On the morning before I left Japan, I decided to take a last-minute walk to a small tea caddy shop I had heard about. Its purpose was narrow then and remains unchanged today: to make tea caddies — chazutsu — that preserve tea at its freshest. In the corner of the shop, a young man tapped steadily with a small hammer against a tea caddy about the size of a coffee mug. You don’t need to move to Kyoto or spend 10 years in an apprenticeship to apply this idea. Mastery, it turns out, may be one of the oldest — and most underrated — forms of meditation we have.