Dear friend,
For the first time, I’m writing a book. Counting my words last week, estimating I was halfway done, I realized I’m only one-fifth deep. Panic arrived. Had I milked my subject dry? Did I have nothing else to give? How long would this project take?
The ADHDer in me wants to rush to the finish line, if only so I can start plunging into the honeymoon phase of a new project. But when I sink inward and seek outward, a knowledge greater than I arrives. The way forward, it guides, is not to rush, but to slow.
I am not writing my way to the lookout view at the top of the mountain. The peak is not the point. I am writing the mountain, befriending its paths and waters, its rocks and flowers, insects, reptiles, and mammals. My feet are stinky and blistered and swollen. My hair is matted. But the river is talking to me, asking me to listen. And if I lurk in self pity or sprint prematurely to a peak, I won’t hear what she has to say.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna advises Arjuna, “The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results… Competing with no one, they are alike in success and failure and content with whatever comes to them.”
Here is the spiritual challenge before me, before all of us:
How do we act without concern for the results of our actions?
In Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, there is a character who organized his life around “an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion.” He set about a plan to spend ten years learning to watercolor. The following twenty years, he would travel the world painting five hundred seascapes. When each was done, he would send them to a craftsman who would turn the painting into a jigsaw puzzle. Then, after his travels, he would reassemble the jigsaws in order. When complete, each seascape could be returned to the place it was painted and dipped in a solution to emerge as a clean sheet of paper. “Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.”
I love this image - this commitment to a routine practice that erases itself upon completion. The character was not motivated by wealth or acknowledgement, fame or even connection. He had some concern for the result - he wanted to complete the task he chose - but he had no external reward for completion. Completing his work returned him to where he started - a blank page.
I wonder - what am I at threat of losing if I focus on the result instead of writing instead of the action?
Presence. Curiosity. Joy.
How do I write without concern for the end-result - the book, the agent, the publisher - but also not sabotage the writing’s potential to offer itself to the world?
In a goal-setting workshop, writer Julia Poole advised us to answer two questions. Our answers, she alluded, would be our compasses. They would guide us back home when we got lost in ego or fear or boredom.
Question 1: Why do you write?
My compass:
For the joy of clarifying that which I don’t yet understand
For the music of language
For the thrill of activated imagination
To listen to solitude’s wisdom
To connect the disparate
To give shadows light
To honor beings, memories, and feelings
Question 2: What do you value about writing?
My compass:
Spiritual attention
Time in solitude’s inner worlds
The un-aloneness of the right words
Wise sage Julia Poole. This compass leads away from the fruit of action and towards the reason for acting.
Lord Krishna extends his spiritual challenge to Arjuna even further. The wise, he says, “perform all work in the spirit of service.”
My ego sighs with relief. It is burdensome for her to carry the weight of being perfect. This isn’t about you, I tell her. Go take a nap.
When she is quiet and sleeping, when her whining and worrying has stopped, Truth will sometimes walk into the room. Truth is so soft-spoken, I have to strain to hear them.
What if you write this book and it’s terrible? What if no one wants to read it - not even you? Would it have been worth it?
Yes.
How do you know?
I don’t.
That is faith.
It is an offering. If to no one else, to God.
Dear friend, why do you do what you do? What is your reason for action outside of its result?
Until next time,
A