On Being and Time

Time. How to spend it?  We always wish we had more of it. Where did it go?

I read a quote the other day that said when you give your time to someone that is the most precious gift you can give, because it is time you will never get back.

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Working to Live

We live in a society where working and making money are the chief proprietors of our time. We spend our lives saving for a Future that rests on the emotional blood loss of Today. Years and years we wait to live; dream of vacationing here, plan on retiring there. Storing up money and trinkets like little squirrels, who starve themselves now to have a questionable enjoyment later. As Thoreau sees it, “By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed…laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break into and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end.”

But we work and work, getting into debt over frivolous purchases, “Always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day…making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day.”

Like the mouse on a perpetually turning wheel, we chase after a cheese that, no matter our diligent efforts, we will never grasp. Thoreau uses the analogy of a hunter: “With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.”

Old age will happen. It will make philosophers of us, no question. But why can’t we be philosophers before that time? Must we postpone life until age 70? Does it take a lifetime of savings just to take a break? In Walden, we hear Thoreau feeling sorry for the people who  have come to read his words only to feel like they are spending “borrowed or stolen time, robbing [their] creditors of an hour”. As if Truth were relegated so low compared to the Almighty Dollar.  Are we so at the mercy of our bosses and employers that we feel more bound to give them our time than ourselves?

Time Off

We are made to feel guilty for taking time off. Vacation days? Not if you want to climb the corporate ladder or be seen as a reliable worker.  And if you do take your vacation days, do you really make the most of them?

 “Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day… He cannot afford it." -Thoreau

Certainly we all can’t be on perpetual vacation. How would society function? But how did we get to thinking that it takes working our whole lives just to relax?  You don’t have to go on Wheel of fortune or win the lottery. These day-time and evening game shows irrationally propagate the notion that a vacation requires spending $6,000 at some exotic beach locale. It doesn’t!

Someone suggested to Thoreau if he just laid up some money, he could travel to Fitchburg by train and see the country. Sounds fine as far as it goes, but our resident philosopher recognized that if he started on foot that very day he would beat the man who had to work that day to earn the fare to get there. So, as he says, “Instead of going to Fitchburg you will be working here the greater part of the day.”  And later says by the time these people have scrimped and saved in order to travel, “they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel.”

Later in Walden, we hear of a man who, wanting to be a poet, went to India to make a fortune just so he could come back to pursue his poetry. Thoreau is as direct and as incisive as usual: “He should have gone up [to the] garret at once.”

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“Ordinary people think merely how they shall spend their time; a man of any talent tries to use it.” – Schopenhauer

What are we afraid of? I think we do not know how to adequately use the time we are given. When we are granted a half day off, or a random Monday holiday presents itself, we have this sudden urge to do “something”. But what? Some go shopping.  Many go home and turn on their TV/computer. At the end of a life, is that what you will be proud you did all those afternoons and evenings?

I am reminded when I go out for such trivial amusements, “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”

On Living Authentically

Hopefully by now we see the deadened cycle we willingly participate in. So how can we get out of it? As simple and difficult as it is, we must rigorously live from a place of authenticity and self knowledge.

“We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs…” – Epicurus

In The Age of Reason by Sartre, the protagonist Mathieu struggles with his desire for freedom. Freedom from what was, what is, what is imposed on him. “I will be free”, he utters to the wind. But to remember this bet, this proclamation to himself and the world, he has to be alert. However, like so many of us, “he could do no more than submit to the ancient and monotonous sensation of the daily round”. 

He questions whether he is nothing more than an official, than his working title. “Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he waited.”  He has real dreams to travel and start afresh, “He thought of going to Russia, of dropping his studies, of learning a manual trade . But what had restrained him each time on the brink of such a violent break, was that he no reasons for acting thus. Without reasons, such acts would be mere impulses. And so he continued to wait…”

The problem in this waiting for clear, logical reasoning for travel or career changes is that the guideposts are seldom very logical. There is often little sense behind our strongest desires and decisions, and yet they are often the most intuitively guided. You have to be a little bit of a rebel.
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The point is how best to use what time you have left. Hopefully you choose to do something out of love versus fear. Purely living a monotonous worker bee life for the sake of some uncertain future is not something I would wish on anyone. We are not at the mercy of business or the cult of busyness, we have a say what work (or leisure) we shall be in engaged in. And the busybodies who probe and question you should not be part of the equation.

As Thoreau adroitly posits, “There is no glory so bright but the veil of business can hide it effectually. With most men life is postponed to some trivial business, and so therefore is heaven. Men think foolishly that they may abuse and misspend life as they please and when they get to heaven turn over a new leaf.”

What would you be doing with your life if no one was telling you how to live? Your life will pass, and the clock will count down to zero. I hope you will have put it to good use.

What is your Profession?

People more often than not define us by what we do. In general, but somehow especially with regards to occupation or work. This creates no shortage of anxiety.

"What is your profession?"

Profession. Let’s look at this word.

What are you professing? What do you have to say to your community, your society, your world? Your career hopes are often a reflection of who you are. And yet, it almost seems like if one's ambitions do not involve some "practical" money-making scheme, it is worth re-considering. You are perceived as not measuring up if you choose something in the trades or artistic field.

Then there's the fact that it takes some people more time to figure out their life path. Emerson points out that if a person (thinking of Thoreau) falters or fails at his first business undertakings his community considers him to be as good as ruined. Likewise, if a person fails to choose his career within a year of his collegiate studies, he should be disheartened. As we look at this, it seems peculiar that such harsh denouncements can follow a person, who, like a flower, is unfurling his petals as fast as he can.  (go faster!!) As if our gifts have a prescribed timeline of conduction. As if that timeline were the business of anyone other than that particular person at hand.

Perhaps seeing his friend Thoreau in this predicament of societal ensnarement, and remembering his own young self, Emerson wanted to speak up for this “lost soul”. He suggests that if a person, perhaps unsure of his/her particular direction, tries multiple professions, this would in fact show a breadth of ability (not merely being “scattered”). To his mind, he/she would be worth “a hundred of these city dolls” who pride themselves on strict career monogamy.

Speaking up for this person, “He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.”

It is easier to just follow the delineated modes of living, thinking, acting and feeling. However, we cannot keep allowing ourselves to be thrown into the fire, expecting to come out in a shape we ourselves do not consent to. “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.” Emerson continues, “I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.” 

He addresses the fact that society at large and in the main will not applaud you for your sudden inspirations to act and do as your will instructs. They will see it as a gross insult, an affront to them personally if you should dismiss their directives for your individual lifestyle. “The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard…but the law of consciousness abides.”

Emerson champions the notion that it takes courage to listen to the dictates of your own soul in a world that values conformity. “And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.” With this courage and absolute self trust, “new powers shall appear.” What individual strengths were once only dimly perceived now come forth in their true form.

*When we can listen with the stethoscope pressed to our own heart (and not Mary’s or Joe’s), we will know the way to go.

*When we shut out the noise of the crowd, we discover what we have to profess. 

*Though it takes a lifetime, if we are brave, we will discover our true profession.~

The Cave

*Alarm goes off*. No one stirs.

Heads are drooping, bobbing; arms are crossed over faces, bodies thrown back, passive.

It is a recreation of the scene in Sleeping Beauty when the 3 fairies put a spell on the castle, except on a mass scale. This has been going on for decades, centuries in fact…

*Loud snoring*

We have been asleep for too long.

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Shadows

What does it matter? What matters that I work here or make this amount of money? What does it matter that I have this new outfit to wear, or this event to go to?

We are made to believe that This* is all there is. This Game, with no prize worthy of the hunt, takes up all our efforts, all our waking hours. But are we really awake?

As Henry David Thoreau suggests, “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.”

Think back to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. We are the prisoners tied up, facing the wall of the cave, where society behind us plays with puppets before a fire, creating shadows on the wall. Growing up as we have we can only believe what we see to be soundest Truth.

We have been deceived. We have been entranced.

Throughout history, it is only the poets, the writers, the philosophers, the artists who have parted the veil of Reality. They have scaled the heights and through their inspiration gone beyond the cave into the light of Truth. They have been good enough, once seeing the Truth, Beauty and Goodness with their own eyes to descend back into the darkness to tell of what lies above.

But meanwhile, down in the cave, “shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”- Thoreau.

But isn’t this Reality? Not as society says it is.

So what matters? What has any everlasting value? If the things of this world pass, what can we hold onto? Again, Thoreau seems to have an answer:

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.” Thoreau suggests we live this superficial life “because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.”

Only when we are awake, truly awake, do we realize what shams and shadows play about the cave wall, and can name them as such.

The Veil

This sleep, it closets us, shutters us, and stuffs us down into our very being, until we consist of concentric layers and our very essence remains at the bottom of the funnel.

So what penetrates through the seeming empty slumber? Art, Music, Literature, Kindness, Nature…these puncture through the portal…we get glimpses of an Ideal existence. As L.M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) suggests,

 “It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realms beyond-only a glimpse-but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.”

Awakening

As Thoreau adroitly points out, “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

 So how do we awaken, and learn to keep ourselves awake? 

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." Thank you Thoreau. My advice: Be present. But also transcend what "matters" in the world's eyes. You are Infinite; do not allow yourself to be tied down. Even if you have metaphorical stones thrown at you, 'twould be better to see the Light and try to share it than be trapped in a deadened state forever.

Loss is More

So you washed your phone. Or you bumped a cup of tea onto your laptop. Maybe you lost your iPod. Does that make you any less of a functional human being? You still have air in your lungs, working limbs, the world is still out there to explore. What more could you want?

The fact is, whether we want it or not, we do become dependent on technology. We begin to think these things which are added “wants” constitute as implied “needs.”

Being the space cadet who washed her phone in her coat, I could have reacted in several ways. I could have freaked out, I could have blamed someone, I could have cried. Instead, I remained calm; the kind of calm in which you want to be angry, but realize you have only yourself to blame so you stay silent.

After checking out the Oracle cards in slight exasperation, I reached for The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho, and turning to any page, found the only thing that could have reached me. It was a quote from the ‘good book’:

"When I sent you without money bag, knapsack, and sandals, you lacked nothing."

The tears began to stream. The fact is, we come into the world with nothing, we go out of the world with very little, and You Can’t Take It With You.  My distress over the loss of my mobile device was laughable. Thoreau never had a phone; he bemoaned the incoming Railroad, and who the hell thinks of railroads as being modern technology? As for my other favorite, Emerson would never have conceived of mourning over something as trivial as this.

We could all take a hint from Montaigne in his essay “Of Solitude”, where he talks of how we have much to learn from those who live with less,

“I see to what limits natural necessity goes; and, seeing the poor beggar at my door, often merrier and healthier than myself, I put myself in his place, I try to fit my mind to his bias. …I easily resolve not to take fright at what a humbler man than I accepts with such patience.

And he talks of how we should act in times when Fortune smiles on us,

….And knowing how precarious these incidental comforts are, I do not fail, while in full enjoyment of them, to make it my sovereign request of God that he make me content with myself and the good things I bring forth.”

Maybe it’s having watched the documentary, Minimalism, on Netflix for the second time later that night, but I felt freer having one less item to distract me from the task of Living. We hear of people who do intentional “no screen time”, for an evening, a day, even a week. Rarely do we embrace such inadvertent loss. And yet, maybe it’s the best thing that can happen. Sometimes we must lose something if only to realize there’s so much more now to gain.