently better than you, though that is the case sometimes. Some people just simply have more capacity to want to keep doing it, but really it is a matter of time. I think if you practice archery so often, you start to forget what it's like to not pull the string. There's a sort of natural motion that one learns, that is not so natural to become. Archery then becomes much more about growing another limb. People throw this concept of mastering a tool pretty liberally out there in the world today. I think one of the things that we're missing is the tool is so transient these days. It switches and changes and moves so fast. We don't have time to intimately master it and help or have it become another limb for us. I think certain tools are easier at becoming limbs for us, I think some tools sometimes are more growths that happen for us, they control us, but I think when you have something like archery and you master it, it becomes an extension of self in a way that beguiles even the most gifted practitioners. So, but after a certain moment over time, with that sort of mastery of it becoming an extension of the limb, really truly pulling the string on the bow and letting it go. I would describe it as more the arrow getting sucked into the center of the target, more than you trying to hit the target. That's how I feel about archery.

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