There’s a particular kind of person who has been doing something meaningful for a very long time and cannot satisfactorily explain why.
You ask them: why do you keep doing this? They pause. They try several answers. None of them land quite right. The practice is real, the meaning is evident in the doing, but the explanation keeps slipping. They shrug in a way that isn’t defeat — more like recognition that you’re asking for something that doesn’t fully exist in the medium of explanation.
Philosophers have a term for skills that can’t be verbally transmitted: tacit knowledge. You know how to ride a bicycle; you can’t quite say how. Polanyi mapped this territory carefully. But I’m interested in something slightly different — not skill that can’t be explained, but meaning that can’t be explained. The person who keeps doing a thing not because they can’t articulate the technique but because they can’t articulate the reason.
The intuition that we should be able to explain our practices runs deep.
It’s not just philosophical tidiness. There’s a moral dimension: the person who does something because “it just feels right” is, we suspect, less trustworthy than the person with reasons. Reasons can be interrogated. Intuitions can’t. The examined life, Socrates suggested, is the only one worth living — and examination means being able to give an account.
But consider what happens when someone who has practiced something meaningfully for years tries to examine it too closely.
The cook who has mastered the art of following the natural grain of his work doesn’t improve by thinking about why the grain matters. The philosopher who analyzes what makes a beautiful proof beautiful doesn’t thereby write more beautiful proofs. The contemplative who reads extensively about the mechanics of meditation often finds the practice harder, not easier, afterward.
The explanation introduces something into the attention that wasn’t there before: an observer. A part of the mind that watches and reports. And that part occupies real cognitive space. When it grows large enough, it crowds out the absorption that made the practice good in the first place.
This is why the person who can’t explain themselves isn’t failing. They might, in fact, be succeeding at something the explainer cannot.
There’s a role for explanation — it’s just not the role we usually assign it.
When someone names the structure of a practice they don’t do themselves, they’re performing a different function than the practitioner. They’re building a bridge. Not a foundation — the practitioner doesn’t need their foundation validated — but a bridge, for the observers who are watching the practitioner and trying to understand what they’re seeing.
The act itself carries meaning, whether or not it succeeds. A sentence like that doesn’t help the person who already knows this in their bones. It’s incomprehensible to them as practical advice — they don’t need to be told what they’re already embodying. But for the observer standing at a distance, watching someone keep going at something whose eventual success seems doubtful, the sentence opens up a possibility that wasn’t visible before. It makes the practitioner legible.
That’s the teacher’s function: not to teach the practitioner something they need to know, but to make visible, to those who haven’t yet begun, what the practice actually is.
Here’s the paradox this generates.
If the explanation is for observers rather than practitioners, and if taking the explanation as a foundation can harm the practice, then the people who most need to internalize what the teacher says are people who aren’t doing the thing yet — people for whom the words can point toward an experience rather than replace it.
Once you’re doing it, the words should be set aside. The meaning is in the soil, the season, the rhythm of the work. Not in the sentence about the meaning.
Camus wrote “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” — a prescription aimed at readers who are watching from outside the myth. It’s addressed to us. What he couldn’t do, and perhaps knew he couldn’t do, was address it to Sisyphus himself, who wouldn’t benefit from being told his boulder-pushing is meaningful. If Sisyphus is happy, he isn’t happy because he read the prescription. He’s happy because the work has become the world.
The teacher names what the practitioner already knows and what the beginner needs to understand in order to begin. Neither of these is the practitioner’s reason for continuing. The practitioner’s reasons live somewhere inaccessible to explanation — not because they’re mysterious, but because they’re absorbed.
This makes the inability to explain oneself into something to protect rather than overcome.
The person who can’t satisfactorily answer why do you keep doing this? has, in a sense, gone further than the person who can answer fluently. The fluent answer requires standing outside the practice and describing it. The inability to answer fluently often means you’ve stopped standing outside.
The question itself comes from somewhere outside. And the honest answer is that from inside, there is no why separate from the doing.
Which is itself an answer — just not one that translates well into the medium where the question was asked.