A while back a group of friends and I were talking about our hopes and dreams for the future. One friend was lamenting the fact that, due to their present circumstances, they wouldn’t be able to work toward one of their particular dreams for the conceivable future. I tried to encourage them by urging them to take a long view of life, to consider its many stages, but I was quickly cut off by another friend trying to be equally encouraging by urging a positive attitude and immediate action despite the circumstances.
This conversation has stuck with me. What is our fascination with doing everything now? The older I get, the more I seem to take comfort in the fact that life is long, that there will be time for many many things, but that maybe some of those things will have to wait a long time. Certainly this line of thinking can be problematic, but the principle is sound. I have found this longer view to be so freeing and frankly, so sustainable. It helps me to focus on what is most important for me to do now and that is where I expend my efforts. So many people seem hurried all the time and while there are times for that for sure, I try to pace myself and have made it a point to live in an unhurried way.
I have lots of friends who are busier than I am and for someone who wants to do good things in this world, that is sometimes hard for me. But I will be damned if I wake up five years from now burnt out or off track or both. Not that my friends will, this isn’t an indictment at all; I am just pondering why we don’t think within a longer horizon. Last week a former professor who I respect very much, a man who works many hours, told me I was being very productive for a young father. This has meant a lot to me and that tells me that I am a bit insecure about how much I get done. So please don’t take this as a “Look at me, I am great” sort of post. This theme has just been on my mind and I am puzzled at our culture’s almost neurotic refusal to consider a perspective other than the short term.
I seem to be alternating between two threads in this post: hurriedness and a thinking within a longer view. Clearly there are lots of reasons for business, but I have a feeling that these two strands are related. I think a short term view lends itself toward being harried. And, not that productivity is an end in itself, but my hunch is that a longer view helps us be more productive when it is all said and done. Think tortoise and the hare.
Last night I was reading my favorite new author, Wendell Berry, and he spoke to this issue. He was comparing the “orthodox” agribusiness emphasis on profit, production and expansion to the agricultural focus on health, skill, care, relationships, etc. I will leave off with this (don’t let the simplistic gender language distract you):
“Production, some would say, is the male principle in isolation from the female principle. Thus isolated, the male principle wants to exert itself absolutely; it wants to “do everything at once” –which is, of course, what doomsday will do. But reproduction, which is the male and female principles in union, is nurturing, patient, resigned to the pace of seasons and lives, respectful always of the nature of things. Production’s tendency is to go “all out”; it always aims to set a new record. Reproduction is more conservative and more modest; its aim is not to happen once, but to happened again and again and again, and so it seeks a balance between saving and spending.”
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