The Nirvana Fallacy

Imagine my delight when I ran across the nirvana fallacy on Wikipedia!  (There, that's my one exclamation mark for this post.)  I am not making this up - here it is, not as a Buddhist idea, but one on the list of accepted fallacies.  It is the error of  -

comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. . . . [in working any problem] the choice is not between real world solutions and utopia; it is a choice between one realistic possibility and another which is merely better.

Now, turn from Western philosophy to the Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which I did yesterday on my iPad, for a while back I bought vol. 2 of his collected writings, a big book, a great bargain. I love reading it on this thing, being able to leave notes and highlights and not bother Tom if I'm reading in bed (it is backlit). And I really enjoy his unique, colloquial voice, which has been preserved in these carefully edited talks.  I happened to have left off last time reading about work.

Strangely enough the transcendental thing, the profound thing, exists in the kitchen sink, in the factory. It may not be particularly blissful to look at; it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we read about, but somehow the actual reality exists there, in the simplicity of people and working with people and dealing with every problem that we are given. . . . The people who wrote the Vedas and the Dhammapada and all the scriptures were not intellectual, high-strung people.

Just the other day I found myself in an interesting conversation about this at brunch.  My friend, who teaches yoga, brought up the subject of nirvana, and stages of levels of bliss, or perhaps higher consciousness, that they work to attain in her discipline.  So I tried to explain how Zen teachers work to get us grounded in this. I quoted the line from Hakuin's Song of Zazen:

         This very place is the lotus land!

All this seemed to be news to the man sitting beside us, who had been talking about how bad a particular bar is to do karaoke in, and who asked a lot of questions that encouraged us, not to spar, but to explain our particular spiritual paths.

Most certainly I do not reject bliss when it comes my way, don't get me wrong. But you need to be careful with it. A well-rounded spiritual experience can leave you with your feet barely touching the ground and a disinclination to take the trash to the curb. But life is about carrying out the trash.  In fact, we are made of what was once dirt and (as the Zen Masters like to say) shit.  Trash, and these bodies will become trash again, to enter the great cycle of fertilizing life.

About Stanley in the cartoon above - what is his true self at the end of all his effort?  The guy with a briefcase and umbrella and morning news, in a suit, on his way to work.  Getting to know and be that guy through and through, or that crazy poet or politico or accountant or dog breeder that you are, that's the work.

Meaningful Work

Full moon over Westbrook's

I've known many people who were unhappy because their work was not meaningful - maybe that was more common in the 1960's and 70's.  But I've noticed that most of the work in this world is very indirectly related to reality, like doing the quality control on bearings or heck, underwear elastic.  I myself had jobs I thought were unimportant and meaningless.  One was being secretary to a group of engineers who kept the calenders running at Firestone.  So, Firestone made tires, they are made with calenders, who cared?  Now I see it better - if you can be involved in the making of a good product that's needed, if you can bring a pleasant attitude to that, it's not meaningless just because your own work is very indirect (typing letters).

Full moon, impressionistic rendering

Many people in the low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry resent their jobs and show it.  But at the White Castle we like to frequent, there is a woman at the drive-through window who is convincingly cheerful and glad to help you.  We look forward to seeing her.

This morning I called my doctor's office to get an appointment about this painful rash.  When I told the receptionist I thought I had shingles, she said "Oh, you poor dear."  And you know, I felt a little warmer: somebody knew what it's like.  I believe there are few jobs in which you don't have the opportunity to be kind, helpful, even compassionate.  A friendly face, a smile - these things are meaningful in this suffering world, and probably more important than you think.

A useless post about practically nothing

I subscribe to a (free) blog by one Peter Bregman, who writes often about time/self management. Mostly, I like his personality.  Of course, time management is a scoff in my life now.  When you are old, well, aging is a breakdown of systems, parts wearing out, though the shock absorbers do get better with practice. Your muscles actually lose a percentage every year, so you exercise to just stay even. And your brain slows down too, being busy with not falling.

The thing is, most time management is about Getting Things Done.  I myself, in fact, have a book by that title sitting right here at my relatively useless right hand.  I came across a reference to it recently, probably in Bregman's blog, and thought, I have that book somewhere.  Yep.  With post-its on it, too. I can't tell what year I bought it, but I was obviously ambitious.

The book asks us to sit down for a few hours or longer and write down every single damn thing we want to get done.  Everything.  All the things that have piled up around you for years, if you're a regular human being living the good life in America. For instance, that box of old photos and slides from the film era, which I have mentioned before: it cries out to be gone through, throw out the many bad pictures, convert the rest to digital - you know.  At least do the pictures of Sherlock, beloved cat of many years.  At least that.  And I bet you have a box like that too - though maybe some of my readers are so young they have always been digital. An amazing thought.

Well, I thought of writing that down - just that one undone project - and I quailed.  [to shrink back in fear, cower - and the synonyms are great]  To even think of seriously setting out to do that project, buying one of those converter things, creating a[nother] big mess . . . no, I thought, I'd do better to do something small, like figure out where to keep my headscarves.  Somehow they have all ended up on top of my dresser in a heap.

You know I must have a larger point, and it is this: when you are old enough you get to stop Getting Things Done.  You don't need to accomplish stuff anymore.  You are done accomplishing.  You can have the great pleasure of . . . doing not much. And knowing that it doesn't matter.

Setting goals in the middle of a hurricane

Having a bipolar body/mind (chemistry?) means a life fundamentally different from the usual mind - which I did have until my early thirties.  (And in a sense did have while heavily medicated for twenty years.)  Usual mind gets up much the same every day.  Feels predictably, not excessively, perceives much the same, can be "in a rut."  I am talking about unawakened mind.

There are things about me that stay the same, that "characterize" me.  Say, an interest in Joe Brainard's work, a tendency toward analytic thought, love of color, need for solitude.  But each day I am in a different state as if this particular outcropping of DNA and experience were dropped into a vat of liquid that is hot or cold, dim or murky or crystal-clear.  Or as if I got out of bed, opened the window and looked onto a different landscape.  Of course, we always do that, as things change.  But I mean radically different.  One day dishwater sameness of tired houses and neighbors, a dull world.  Another day the view from a rest area somewhere between Phoenix and Flagstaff overlooking a pine forest.  Another day the charming, simple hut of a haiku poet.  Do you see what I mean?

This is a new thing as I stroll into the second year since my transplant - dealing with this very changeable outlook/perspective/energy/attitude.  For many years as my kidneys failed I was pretty predictably dull and quiet.  Looking back, I see a long subdued depression.  Two years ago I took up knitting.  My favorite thing that year was going to a yarn store, all the colors.  I washed one of the scarves I made the other day and felt tender toward myself, working so hard to create something, to do something.

Now this.  I am thinking how to set some goals for myself, structure some work time, now that it seems possible to have some time not dedicated to just staying alive. This is daunting in a life that changes so radically, not just the mind, but the aging body (four weeks ago today I fell and broke my arm).  In my files in the cloud I found this quote from an article in Harvard Business Review:

In work, your goal should be to spend most of your time at the intersection of three spheres: what you like to do, what you do best, and what adds value to the [world].

As you see, I changed his word "organization" to my word, "world."  I guess when you are retired, that is your organization. I am imagining the above in a diagram of three interlocking spheres, picturing things being something I like to do.  Stay open.

The Dude Abides

A frivolous poem from my journal -

pro-gress
e-gress
di-gress
un-gress

 Maybe ungress is "not a word," meaning only that no one has written it down until now, but maybe it should be.  Sounds Zen to me -
ungress: to not go forward.  Just to stand there.

frivolous: not serious in content, attitude, or behavior

serious: concerned with work or important matters rather than play or trivialities.  Work is . . . what is work? you reap something from it.

progress: movement as toward a goal, advancement.  gress is from ancient languages - to advance, to go, to walk. (The opposite of progress is Congress.)

If you must walk purposefully, at least digress - turn aside, stray, wander.A form of play.

So many people work so hard to get somewhere.  But somewhere doesn't exist. When you get there, there's no there there.  What is somewhere?  A better place, materially, one that feels secure.  A time when you can ah-ha be frivolous, have fun.

If you must do serious things, do them in ruffles. Do them with a clown nose on.  Like Bernie Glassman, above on the right.  That's him doing dokusan (private spiritual interview) with Jeff Bridges, famous for The Big Lebowski, an unserious movie in which a spirit of play has the last word. (The title of this post.)  Glassman has accomplished big, serious things, a mandala of services for the homeless, retreats at Auschwitz.  You can read an interview with him here on Tricycle, I hope.  (Like everyone else, Tricycle is starting to limit content to those who pay for it - gasp. I find being a subscriber worth it.)

If you must work, play at it. Oh, don't make me get started on What is play? It is anything done with a play-full attitude.  Which is an attitude of getting nowhere, of exploring - how high can a sand castle go?
Where does this trail go?  What would I do if I don't get a damn thing done today?

This morning I am thinking about the Protestant Work Ethic. It is a long way from the dense surround of scholarship about this way of thinking to our actual life as creatures that feel, live, and die. It calls to my mind a poem I wrote several years ago. I liked the original, but lost it in revisions, playing with meter and rhyme, which is an ironic footnote to the project.

By way of explanation, the Beineke is a library at Yale. Its walls are made of thin marble that casts a certain pale underwater light. It's hard to tell in the photo; those are stacks on the left and marble "windows" on the right.

The Beinecke displays a Gutenberg Bible, which is not that old, but is precious - why? Partly because of our thoughts - we assign a historic value to it. Partly because, like us, it is fragile. I am often aware of how fragile the word is, printed or stored as a collection of electronic impulses somewhere. I know this image is not correct, yet it seems to me there is a bitstream floating now around the earth.

The building's rare book library contains various collections of papers thought to be important, such as those of the poet H.D. When I visited, copy machines were not as widely used as they are now - to think, it was even before the internet! One sat and copied by hand from the handwritten miscellany of someone who is dead and forgotten except by a handfull of scholars. It was the very image of the quiet isolation of scholarship.

Scholarship at the Beinecke Library

Precious papers settle unseen at night
in acid-free boxes. Submerged in the light
that falls through marble here, by day
scholars chronicle poets.
You cannot write

sprung rhythm on their index cards.
You need huge white
boards covering every wall,
hasty scrawls,
dazzled eyes.

I see that in this poem, written before I got seriously absorbed in Buddhist thought and imagery, I was considering the difference between the world of thought and the reality that words do not capture, but poetry tries to.

Why they call it work

Nothing is much weirder than thinking that Being a Poet is your work. Or actually, Work, with a capital W. For one thing, as I have often noted before, you don't get paid for it, unless by a sort of accident you win a grant or contest. But I am pretty sure there is no salaried job whose description of duties is --
1. write poetry.
If there were, I am afraid the job description would go on --
2. get it published.
Aye, there's the rub. That's where the work (with a small w) comes in. To get published you have to write well enough - that's years and years of studying good poetry, writing and revising, learning to throw stuff out, or at least move it to a file titled "unpublishable." And transcending rejections to submit your work time and again.

Yesterday we had an excellent visit with the kidney doctor. He pronounced himself as happy as we are with my latest labs, which actually show some improvement in kidney function, perhaps because my anemia has been fixed. I don't have to go back for two months. Released!

Furthermore, the Fourth of July is the date set by my orthopedic doctor when I can leave off my air cast and ankle support and walk around like a regular person. I am already walking more, trying to get muscles toned up after five months of being almost chairbound. My ankles do not hurt!

All that, and I passed the neurological exam of my aging mind. So you can imagine that I feel frisky. You know what that means - if you feel good, it's time to get back to work.

I have been writing during all this; writing is what I do to find myself and express myself. But I haven't made much effort to finish stuff and send it out. Even the blog seemed to take too much energy during this storm of illness. My time is still eaten up with tedious, frustrating phone calls regarding insurance and prescription delivery, and with the ordinary demands of life, like deadheading and watering the Wave petunias in the hanging basket, which have turned out to be demanding Divas. Everything takes minutes, and then the hours are gone.

But I am back to work today, and have been devoting myself to exploring contests where I can submit a certain long, narrative poem. This is work of the tedious, ordinary sort, not as pleasing as tending my potted plants. And it will be more work when I move on to the task of revision, trying to perfect the poem, line by line, word by word, does that comma need to be there? Writing a poem you are pleased with feels like a miracle in which you got to participate. But revising it takes a sharp, clear mind and a sort of ruthless detachment. It's the hardest mental work I know.

At one retreat I wrote a question for the Teacher, "How do I make myself write the book I need to write." (At the time, I thought I knew what that book was.) He read the question aloud and sort of laughed, and said, "Your work is your work," with a shrug. And went on to say that he, too, found aspects of working on his books tedious. Work is not always inspired or inspiring, and it is not always a pleasure.

My daughter, whose consulting business requires a lot of tedious travel, also shrugged when I talked to her about this. "It's not fun," she said matter-of-factly. "That's why they call it work."

Since I am, after all, a writer, these words led me to months of exploring the words work and play. I haven't got very far with it. It's cool when you love what you're doing, and it feels like play, but we all know that not every morning is like that. Some days you remember the First Noble Truth, which people translate various ways, but it goes like this: Sometimes life is hard. Unsatisfactory. Unpleasant. Or at least boring.
[image: our new cat, Sheba, questioning everything I said.]

Will work for fun

[dishtowels from Anthropologie]
One of the benefits of being disabled is not having to work - and not having to look for work. It helps to be 66, and of a generation that felt entitled to retire (and actually got to accumulate pensions). Now we keep hearing that many people will have to work all their lives even as there aren't enough jobs for the young.

There are a lot of people popping up to help people look for work these days. They don't seem to know anything more than people knew 25 years ago, when I found myself out of a job I didn't like, and took a career change workshop. It was a small-group format packed with good advice and useful exercises. The only trouble was, nobody did the assignments. So in that way it was much like school of any kind. And the assignments were the hardest ones you ever had, starting with refining an objective: What do you want to do?

The teachers - most of whom were self-appointed, which is not uncommon among career counselors and life coaches - were idealistic. Their ideal: you have a chance now to change your life, to set out to get the job you'll love. The fact is, none of us could actually think that way. All we could think of was a paycheck. All we wanted to know was how to get someone to pay us for something. Our secret job objective was "Anything," we joked, but you weren't allowed to put that on your resume. I imagine that's why many in the small class still hadn't come up with an objective or a resume by the end of the six weeks.

I remember getting hung up in one session that included a presentation of your dreams and talents, and group brainstorming on ideas for work you could do. People thought I should write children's books, and I knew they were right. It was what I had been doing in my free time for years. How could I explain to them that it's almost unheard of to make a living at that, hard to break in even then, and if you did get a contract, it fell through; or it took two leisurely years before the book was published and you got any money. This is why artists who don't live at home have "day jobs" - something that pays the rent.

It's actually very hard to make a living doing something fun; after all, a whole lot of people want to do that. In fact, there is probably a shortage of people who actually do want to work rather than play.

Moreover, if you're paid to do something, I fear it would not be so much fun anymore; it would turn into work. I experienced this after I got paid for having fun, that is, got a no-string arts grant to encourage my writing. Applying for a grant is tedious and maddeningly bureaucratic anyway, not suited to the artistic temperament. And once you have seen you can actually get money that way, you become anxious to do it again. Artists live with the particular danger that we might commodify our work, twist it in order to make it marketable and forget why we started doing it in the first place. Many somewhat successful people end up teaching their art form; but by and large teaching drains a huge amount of creative energy and eats your time. And it is definitely not the same kind of work as strolling in the woods, maybe writing a haiku.

What is the question, anyway? How about, How can I earn enough to survive and be content with my life? This goes in many directions, and might include noticing what is enjoyable about the work you do now, or have done. I can't help thinking of my neighbor Cindy telling me the other day that she loved the sun so much, she was enjoying scooping up the dog poop in the yard. I did understand, though I don't think I'm that spiritually advanced.

But I do enjoy some common, ordinary tasks, like ironing linen and cotton dishtowels. The clean smell of the steam, the beautiful way towels turn out, how pretty they look stacked. Women of an older generation often agree with me; some of us remember how tedious it was to iron five or six white shirts a week, trying to beat your best time (15 minutes), so that dishtowels were a sort of break.

When the lymphedema in my right arm got bad two years ago due to an unlucky accident, I decided I should give up ironing, except sometimes a collar and placket. No more dishtowels. The arm is problem enough if I behave. This is the kind of little relinquishment you do on a daily basis as you age. If I had a positive attitude I'd say it keeps life interesting.

Taking a sabbath

Adena Brook this time of year.

I don't know when I began to think taking Sunday off was a good idea. I remember the years we would go to church and then, I'm guessing, out to lunch, and then to Border's and buy easily $50 worth of stuff. Books, magazines, impulse purchases. Who were we to stand outside the consumer economy? We joked about it. Somehow, when you're young you think your excesses are cute.

Now I really do take Sunday off from the flow of responsibilities. I don't do anything I don't want to do. This seems to prevent me from doing anything that feels like "work" or "should," though sometimes I'll do laundry or cook, and enjoy it. I seldom do anything special.

I've gotten used to having this sometimes boring day. An interesting subject, boredom, whose opposite is excitement I guess; I seem to have gotten bored with excitement these days.

On Sunday, the burdens drop to the floor. I don't work problems. I am usually energized Monday, write a lot, make out frisky lists of things to do, and get to the health club. Monday actually feels good, something I could never say about Monday on any of the jobs I had. At the same time, I often felt disappointed that my weekend had not yielded more fun. Fun is a big subject at one point in your life.

Work. The problem with being paid to do something is, it is almost never something you would do if nobody paid you. My daughter Cassie told me reasonably, "That's why they call it work." Well, poets don't necessarily know these things.

Work, why?

In my opinion, opinions do more harm than good. Take opinions about who's "saved" (?) and how, and who isn't. It can do a family no good, in my experience, to discuss differences of opinion about things like this. Much better everybody should just pare potatoes together and enjoy Thanksgiving.

Yet, I read op-ed, informed opinion you could call it, avidly. Today I read a column in the NY Times by Lisa Belkin, who writes about parenting. It is a good column, but I got sidetracked by a sentence.

". . . modern parenthood, where we often hold many contradictory opinions at once. Want to work but also want to stay home."

"Want to work." I wondered, What is it you really want, when you "want to work"? At first, I had difficulty answering. I have always had the nature of a Poet, compounded by resistance against parents who worked compulsively, and a dislike of being told what to do. (I think most people feel that way, but hide it better than me.)

So, while I am quickly bored by assigned tasks, I am endlessly amused strolling through the Whetstone Prairie. Just being there, with no responsibilities at all. I see work as something that in the state of nature we would do only to get something we need, like food. Just being, now that's a condition worth working for.