Sunday, July 17, 2005
Manage - or live?
In Zen and the Art of Making a Living
, Laurence Boldt tells us:The approach of traditional career models is to help people defend against problems. The implicit assumption is a notion of work as a means of defeinding against the problems of poverty, ridicule, boredom and the like. A problem-solving approach to work puts us in a defensive posture, from which we hope for escape - ultimately from work itself. (Defending, after all, is a rather tiresome business.) Since work is something we do to solve our problems, the implication is that no problems equals no work. So, many dream of winning the lottery and "solving all their problems" and not "having to" work.The problem posed here is one that applies to life as well. In a biochemistry seminar I took, our professor announced that unlike in regular chemistry classes, our equations would hopefully not come into balance. A living human being, after all, is warm from all the energy he burns as he goes about living. When the human equation balances, the end product is a corpse.
If the endpoint of life is a corpse, then we can define life, chemically, as a self-perpetuating process of maintaining sustainable imbalances. The choice is how we perceive and relate to this situation. We can conceive of ourselves as riding a rickety bicycle, our every move forward an effort to stay on or readjust course. Or we can think of ourselves as a lake, waves going in and out like inhalations and exhalations of breath.
The first image puts us in the driver's seat, but this is not an enviable position, for there are only so many places we can go and are limited ways to get there.
The lake gives us a different way of dealing with life. The waves of a lake are tied to the pull of the moon. Likewise, we can allow ourselves to exist in harmony with the natural order in which we live.
Having rational consciousness, of course, we go one step beyond the lake. We can express ourselves. But we still have to decide how to do so. How are we to live? Do we treat life as something we have to continually manage and direct? Or do we allow ourselves to be, manifesting ourselves as a part of the world we inhabit? It all depends on whether we treat life as a struggle to be fought through or a process to experience and interact with.
posted by gbarto at 10:20 PM