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Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways, Ninety People

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The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

There was a stretch of years when I would get to the Varment Guard yard before most of the crews, and what I remember is the sound more than the sight — twenty-odd trucks pulling in already running, warm from the drive, ready for the day and the hiss of a bay door going up. Most of the fleet never saw the yard in the morning. Ninety trucks and the men took them home, so at any hour of any night our trucks were scattered across Ohio in ninety driveways. Only the ones needing parts or a swap came in. But, standing there at six, what you saw was rows of black and gold, same logo, same ladder racks, same lettering on the door, men in the same uniform crossing between them with coffee.

I was proud of that lot. And, because of that pride it complicates everything I’m about to say.

We made them identical on purpose, and it cost money to keep them that way. Not for efficiency — for recognition( and maybe a little efficiency). Sending the trucks home every night was part of it. Ninety black and gold trucks sitting overnight in ninety neighborhoods is ninety people seeing us before they ever need us, so that a woman who noticed one in her neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday knew it on sight when it pulled into hers on Friday. She had already decided something about us before anyone knocked. That is how a stranger comes to trust you enough to let you into her crawlspace at ten at night. The sameness was a promise, of knowing that we had to be good enough, often enough, for the promise to be worth anything. Uniformity without a company behind it is just paint.

Which is why it took me a while to understand what bothers me about the internet now.

Because it looks like my back lot, and it shouldn’t. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ll see it — the same post, the same words, the same three-beat structure, the same gentle authority, the same closing invitation to reflect. Row after row of the same thing, parked, in the back lot. But our trucks were never supposed to be parked together. The whole design was to get them out and scattered, one to a street, each one sitting in front of a particular house belonging to particular people. What is filling the internet is the opposite: the livery piled up in one place where nobody lives, all the recognition with nothing behind it. No company. No crews. Nobody who answers the phone when it goes wrong at ten at night.

Nobody decided this, which is the strange part. At Varment Guard we chose the sameness and paid for it and could defend it in a room. What’s happening now is a lot that filled up by default, truck by truck, with no one ever choosing the colors.

I know how it happens, because I know how it almost happens to me. You sit down to write. Something comes back fluent and competent and nearly right. “Nearly right” has a gravitational pull that “wrong” never had. Wrong you fight. Nearly right you accept, because fixing it feels like fussiness, and because it already sounds like something that would do well. The median is seductive precisely because it is the shape of what has already worked for everyone else. Right?

The contemplative tradition has a name for this, and it is older than any of our tools. Thomas Merton spent his life circling what he called the false self — not a liar, not a villain, but the self we assemble out of what the room is known to approve of. It is competent. It is often admired. It is also, in his reading, not anyone. The desert monastics worried about the same thing in a different space. They were forever warning young monks against copying an elder’s practice instead of finding their own, because a borrowed discipline produces a borrowed man.

Here is the part that matters for anyone who isn’t writing anything. The parking lot is not primarily a content problem. It is an interior one, and it had a head start on the technology by several thousand years.

I sit with people for a living and what I hear, more often than anything else, is pre-owned language. Someone describes their marriage in the vocabulary of a podcast they heard. Someone names a career crisis in terms borrowed whole from an article they read. Someone tells me about their grief in the precise phrasing of the last condolence card they received. None of it is dishonest. All of it is context with nothing behind it yet. My work in that room is almost never to supply a better framework or give answers — it is to keep asking until something comes out that nobody handed them. You can hear it when it happens. The sentence gets worse. It gets halting and specific and a little embarrassing, and it is the first true thing said in forty minutes.

That is the whole discipline, as far as I can tell. The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

I wrote in the last blog about my father in his studio, and how he would set aside a piece that was nearly finished because a quarter inch in the slope of a cheek had gone wrong. He could not paint over wood. He had to go back to the log and start again. It took me fifty years to understand he was describing the same thing I am describing here from the other end — that the fluent, finished, nearly right version is the most dangerous thing on the table, because it is the hardest one to see a fault in.

The Enneagram makes the same case from another direction. Each type is, among other things, a strategy for being acceptable — a reliable way of getting approval, safety, or distance that worked so well, so early, that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. Nine types, nine very sophisticated paint schemes. The work is not to trade your type for a better one. It is to notice the moment you reach for the familiar move and ask whether this situation is asking for it, or whether you are just driving the truck because it is the one in the lot.

Which brings me back to the yard, and to the thing I had wrong for years.

I thought the fleet was the achievement. It wasn’t. I knew those crews. I knew Steve and Brad and Harry — what each of them was carrying into the truck at six in the morning, what was waiting when they got home, which of them was in a season that was going to hold and which of them was in one that wasn’t. The trucks were identical. Steve and Brad and Harry were never identical, not for one morning, and every night those ninety identical trucks went home to ninety different lives. The black and gold only ever went as deep as the paint.

That is also what made the brand mean anything. The uniformity was never the product. It was a way of pointing at ninety particular people who showed up and did the work. Take them out and you still have the trucks, and the trucks are worth nothing.

So the question the internet raises isn’t really about sameness. The lot is going to fill up; it already has. The question is whether there is anyone in the cab?

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways Reflection Sheet

What I have come to is unglamorous. Before I publish, before I say the thing in the meeting, before I offer the observation in a session that I can tell will land well, I try to ask one question. Is this mine, or did I pick it up in the lot? Not “is it true” — the median is usually true. True and borrowed are not opposites. The question is whether it came up out of a life or came in off a shelf, and I find I can tell, if I am willing to be slow about it for ten seconds.

Most mornings I don’t like the answer. The borrowed version is better written. It is always better written. That is the problem.

But I think about standing in that cold lot at six in the morning, looking at what I believed was uniformity, when what was in front of me was ninety people I would have had to ask, one at a time, to learn anything true about. The sameness was real. It was also, every single morning, the least interesting fact about what I was looking at.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

AI assisted, not written.

Sources

Thomas Merton on the false self — developed across his work, most directly in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).

The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers on not imitating another’s practice: the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

Getting It Right and Back To The Log

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The work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The smell I remember from my father’s studio in Detroit is sawdust and linseed oil, and under that the green, almost sweet smell of wood that hasn’t finished drying. He worked in walnut and cherry mostly, and he brought the material in himself — out to the forest, down a trunk, a log hauled back and set on end in the corner of the shop to wait its turn. Some of them waited years.

I was thirteen the year I started paying real attention, and what I kept sometimes was him starting over.

Not with failures. With work that was nearly done. A standing figure he had been at for weeks, and something in the slope of the cheek was wrong — a quarter inch, a plane that caught the light at an angle he hadn’t intended. There is no fixing that. You cannot paint over wood. He could cut deeper and let the whole head become something smaller than he had planned, or he could set it aside and go pick out another log. I watched him do both.

I questioned, the first time I understood what was happening. Not a child’s dismay — a thirteen-year-old’s wonderment which is curious, because I had reasons. Nobody would see it. It was weeks of work. He didn’t turn around. He said the figure had been telling him for some time that it wasn’t the figure, and he had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it. Hmmmm.

We had some version of that exchange a few times over the next few years. The foot placed a half inch off and the whole body going false above it. The shoulder that was technically correct and somehow dead. I always asked. He always said something close to the same thing, and I always heard it as a man talking about wood. Hmmmm. It took me five decades to understand he was describing a spiritual discipline, and I only understood it because I started writing — regularly, publicly, with my name on it — and found out that the work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The process is not tidy. There is a list, sixty-some ideas now, growing, gathered from articles that snagged on something and sentences clients said in the middle of a session that opened a door I didn’t know was there. Some have been sitting a year and a half, like logs on end in the corner, not ready. Two have been drafted and set aside — not because they were bad but because they were not true yet. And every so often one comes up the moment I sit down, fully formed and insisting. Those are rarely the good ones. The urgency usually belongs to my ego rather than to the material.

Then comes the part nobody warns you about. You sit down intending to write one thing and the writing informs you, around the fourth paragraph, that you have been intending the wrong thing. Not a failure of planning. A kind of exposure. You cannot write honestly about patience while impatient and expect the sentences to hold; they go brittle, they start performing, and anyone reading carefully can hear it even if they couldn’t name what they’re hearing. The page is an unsentimental instrument. It registers what is in you with a precision I have found in only two other places: a good spiritual director, and silence.

Thomas Merton spent years convinced that the writing — and he wrote beautifully — was vanity dressed as vocation and discovered again and again that the page kept handing him back the very self he had come to the monastery to leave at the door. He could not get around himself by writing. Neither can I. Neither I suspect, can you, whatever your version of the page is — the report, the sermon, the hard email, the conversation you’ve rehearsed eleven times in the car.

So, writing has become a form of daily examen for me. Not something I perform at the end of a post, but what the post performs on me while I’m making it. Some sentences cost nothing. Others ask a question I would rather not answer, and I know which is which by a tightening at the base of the throat and a sudden interest in checking email.

The most expensive paragraph I ever wrote was in a post about what it means for a man to hear a woman say no. I was writing confidently, in the voice of the man who has it worked out, and the page stopped me. If I was going to write that, I had to admit I have not always heard it — not dramatically, but in the ordinary ways that are easier to excuse. Talking past a no. Softening it on someone’s behalf. Treating it as an opening position. I sat with it for a day and wanted to publish without it. Without the admission the post would have been competent and useless, one more man explaining a standard he exempts himself from. So I wrote it in, and then had to live with having written it, and the admission turned out to be the only part that earned the rest.

That is the half inch in the foot. The piece was fine. Fine was the problem. And there is no sanding your way out of it — you go back and start at the beginning or you publish something false and hope the light never catches it at the wrong angle.

Now I should tell you how this post got made, because leaving it out would make everything above a little bit of a lie.

There is an AI in my process, surprise! I bring the material — the studio, the list, the day I sat with that paragraph — and a draft comes back, cleaned up with sentence, spelling, etc and then I go to work on it. It is a real collaborator in that it asks me questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself, and not a collaborator at all in that it has no shop in its memory and nothing at stake in what I publish. Both are true at once. And it does not write the piece for me.

The danger is not the one people warn about. It is not going to replace me. Fluency is what it does best, and fluency is exactly what I described above as the signal that something is wrong. IT helps with an acceptable version. The surface you can no longer change. Every time it hands me that version I am standing where my father stood, except the piece arrived with questions before I had done any of the work that usually earns it, and a sanded surface is the hardest thing in the world to see a fault in.

That is the easy part — sentence structure, punctuation, the rhythm of a line.

But it cannot tell me which paragraph costs me something. It has no throat to tighten. When it drafted the section above it wrote well and wrote from the outside, because the admission underneath was mine and the having-to-live-with-it was mine. That does not transfer. An examen performed by someone else is not an examen; it is a performance review.

So: I let it start a draft. I let it argue with me. Then I go looking for the half inch myself, and I do not let it do that part. The day I hand over that part is the day this stops being a practice and becomes content, and I have enough content in my life. Don’t you?

Lynette reads most things after that, which is its own discipline, because she has known me for many years and can spot the sentence where I started hiding or it is not my words and it is the sentence a machine wrote. She doesn’t argue with it. She reads it back to me, and it falls apart on contact with her voice. No machine has done that to me yet, and I notice I don’t want one to. I do not want my writing to look like all the other AI generated material out there and face it, we can all tell when AI writes this stuff.

And then there is the reader I will never meet, who finds the post eight months late on a Tuesday night at an hour that tells you something about how the day went. I used to write to an imagined audience, which is to say nobody. Now I write to one person, usually someone who sat across from me and said a thing they had never told anyone. You lose reach that way. You gain the only thing that matters — the occasional note that says: this was me, how did you know. The honest answer is that I didn’t.

Back To The Log Reflection Sheet

I have one of his pieces. It is in my house, where I see it every day without seeing it, the way you stop seeing anything you live with. It is wearing a wizard hat at the moment — a gift someone gave me that I had no use for and no heart to throw out, so I set it on his figure, and it has stayed there because it looks right. It looks like something he would have found funny. Every so often the light moves across it and I notice my dad again, and what I notice is not the skill. It is the dozen other versions of it that never existed, the ones that got set aside at the point where almost anyone else would have finished and signed it. That is what I am looking at. The restraint is the piece. And I smile. Hi, Dad.

I think about those afternoons every time a draft goes smooth and I can feel myself writing the acceptable version. Changing it is what brings the truth up — something underneath is asking for the room. Whatever I was proud of may have to go back to the woodpile. Sigh.

Then I sit in the quiet, where the sawdust was, and wait to hear what the figure has been telling me.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ, where they work at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Jim is a Master Certified Coach, a certified spiritual director, and a former CEO. Lynette’s doctoral research grounds their Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) framework. Together they write The Mystical Seeker. spiritofeq.com · mysticalseeker.substack.com

Sources

Thomas Merton wrestled with writing as vocation and as vanity throughout his journals, most directly in The Sign of Jonas (1953).