Chaos

Tea is about controlling chaos.  Miniature everyday chaos which mostly doesn’t end in disaster but sometimes does: spills, broken dishes, little injuries, ugly things, dirty things, unknown things. It refines the social encounter through intense practice to be largely predictable, meshing smoothly like carefully honed gears.
Like noh and other traditional performing arts, you practice your part by yourself, and it is the rigorous attention to detailed reproduction of forms (kata) that allows the event itself to run smoothly when everyone comes together.  In contrast, in the west we tend to rehearse the parts all together in order to make them work together. This is one way to ensure a harmonious whole, but not (the Japanese example makes clear) the only way.
We know what to say when, we know what to do down to infinitesimal, invisible details, and there are very very few places or details where the teacher will say, “how you do that is up to you.”
The catch all way that we often describe this training is through one of Rikyu’s (attributed) 7 rules: Prepare for rain.
[All seven are “ First you must make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so the water boils; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in the summer suggest coolness, in the winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain; and give those with whom you find yourself every consideration.” In a very Biblical turn of events, the student who asked Rikyu for his advice said he already knew all those things, and Rikyu is said to have responded that if the student could do all those things, Rikyu would like to become his student.]
We are attempting to be prepared for any contingency, including our own mistakes. But, here’s the other half:Chaos is happening all the time.Our preparation is an always-already doomed enterprise because chaos laps at our feet and tugs at our hanging sleeves all the time. The mind trying to control every part of the body misses one finger, and it slips out of place. As host in hakobi usucha (a very basic procedure) you stand up in the tea room 6 times. One of those times you’ll forget to squeeze your heels together when standing up. An elbow bumps something, pieces of kimono (precariously if extensively tied) slide over the hours. Things go awry; things fall apart.
Natural forces and physics conspire against us: the charcoal branch we’re cutting isn’t straight and nothing will make its two faces perfectly parallel. The ash form crumbles due to lack of humidity. Gravity occasionally triumphs over our wild balancing acts of bamboo ladle on slick brass container rim, a domed lid refuses to hold a bamboo tea scoop, a slippery lacquer lid won’t stand upright. Things happen.
Our preparations for rain are ultimately bound to fail because the chaos is much greater even than our innumerable plans and rules and procedures. And that’s the rest of tea. Gracefully negotiating the chaos. Imposing just enough order onto the chaos to make a moment that slows the tumbling flow of time and things. We try to distill the chaos into one awe-inspiring flower miraculously arrested in its fall from the vase, into the leaf that fell into the path at the last moment after a meticulous sweeping.
There is nothing like concentrating on rules and preparation all day every day to make you realize just how much chaos remains to be negotiated every second. That’s when it’s time to make a calculated leap into the unknown. That’s all the time.