Mastery is only understood by those who have walked enough of the journey to know what effort it takes to stay on the path. And yet one definition of mastery (one that I like, anyways) is “effort made invisible.”

Forget moving forwards towards an ideal or progressing towards the betterment of skill and self, for a moment. Time and time again, simply being in the game takes every last drop of effort one has to give. To not seek an easier path; to not drug one’s self on wild fancies, the lost past, or dreamt-up futures; to bear judgement from both within and without; to stand in darkness and incessantly strike against rock the stubborn match you have sacrificed for, even when you can see artificial lights winking not so far away; to hear the grumbles and footsteps of comrades fading away as they turn back towards the life they, like you, were attempting to leave behind.

All this, just to be at the foot of the mountain.

Then, to climb.

And then, to master climbing itself. Not a conquering of the mountain, not a competing of how much quicker or higher you are then your peers, not even a getting onto a higher level so you can see more of the world.

What if the point of doing the thing is simply to be better at it? To absorb the contours of a skill into the angles and lines of your body and mind until “mastery” is not a concept but a lived experience you have ceased to care for the definition of?

Sprezzatura, they call it — a “studied carelessness” as one executes excellence with nonchalance and ease.

It does not serve any good purpose, at least in my own practice, to claim this attitude and demonstrate it in the way one does things. This was my great misunderstanding, one I still catch myself subscribing to here and there. The carelessness is not a heart position or an affectation, but that embodiment of a pilot who knows his aircraft and his own body so well he flies the plane with his fingers loosely touching the controls, nudging the center stick with his pinky as he takes in the beauty of the land and sea beneath him. Picasso’s $10,000 napkin sketch was born out of thirty years of effort, even though we see only the backhanded scratching of pencil on paper. One does not ask for nonchalant excellence and gets it. Past effort and intense application of self to the pursuit makes it possible: and, be not deceived — the application of self is still very much present in sprezzatura, it is only that from the outside it seems marvellous how the self has reached beyond what it once was.