My point is that humans can make a high-stakes drama out of anything. Certainly we moderns are no slouches compared to even our first-century ancestors. There is no work we humans do - no matter how inherently small, quiet and domestic - that we can't somehow find a way to make it BIG, complex, operational, challenging. To say nothing of globally arduous - and even agonizing. At the same time, there's no work we do that's so intrinsically complex and arduous, SO globally loud and overwhelming and interconnected, that God cannot somehow uncomplicate it. Or disentangle it. Perhaps even make it gentler, and quieter, and more local again.*
*Indeed, just from my own past two years' experience I can testify - and not just with home projects either - how uncanny are the myriad, gently insinuative ways in which our Maker may cause us to spill and drop and break things ever more gradually less . . . and less . . . and all, bizarrely enough, while actually saving us time. Which of course you're free to dismiss as so much anecdotal evidence. RIGHT: as if these infinitesimal building-blocks of personal training and discipleship have not, time and time again, proved themselves the immovable cornerstones of much bigger efforts, initiatives, even institutions. Then again, when hasn't Man Almighty been busy inventing "operations" either too small or too big for God to enter in? Which, naturally, leaves almighty US no choice but to be the sole lords of these "mere human" domains.
But please note the kind of work, the quality of result I'm talking about here: not more sloppy, or makeshift, or passable, or "good enough," but at once both genuinely easier, and more excellent.
Of course I'm aware how much all this goes against our Modern Grain. I realize this Hypermodern Global World is not only an action-packed, but an (often intensely) action-valuing place. Maybe even a world that sort of - well, worships Action. And arguably to such a degree as no human time or place ever did before. Why, "JUST DO IT," right? I mean, it's not like any act of mere quiet contemplation can ever shed real light on this person, place or thing - whatever it is - that I'm so fiercely anxious to get to work on. Indeed (a really hands-on, practical mover-shaker might argue), what place can these virtues of antiquity - or in particular, any such antique mode as we used to call contemplative - have in a 24/7 globe where creative and productive activity literally never stops?
At the same time, note that our traditional medical ethics begins with the words "First, do no harm." Almost as if to suggest that some - I don't know - quaint spirit of contemplation? might actually add a note or two of cautionary, harm-preventive grace to our efforts. Whereas we hypermoderns, in our futuristic wisdom, seem able to grasp only the curative mode. And so presumably have rendered the old maxim obsolete. Our modern injunction (did we dare to advertise openly such a thing) should probably read "First do SOMETHING."
Do anything, it would seem. As in, "Even if you haven't a clue, just keep on doing something until you do it right, OR discover the right thing to do, OR . . ."
Which surely is the most wondrous thing about any incessant, unstoppable, whirlwind human activity: I just keeping piling more and more new, self-interposed data onto my original subject, lest there be so much as a pause, or breath, in which the infernal smoke of my work can clear. Thereby making me at last able to see the thing I'm trying to work - or change, or reconfigure - for what it is. Apart, I mean, from my own machinations.
And again, note this Age is especially proud of how it likes not just doing things - and preferably with as few words as possible* - but also doing them up BIG. And with a big splash. Apparently this is one of the grand wisdoms of globalization (or of the militarization that seems always to accompany it?): Everything's better when done on a large scale, and preferably made a grand spectacle of. "SHOCK AND AWE," as I believe was the fashionable phrase at one time. After all, whatever it takes to make the world happier, more peaceful, more productive, right? Beijing, Baghdad, Benghazi, bank bailouts - again, the sky's the limit.
*Definitely not words of explanation, or apology, in any case. Much less words of inquiry or reassurance.
Yet surely by now, one might hope, some of us have grown tired, poor and miserable enough to venture a cautious question: i.e., Is striving to make a hyped-up, arduously global ordeal of just about everything - and with words that only further agitate and "hype it up" - is that really the key to doing the job right?
Yet surely by now, one might hope, some of us have grown tired, poor and miserable enough to venture a cautious question: i.e., Is striving to make a hyped-up, arduously global ordeal of just about everything - and with words that only further agitate and "hype it up" - is that really the key to doing the job right?
IV
What is it, then, about exaggerating the difficulty, or seriousness - or complexity - of a pending task that makes us not only unhappier (and often crueler) in the doing of it, but at the same time more full of ourselves, and more demanding of ourselves?
What is it, I wonder, about doing even the simplest jobs in a tense, self-scrutinizing, other-comparing hurry - full of the importance of our task and yet, it would seem, utterly dismissive of that task's own natural rhythms and flow (having "digitized" it, so to speak)? What is it about doing that, in particular, that almost invariably, sooner or later ministers to our pride? And not just any old pride either. At least not the kind we most conventionally think of - one that's smug, comfortable, self-congratulating. But rather is it the sort of pride that is above all ambitious, and anxious. Sometimes even brutally self-critical. Only not with the species of criticism we most need - the kind that actually makes us into BETTER, kinder, more attentive and discerning human beings, and human workers. As opposed to workers who are just busier, harsher, more nagging and complaining. Or, in a word, more perfectionist.
What is it, then, about exaggerating the difficulty, or seriousness - or complexity - of a pending task that makes us not only unhappier (and often crueler) in the doing of it, but at the same time more full of ourselves, and more demanding of ourselves?
What is it, I wonder, about doing even the simplest jobs in a tense, self-scrutinizing, other-comparing hurry - full of the importance of our task and yet, it would seem, utterly dismissive of that task's own natural rhythms and flow (having "digitized" it, so to speak)? What is it about doing that, in particular, that almost invariably, sooner or later ministers to our pride? And not just any old pride either. At least not the kind we most conventionally think of - one that's smug, comfortable, self-congratulating. But rather is it the sort of pride that is above all ambitious, and anxious. Sometimes even brutally self-critical. Only not with the species of criticism we most need - the kind that actually makes us into BETTER, kinder, more attentive and discerning human beings, and human workers. As opposed to workers who are just busier, harsher, more nagging and complaining. Or, in a word, more perfectionist.
Perfectionist: Almost as if all real perfection depended solely on us, and always had. As if you and I were gazing out, for the first time, at the seemingly endless prospect of the original Eden from some grand palatial window. And feeling on the one hand wholly overwhelmed, yet also kind of furiously exhilarated, by what it's going to take to SUBDUE ALL THAT - to bring all that unimproved wilderness to its properly shorn, docile, tightly manicured perfection. All the various, numberless (multi-)tasks required, along with their just-in-time co-ordination - to be completed, indeed, just in time for the record-early deadline.
Talk about Pride in one's work. Along with the humiliation of just about everything (and everyone?) else. And lest we forget, Nature never sleeps: this is a War no less "endless" than its prospect.
Whereas I like to think of humility, in contrast, as a very different kind of agenda and project. Unlike all our Prideful Work or Workful Pride or whatever, it doesn't have to be such a hard, daunting thing to understand, or undertake. Think of humility, then, as that secret (neglected or forgotten) window, into the quietest part of the garden, through which we find ourselves making what may be, in fact, the strangest of all modern discoveries. That window through which we discover that, even in our busiest, demandingest work, what we hypermoderns so often call perfection is no longer the Key. At least not to the WHOLE operation. So that we no longer have to do everything with that angry, tense, micromanagerial meticulousness so popular today. The kind that tells us that not just our task or job, but the entirety of our success, our prosperity, indeed our very survival depends on our being, you know, perfect. ("What do you mean you're not clever? not SMART? You want to sur-VIVE, don't you? You wanna EAT, right?") Almost makes me wonder how simple, humble people in the past ever survived at all, much less made a living, without our monstrous self-promoting, self-judging Egos.
Or think of humility as that refreshment from the Garden in the cool of the day - if we could just open the (industrially-sealed) window. That quiet lowliness, if you will, which teaches us that, just because we no longer have to do everything with Today's hammering, harrowing perfection, we are now free to work even some of the biggest, most operationally urgent jobs wisely, flowingly, grace-fully. Perhaps even beautifully. And sometimes, as often as not, with that peculiarly old, still and haunting beauty - seemingly remote as our own birth - which yet also seems to anticipate and partake of what may be, in fact, the lowliest, most unexpected Perfection of all. Or surely, in any case, One very different from the kind we've grown used to performing in these digital times.
Imagine, if you can, a kind of Perfection that doesn't measure itself by what it disdains and discards, what it wastes and trashes and uses up, but rather by what It yearns to gather up and enfold into Its own bosom - even each one of us, and every creature. So that finally, at long last, you and I can begin to be something of what our Maker created us to be. And finally do the job right. Only this time, of course, minus Almighty Adam's (and Eve's) urgently necessary tension and strain, and anger.
(Edited.)
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