Conversations For Transformation:
Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
Conversations For Transformation
Essays By Laurence Platt
Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
And More
Junction:
A Pre-Possibility
Oak Creek At Silverado, Napa Valley, California, USA
February 8, 2020
"Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still
untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not
quite sure what to do next.
But he would think of something."
... Arthur C Clarke embodying Star-Child, in the closing words of
the grand finale of "2001: A Space Odyssey"
This essay,
Junction: A Pre-Possibility,
is the companion piece to
Before anything happens, someone says something. Before someone says
something, nothing happens. Before nothing happens, there's ... well
... nothing. And being in nothing is an interesting place to be.
What's most inexplicable about it is our on-automatic thrown-ness to
not be here in this place. And I'm in it now for sure,
my children
having all left the area, so there's a huge lessening in
what I "gotta" do. And it's been a long time since I had
the freedom to consider what I "wanna" do. "Gotta" do, and "wanna" do,
aren't always the same or co-incident or compatible. And to get from
"gotta do" to "wanna do", you have to
pass through
... nothing.
Wait! Surely "doing nothing" is an oxymoron? Even though
we may say we're "doing nothing", we're almost never doing nothing.
Doing nothing is at best a transient place to be, a fleeting place.
Before
Werner,
it seemed to be the lot of us human beings to catch only occasional
glimpses of ourselves doing nothing. Yet as rich, as full, and as
magical
as the moments those glimpses reveal, what we have even more of, are
glimpses of life as it's really lived day to day, in which doing
nothing is constantly overshadowed with the business of the day, with
the trivia we take on to make our lives work - and that's not taking
into account the swathe of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that
constantly erupt, flow, and swirl like leaves agitated by a windstorm.
We all know (we've all tasted) the healing power of nothing. In spite
of that, human beings aren't set up to easily
access
it. That's what a great deal of what
Zen
purports to be and do, is:
accessing
"nothing". Oh? Like how,
Laurence?
Essential Zen,
Werner shares,
reveals that when you do what you do while you're doing it, you're
doing nothing (when the experience is itself, it's nothing). That's
thebreakthrough
if you're to
access
nothing (and do nothing). Yes it's a
paradox:
doing nothing isn't necessarily doing nothing. Contemplate that
for a moment. There's nothing. Then there's doing nothing (interim
doing nothing). Then there's doing what you do, yet unfreely. And then
there's doing what you do while you're doing it (ultimate doing
nothing). Those are (if you will) my four degrees of doing
nothing. And it's the third one which I'm in the middle of
inquiring into in my life right now.
Soon, for the first time since 1988 when I moved to
the wine country,
northern California's Napa Valley,
all my three children
will have moved on in their lives and left the area. It will be the
first time in thirty two years I won't have
family
in the area. More pertinently, it will be the first time in thirty two
years I won't have
family
I'm supporting and for whom I'm responsible, in the area. I have
(literally) nothing to do. And it's a daunting prospect! Sure, there'll
be the next thing soon enough. There always is. But for now, for the
first time in thirty two years, there's nothing I gotta
do. And I'm starting to notice the way I'm thrown with regard to doing
nothing.
My thrown-ness is to avoid doing nothing (interim doing nothing) and
fill the space with stop-gap activities to inoculate myself from it -
anything but to experience nothing for what it is. And
given there's nothing I gotta do, I get this is a real chance to
experience nothing and to do nothing. Yet what I'm discovering is it's
oddly, surprisingly hard to do nothing, and not be thrown to avoid it,
and to fill the space with trivia. If there's nothing I gotta do, then
this surely is a good time to really experience and get to know doing
nothing (the
Zen
of it) while looking into what I wanna do next. For thirty two years,
all my attention has been on the former, during which time the latter
came into the picture so infrequently as to have left me almost totally
out of touch with it, unpracticed at it, unfamiliar with it -
strangely.
I'm now at a junction, a place in my life where two paths are meeting,
the two paths being the "gotta" path (now ended) and the "wanna" path
(not yet started). After all these years of "gotta", "wanna" is
strangely elusive (no surprise there, really: I've not been looking at
it much - until now). This junction is at best a
pre-possibility.