Pascal? Kafka? Really?

So if you tell me to do something I won't do it.  Don't ever tell me what to do if you want me to do it.  I won't take my hand off a hot stove if you imply that it would be a good idea.

After mom and dad and Kenner died I felt the need to explore a solution, some solution, part of a solution, in a venue outside of The Program.  My recovery is not only in the rooms of recovery.  Our literature urges us to make use of all of the tools for good, right living that the world offers up: doctors, religion, psychology, philosophy, music, art, nature.  There's a ton of good shit out there.

I read books on grieving.  I read a few on depression and anxiety.  I read a book on aging with gratitude and grace that blew me away.  Now I'm reading one called: "The Art of Wasted Day" by Patricia Hampl, an American essayist.  I'm being blown away by this book as well.  It is written by a striver and is resonating with a striver like me, a dude who knows the concept of "It's Never Enough."

Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem. I sense I’m not alone. Fretful, earnest, ambitious strivers—we take no comfort in existence unfurling easefully as God intended. For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished.  On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done.  It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

The beauty of arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own purpose, rippling with contentment and curiosity. One’s own idiosyncrasy reveals itself as a pleasure, without other value—but golden, amusing, integrity hard-won and now at its leisure.  Hand on heart, this life of the mind, lolling—tending to life’s real business. This latter stage of existence suggests that the ultimate task, the real to-do, is: waste your life in order to find it.  Who said that?  Or said something like that.  Jesus? Buddha? Bob Dylan? Somebody who knew. 

This particular battle between striving and serenity may be distinctly American. The struggle between toil and Real Life.  I was mistaken. The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.

How about just giving up? Giving up the habit of struggle.  Maybe it’s a matter of giving over.  To what?  Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” that phrase I fastened on to describe the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world when I decided to embrace that key occasion of sin—the daydream.  Happiness redefined as looking out the window and taking things in - not pursuing them.  Taking in whatever is out there, seeing how it beckons.  And letting it go.

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." 

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks.

"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Pascal