February 18, 2009
- Boats -
Ego is a commitment to being an unchanging permanent self-thing. This causes suffering because everything changes, an ever-flowing-river-sea of information across and through your nervous system.
No commitment is good in such a sea. No commitment that must be held in place to exist, at least. No commitment that is supposed to withstand the flow of that sea. Two boats may connect and move together, but they must be able to move while connected.
A boat clinging to an unmoving rock will just be battered against it by the current until it lets go.
The stronger the current, the more one must flow with it. Yet must we move entirely at the current’s whim? Is there no way to control your movements on the current?
There is. A rudder: a small piece of commitment attached to your boat.
But that small permanence must be able to flow with the boat, and must be used skillfully to guide the already moving boat along with the movement of the current. Push your rudder too sharply against a strong current, and your boat will capsize!
And a boat with no rudder is useless as well. It can do little to help its movement along the current. Although there are times when even the use of the rudder must be abandoned as well.
The key is to figure out how to watch both the rudder and boat’s movement simultaneously.
Perhaps it is better not to be in the boat at all!
This bit of rambling has been brought you by cup #76 at Starbucks:
Oh. And the cup’s right too. Complete and total commitment in work, in play, in love, is deeply liberating as well. That is commitment to flow of the river, the “one fortunate attachment”…
That there on the mug, that’s some powerful working. (Aside from the aforementioned coffee chain being an excellent example of a dark organising force.)
Setting aside also the definition of irony, what we’ve got is a frame for the whole quote that sees commitment as inherently bad and scary, and needs to think of something clever to say to make it palatable. And it’s vague as to what the definition of ‘commit’ is. Suppose I commit to a hypothetical bum job as a lackey for some dark organising force. If I commit truly then that’s an aligning with the flow of things, which will feel entirely natural, and is bound to work out for the best. But sometimes it’s hard to see clearly, and commitment becomes resentful submission. That feels bad, real bad. But hey, there’s an irony, right? This is a fine line between light and dark.
*
I went to a Starbucks in Vancouver, an Englishman 6,000 miles from home. They poured me a coffee, and asked,
‘Do you want room in that?’
- ‘Room?’
‘Room.’
- ‘What’s ‘room’?’
‘Y’know, room for milk’.
Comment by speedbird — February 19, 2009 @ 8:29 am
That’s funny!
I always get “room” in mine.
That’s the whole Christian idea of working for God instead of Man, or the Roman’s or whomever, even if you are a slave.
So then you get people saying the New Testament condones the institution of slavery.
Comment by Ted — February 19, 2009 @ 9:17 am
Yeah, Starbuck’s is really proud of having their own vocabulary for everything. Kind of sounds like a cult, right? ;)
Of course, I actually think Starbucks is a much better company than everybody makes it out to be, and, blogger that I am, I plan to put together a little post on it. Nothing at all against anyone here of course! Just that I’d like a chance to organize my thoughts on the subject. (either that or I’ve completely swallowed their beautiful caffeine filled Kool-Aide…)
More importantly, Speedbird, I think you hit on something very key here (and Ted, you back that up with your comment as well).
The difference between the two is simply the way you choose to see your situation. Both co-exist as parts of the reality, but you can choose to focus more on the commitment part or the servitude part. Whichever part you choose, different paths lie open to you from there.
Commitment to the moment means that you will at some point probably be confronted with the darker aspects of the thing you’ve committed to, since your sort of affirming it’s positive aspects by signing up in the first place (even if those positive aspects are just a reliable paycheck and health care…).
Then it’s your choice to confront these negative aspects and try to resolve them, for the betterment of the whole organization to which your committed. The more committed you are to the good stuff, the more weapons you’ll have to overcome the bad aspects…
On the other hand, if you choose to view your situation as one of servitude, it means that, in some sense, you were forced into it against your will. And so you can either wallow in servitude, which itself is a kind of freeing commitment, or you can work to change yourself so as to rise above and break free of the servitude.
It’s really just a question of what kind of work do you want to be doing?
Not that any of this is easy, but it’s all based on how much of a firm choice you make. And the more choices you make, and the more you follow through on those choices, the more real life experience you have…
That “fine line” is one you have every right to decide on. And no choice is “right” or “wrong”, just each presents you with a completely different “reality”…
Comment by Ian — February 19, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
> That’s the whole Christian idea
Cool… again and again, we keep coming back to ‘render unto Caesar’. Didn’t spot that, thanx.
*
I think what I’m trying to say is there’s nasty things out there masquerading as ‘commitment’. A dark story:
My first ‘real’ job. Interview. A strange man called Ricardo who mumbled a lot. We talked about activities outside work, and about my willingness to put them aside to work long hours if necessary. ‘If a job needs doing, then you set to and do it,’ I equivocated. Ricardo pushed harder, something like, ‘To be clear, I want to make sure you’re committed to this job before I offer it to you. If I asked you to work long hours outside your contract you’d do it, right?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
I got the job, and it was a disaster.
Many, many years later, I realised /why/ this had happened. Ricardo /knew/ I was lying; what was important about the exchange was that he’d been able to make me lie for him on demand. From that point on I was his b*tch…
Scary crap, thinking back, even now.
Comment by speedbird — February 20, 2009 @ 6:38 am
Yeah, that’s a good point.Sometimes thinking you are being polite and telling people what you think they want to hear, ends up being dishonest.
Almost better to be really blunt and up front from the get go. Of course that has its problems too.
I have been struggling with the right balance in my professional life.
Comment by Ted — February 20, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
Speedbird, that’s a great insight. I’ve probably been in the same situation myself and just not noticed… And yeah, proving that you’re a “yes man” will get you a job, but not necessarily an enjoyable one. A good thing for me to remember…
Ted, I think your comment points at what I’m trying to explore with the “keeping track of the rudder and the river” metaphor.
Your explanation sets up two variable we have to keep track of:
Politeness < ----> Offensiveness
Honesty < ----> Dishonesty
Ideally, and I am not any good at this myself, but ideally, we should be able to tell from being in the situation how we should act to be both as completely polite and as completely honest as possible.
For me, the difficulty with achieving that ideal balance is that I cannot keep track of what I want (that is, how honest I am being about what I am trying to communicate) and the situation outside of me (that is, how polite or offensive I am appearing).
The heart of this seems to be an inability to be aware of both our “own” sensations (ie: what we want, what we’re trying to be honest about) and the external world (how others are reacting to our behavior) at the same time.
Yet clearly, at the root of it all, both sensations are occurring within the empty awareness of our awareness, so there is no inherent reason that we can’t be aware of both together…
Comment by Ian — February 20, 2009 @ 2:43 pm