013_The way of doing
I don’t know about you, but I like stories with pictures.
I’m not going to do away altogether with my explanatory ringo bingo tango lingo (#010, #011), but it may be helpful to use a few more illustrations, starting with this one:
These images are all about “doing” stuff, about actually moving from A to B. This is a pictorial version of the three shapes that we looked at last time (#012). The square is a toolbox that contains useful tools. The triangle is a path, receding into the distance. And the circle is a 360-degree source of guidance on our journey from A to B:
In the pictorial version, the circle contains a compass. This tells us if we are moving in the “right” direction. We commonly talk about a “moral” compass, and so a compass seems an appropriate icon for 道徳 morality.
The triangle frames a person “heading along” a path. “A head in motion” is precisely what the Canjeez 道 path itself represents (#012).
And the square contains a map, a handy 道具 tool when you’re on your way to an unfamiliar destination.
One thing to note about a map is that it is rectangular. I wrote before that the most powerful tool in the human toolbox is language. Think of the various forms in which we encounter written language: a page, a letter, a magazine, a book, a poster, a business card, a billboard, a noticeboard. All typically rectangular.
The rectangle also seems to be the shape of choice for tools that present various other forms of information: a TV screen, a movie screen, a phone screen, a computer screen.
A compass, meanwhile, is circular. If you google images of “meters, gauges”, you’ll see all sorts of circular cases and rounded faces. We humans seem to have a strong preference for rounded forms of guidance about our circumstances (another “circle” word).
Even on my rectangular-interface phone, the compass app presents guidance in a circular form. Where direction is concerned, I find it hard to imagine an appropriate interface shape that is not circular or spherical.
What about timepieces? In my teens and early 20s, digital watches were new and popular. For a time it seemed that rectangular time displays might replace circular ones entirely. In fact it seemed that all digital tools offering guidance might one day end up with rectangular interfaces.
But circles have been surprisingly resilient. After that initial wave of enthusiasm for digital displays, many people reverted to round displays for watches and clocks.
In the 1970s, I didn’t anticipate that a generation later, watches themselves would be superseded by app-packed rectangular phones. Likewise, in around 2010 I didn’t anticipate that a few years after that, people would be buying app-packed rectangular watches. But even though a smart watch is intended to present much more than just time, demand for round interfaces and even round cases seems to persist.
Of course, a map is also a form of guidance and a compass is also a tool. Tools may have circular associations. Guidance may have rectangular associations. It is not easy to clearly differentiate tools from guidance. You can make use of both.
But here’s a tentative rule of thumb: Tools imply things that require your hands-on engagement (we live in the age of the swipe, but tracing your finger along a route on a map goes back millennia); guidance implies things that lend you a hand (helpfully, the compass needle always points north).
The hands on a clock and the needles on all sorts of gauges point like fingers, drawing our attention to useful information. A parent’s pointing at the moon (#006) does more than facilitate language acquisition. It also teaches us to look at what is being pointed out, so that eventually we learn to point things out to others.
Pointing and guidance go hand in glove. Guidance and tools go hand in hand.
Concealed in the hands-on “doing” layer of human behaviour is an image of a hand: for handling tools, for offering each other a hand.
A hand shows us the way, points out what we should do, draws our attention to something important on the path ahead.
Next time we’ll take a step back from “doing” and consider “being”. What pointers can we offer ourself in that context?