The discipline of elegance?
What is the difference between the Chinese art of not doing, and doing nothing at all? What would seem to some people to be closer to pure inactivity rather than the western ideals of the Protestant work ethic where you put all your individual concentration and effort into a single overwhelming task, can in others become super efficiency on the journey to mastery through effortlessness and leaving yourself behind. Chinese mastery is closer to achieving flow after you have the skill techniques that enable you to reach flow in the first place, such as when you kick a football and you know when you make contact that is going exactly where you want it to. At the centre of the process is the pursuit of flow not the technical mimicry of what a master does, it is about becoming masterful, competent and then confident enough to let go of technique and to accidentally create art from a place of non-being, non-doing, non-self where the loci of creation is not from ego rather it comes from the intuition, their inner self that has no voice except through your being.
Where do you want to create from? I am not just limiting the conversation to the obvious avenues of what we call creative arts, music, writing, sculpture and carpentry, why limit yourself to playtime? What I am interested in is creating a life, a fully realised dramatic re-enactment of a life well lived, a play that lasts a lifetime, but that is full of meaning, has a purpose, comedy, passion, deep love and even a little tragedy, for what is life without a little salt? I do not even need to be the lead, the centre of attention and superstar of the production, I can think of nothing more fun than being in a ensemble of wonderfully inspiring co-creators indulging in improvisation for each other's entertainment, and with a range that expands from comedy to pathos, and which ultimately transcends a lifetime, which is remembered and treasured by the audience long after I am gone, despite being indifferent to the critics.
Which of course is easier said than done, being remembered is a fine ambition but it is not really something in our control. Hard work and dedication does not really guarantee anything on its own despite what we tell the children, the reality is what you really need is a nice huge piece of good luck, the favour of the fates, you do the hard work and dedication to be able to take advantage of it when it comes along. Which despite being true is a harder sell to children as what you really have to love is the process of trying and more importantly failing, you have to appreciate every bruise from falling over as part of the learning process, every fumble of a line, every miss-kick, every chance you take to look stupid or naive, you truly have to produce a lot of bad work before you create work that is great, and you do that by stopping trying to be the kind of person who creates great work.
After all you know that person, and there is a fair chance that you think they are an idiot, a fake, a mere imitation and that you are going to be found out at any moment. Any honest and accurate self-assessment will produce a list of faults that far exceeds any positives, how could such an imperfect being produce anything that is even good. So it comes as a relief when you find out all you need to be is competent at the techniques, as long as you get out of your own way and let the non-doing parts of yourself handle the original creative thought part of the process, things will turn out good enough.
Though the getting out of the way of yourself turns out to be the truly hard part, because there is an awful lot of you inside yourself, like pieces of string that has been stuffed into a tin box for decades, each string of thought gets tangled into a rats nest. They pull and snag us in different direction, distract us from whatever we are currently doing just in case our attention is needed elsewhere, it refuses to settle on a single task despite our best intentions. Intentions which themselves are constantly jostled around in their priority but refused to stay ordered so that we can never attend to whatever is at the top of the list because our attention is constantly being pulled away again to something we neglected for a few minutes.
The only way to escape this finger trap is to stop, stop your doing, stop attending to your needs and desires, stop your concern for your future, your embarrassment or worry about the past. Instead turn in to non-doing, non-being, not having, it means that you have to stop distracting yourself with endless pointless task, you have to stop running towards the finish line of getting that job, promotion, degree in engineering and stop. You have to stop before you can decide where you even want to go, whether you chose the direction you are travelling, the priorities that you have in life. You have to engage in true inactivity, not just doing nothing but actively non-doing, because it is the nature of a vacuum to be filled, to maintain a state of emptiness takes more force than you can imagine, more determination, strength and concentration that I currently find plausible for me to have. True solitude that is chosen, treasured and maintained, relies entirely on finding your own company satisfying and fulfilling, to appear to do nothing useful in the eyes of others is to find true self-worth and love, to not be needed is to find the basis for the unconditional love about for others.
The greatest enemy of non-doing is nothing so grand or noble, it is mere distraction, an important, unnecessary and relentless distraction from whatever you do, even and especially non-doing. So if you going to engage in the activity of inactivity, you have to be ruthlessly efficient about it, you have to make your priority the freedom of space and time, and your actions and behaviour has to make it clear that you prize these things above all else. You do not have to do anything to let the distractions in, they will form a queue to take your awareness away. To truly be able to do nothing for the maximum amount of time, you have to do all the things you need to do in the minimal amount of time.
And what that looks like in your life will be entirely different from how it manifests itself in my life. In a capitalist system, it can be a perfectly rational choice to trade time for money but if your priorities is time, you can make the equally rational decision to trade the opportunity to make money for more time, you can even decide to not consume money and instead buy assets to produce income so that you don't have to, you can dedicate yourself to something outside of yourself, to art, meditation, causes, family. It is what monks do all over the world, they give up work, processions, status, and they give themselves time to investigate their sensory world. However you can choose whatever path you wish, but to get somewhere you have to choose to give it time, discipline and a conscious life full of slow, patient, elegance.
