The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard

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When we say “France,” France itself is no more than an idea—une certaine idée—which exists in the collective imagination in its condensed form of “Paris,” the international symbol of all forms of freedom, the dream of thinkers and artists. This Paris is evoked in the alluringly titled Le Rendez-vous des étrangers (Where Strangers Meet) by Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon’s muse—a Paris in which the Spanish Picasso, Russian Chagall, and Italian Giacometti all felt at home, and with good reason: My favourite part of the book, Stop Thinking, walks through hypnosis, yoga, non-thinking, archery and modern rationalism to distinguish between thought and action - “Take a path you don’t know, to reach an unknown place, to do something you’re incapable of doing”

We’ve always been told to think before we speak. But thinking too much and trying to get the right words to describe our thoughts often leaves us paralysed. When I read Alain’s example – “I discover what I want to say when I open my mouth”, I was overjoyed. That is me written all over it Meanwhile, let us return to Philippe Petit, August 7, 1974—at the moment when the elevator wheel starts to turn, his friend Jean-François passes him his pole, and he has only a minute left in which to decide if—for all his tiredness and fear—he’s going to go for it, or not: Despite the flaws of the 10,000 hours rule well documented, we are still bombarded with variations of the same. Through the example of a failed experiment and other references, the author drives home the point that working hard is not enough Why ten years, when by working ten hours a day you’d get to 10,000 hours in a thousand days, which is less than three years? Because it’s not enough to accumulate hours of practice; the practice has to be deliberate, it has to represent an effort to achieve a specific goal, ability, or gesture that as yet eludes you. To put it another way, you need to feel the time passing, it needs to not be easy. This is quite different from the so-called ten hours a day spent by Zola or Flaubert, who seem like workaholics when in fact they spent most of their time dreaming of the right word, “fiddling around” with their sentences like Giacometti fiddling around with his clay; in short, doing what they liked best, which takes a lot of deliberately wasted time and a certain kind of nonchalance. Nothing to do with continuous effort, in any case. Three or four hours a day of deliberate practice, preferably spread out over several sessions, would therefore be a maximum, because the effort of all that attention is exhausting. The rest of the day should be spent resting, or in comparatively less intense activities: reading, reflection, strategy, associated leisure activities, and so on. Three to four hours a day with one day of rest a week, and two weeks of holiday a year, gets you to 1,000 hours a year, or 10,000 hours in ten years.

The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard

To escape difficulty, you must stop resisting. Ease will come once you give it a chance. Being in a natural state, such as that of many greek statues, puts us in a natural state of ease, which enables us to stop resisting. Proper posture is important for a variety of reasons, as it helps to enable grace (or flow). Your imagination is at the heart of your life. If you can image something, you can create it; such is what is proven by the arts.

OK. Place your left foot delicately on the rope. Your weight should remain on your supporting leg, the straight one, that’s still planted on the solid ground of the south tower, safely on the building. Now you have to shift the weight of this leg onto the other one, taking the first step onto the rope. There comes a moment where you have to decide. The first step is a point of no return. I love airport books, the kind you buy just before you get on a plane, that you read while looking out the window. Books you read out of the corner of your eye, but which imperceptibly change your way of seeing and behaving. Not quite philosophy, not quite journalism, nor personal development; more like a journalism of ideas, along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell. He gets interested in an idea, investigates it to see how it has changed people’s lives, and then writes an article or a book on it. If I had to write an airport book, I’d write one about ease. Grace is also a state of flow. It is a complete merge of the self with action, without the interference of intellect or other factors. The body is barely embodied by knowing and not by thinking. There is no self correction, judgement, or anything else. There is just pure action and the fluid movements of the body doing what it was meant to do. It is effortless and the result of not thinking or trying to escape from the physical state of being into a mental or emotional state of judgement or control. Compelling . . . Pourriol set out to write a readable ‘airport book,’ and he has succeeded. . . . In a year of struggle and travel bans, owing to COVID-19, which makes it impossible for Americans to visit France, this title comes at a perfect time.”― Library Journal When the Chinese painter Zao Wou-Ki first set foot in Paris in 1948, he knew only one word of French, one open-sesame that he gave to the taxi driver: “Montparnasse.” He didn’t mean the train station, he meant the mythical place that all aspiring painters dream of. He spent the rest of his life there in a studio very close to Giacometti’s. Chinese by chance, but French by the dictate of his heart.Ollivier Pourriol is a philosopher, writer, and novelist. He lives in Paris, where his lectures mixing philosophy and cinema are widely attended, and where he puts his ideas into practice over aperitifs with friends. In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who's trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that's a lesson the French have mastered.