What are you doing? I am doing as Little as Possible
My yoga teacher told me “When in doubt stand still”. I thought he was an idiot. Now I think he is a genius.
I guess that old dogs can learn new tricks. So, you may be wondering, where am I going with this? I am not sure. My basic idea is to explore random thoughts based upon this yoga saying, which was reinforced by my yoga session last night which, coincidentally, sort of had the same message. Last night’s yoga them was “Be here. Be totally here. Live in this moment, because all there is, is NOW”. It was a great yoga session and I slept like a baby after it – I worried about absolutely nothing, and given that lack of sleep because of worry and anxiety and other destructive emotions is endemic (1/3 of Americans) I decided that being in the NOW is a great idea, so I am sharing it with you.
Let’s start with this simple fact: we are called human beings, not human doings. Why is that? Could it be that being is more important than doing? Obviously this sounds like one of the great questions of philosophy and if you think that you are correct! The famous German philosopher (why are so many philosophers German? I have no idea, but I do find it rather strange.) Martin Heidegger was obsessed with the question: What is the meaning of being? Lucky for (and you) my wife had to struggle with his very obtuse writings on this subject but rather than quote from his writings (which I was forced to read as she wrote her PhD thesis) which are pretty much incomprehensible I will quote from a College paper:
In his 1927 work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger seeks to “raise anew the question of the meaning of being,” which he believed to have been deeply misconstrued by the preceding two millennia of western philosophy. Alluding to the the tradition started by the Greeks, he begins Being and Time with a quote from Plato’s Sophist: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” Heidegger uses this passage to convey an important point: The problem of being, at first, doesn’t even seem like a problem to us. But when we actually try to articulate what we mean by being, that is when we get into trouble. The issue for us, which Heidegger seeks to clarify, is to overcome our natural disposition to think that we already understand everything. This disposition, driven by our desire to master reality, masks a deeper anxiety over our challenge of existing as finite beings in a world that resists our life goals. Heidegger wants us to come to terms with our anxiety and let go of our desire to master reality, and he begins this endeavor with the being-question.
Yes, this is the dumbed down version of Heidegger and it’s still a tough slog. Here’s the punchline for those of you who could not read to the end of the paragraph without getting a headache: We pretend, because we are anxious, to know what is going on the world because we are so insecure that we want to control it all and thus feel “safe”. Yes, we are control freaks and that does is make us insecure and untrusting and afraid and unable to live in the NOW. It turns us from human beings into human doings. Yuk! (at least according to Heidegger). Of course, you are probably asking: “So what?” This obtuse intellectual mind game has nothing to do with my life “in the real world”. You could not be more wrong.
The key is Heidegger’s title: Being and Time. What being does is give us time. Being slows time down. Being gives time a flavor and a quality that you do not notice when you are busy. You notice that you are not alone. You connect. With the air, the sun, the dirt, the trees, the bugs, maybe even your spouse and even, more miraculously, yourself. Your fears and need to control and dominate subside (unlike Putin). Now, I don’t mean to say do nothing, I just mean when you do strive to be in what is called the “flow state” – a kind of doing where time disappears and you are immersed in your “doing” in such a way that it is more like the experience of “being”. One of the most popular ways of entering this state is gardening (mine is either playing piano or walking in the woods or teaching teenagers who really want to learn).
It turns out, surprise, surprise that gardeners (my 92 year old mother is proof of this) live much longer than the average person. Lots of research have tried to figure out why this is but I will simply summarize the research (simplistically) by saying gardening puts us into a flow state and makes us feel connected to the dirt and the plants and the sun in a way that anxiety and fears and need for total control (some control is OK!) because of our fears disappear. Luckily, for those who want this experience but are afraid of hard labour, modern gardening is supporting the idea of being over doing with new techniques that mean gardening with less work, such as this technique called No-Dig Gardening. Here is a bit about it from a lady who calls herself the Empress of Dirt:
When starting a new garden bed, instead of digging or tilling the site, the gardener puts layers of cardboard over existing grass lawn or weeds with a layer of compost or some other mulch on top and waters everything. The idea is that over weeks and months the smothered grass or weeds will gradually die off and the cardboard decomposes, leaving a bed ready to plant. When planting in subsequent years, the existing soil is left as-is and a new layer of compost is added on top to replenish nutrients.
Finally, let’s see what Mr. Google the Wise has to say. When I entered into google “do little” (as opposed to do more, which is the American mantra) I got this hit:
20+ years ago this movie, a fantasy-comedy about a Dr. who can talk to animals, was a big hit. As a kid Dr. Dolittle could talk to animals, but suppressed his ability because it made his life way to complicated. Fast forward 30 years. His gift is reawakened when he almost kills a dog but, believing his gift is a hindrance, John rejects all abnormality in his life and returns to work… and then things get messy. The punchline I choose to see? It is simple, as kids we live in the NOW, we are primarily being, rather than doing. A day is an eternity. We have not great plans or ambitions or needs (other than a good dinner and comfy bed). If you had a happy childhood (as I luckily did), you know what I mean.
Our challenge, as made clear in the poetry of William Wordworth (basically a really classy, British version of Eddie Murphy) confirms what this punchline with these words from his poem Intimations of Immortality :
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy;
So, you want to solve the world’s problems. Focus more on being and less on doing. Your backyard can be a large an adventure as a flight to Peru – if you have enough imagination. A tree is a mystery to unravel. Your neighbour may think that UFOs and aliens have landed (mine does) but he/she can still give you a fun time when you share a BBQ. My 92 year old mother sits on my back porch whenever it is sunny (outside), even if its – 20 C. She is content. She is happy. She lives in the NOW. She is not anxious. She is not ambitious or afraid. And in that way she is at one with the world and the people around her. She, unlike most people, realizes that not only does she have enough, she has more than enough – because the people and the trees and the animals and water and soil all around her are part of who she is and she, in turn, is part of who they are. When all of us are like her and are beings rather than doings there is a chance to save the world. Good luck as you seek to save the world by simply being.
References
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2386&context=cmc_theses#:~:text=The%20being%2Dquestion%20is%20ontological,is%20not%20itself%20an%20entity. By Surya Sendyl, 2016
https://empressofdirt.net/no-dig-gardening/
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