Acrobatics

I was struck the other day with a sudden illumination about why we can be so easily disturbed by any little thing that gets out of place. (Example: someone leaves a single towel folded in the kitchen we share on the second floor. Then all we Midorikaisei ask each other, did you leave this here? What is this? and then some Gakuen students come searching for us and say, is this yours? Did you leave this? We are all quite shocked by a towel left folded when it's not where we usually plan for towels to be left folded.) So. I usually think this is very silly of us, and yet I do it too. I too will exclaim out loud something like "who left this tea open?!" "Who didn't clean this bowl!?" "Why has this carafe of tea been left to freeze in the fridge?!"
So I had a realization. Here's why we freak out: we are acrobats. We are like trapeze artists; we practice and practice and plan exhaustively beforehand so that in the moment we should be able to fly effortlessly hand to hand without looking. We need everything in its place to be able to do this. We practice and plan with each other so that we can expect to put out a hand for a towel (or for another hand to catch us) and feel it there. We want to glance for a bowl of the desired rank and it be there, beneath our gaze. And there is a pleasure in executing that. And a panic--a gasp from the crowd and from each other--when the inevitable happens: a mistake--a slip of gravity or entropy or human error. Because that is also tea--the hataraki (making it work) of recovering from the inevitable error. We do expect the unexpected or undesired to happen, but we have little forgiveness for it, especially for human mistakes--misplacements, forgetfulness, laziness. And we are not necessarily good judges of why a person might have made a choice that we interpret as a mistake. And even I, who believe so strongly that the vast majority of what goes on in the tearoom is beyond the thousands of rules we make and plans we have agreed on, even I am heard to gasp when something is not just so.