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
What Are You Going To Do Today?
Sacramento, California, USA
August 1, 2019
"The only thing you are going to do today is: what you do today.
Therefore, the only thing there is to do today is: what you do today.
That's all there was to do when you started no matter what you thought
or think."
...
"People who are at the effect of time, people who can't create time,
people who can't manage time, people who can't move time around,
people who can't handle time, people who are overwhelmed by time, have
no
mastery
and no basis for
mastery.
The basis for
masteryin the world
is being able to handle time."
I am indebted to Tamberlaine Harris who inspired this conversation.
Before I became a
homeowner
and a
parent,
I got it all done before I went to bed at night. Then I
purchased a house
and
fathered three children.
And although I gave it my best shot, I no longer got it all done before
I went to bed at night.
So there've been two take-aways from this experience I've undergone of
getting done what I get done, which are the precursors to a
breakthrough
I've had in getting things done. They are:
1)
I got it all done (within the limited
context
of one day);
2)
I didn't get it all done (at the end of the day there were things
left to do);
Then I expanded my notion of getting it all done, to include getting
done everything there is to get done in my entire life. Since
then, getting it all done has become like climbing a
mountain,
an Everest or a Kilimanjaro. More than that, it's
become like climbing a
mountainwith no top. Even more than that, it's as I'm climbing,
the
mountain
keeps growing taller. That's when I realized I'll never
get it all done, so I needed to
recontextualize
(I
love
that
word)
what I do get done so that it's not diminished by doing it
inside of my default future of "I didn't get it all done", "I didn't do
enough", "I should have done more" blah blah blah yada yada yada etc.
Sometime around now (it may have happened five weeks ago or fifty years
ago, but sometime around now), enter
Werner
stage left, and I had a
breakthrough in the way I
am with what I get done before I go to bed at night: it's I get done
what I get done, and I don't get done what I don't get done.
Unexamined / undiscovered, that's always been true (patently so,
trivially so). Examined / discovered /
grokked newly (as Robert Heinlein may have said), it's a
breakthrough
in
Zen:
the only thing I'll get done in any particular day is what I'll get
done in that particular day, not one thing more, not one thing
less. Great! Now I can relax and enjoy the climb.
Wait! Don't gloss over that quickly. It's golden. Stop and look: who
(or what) do you have to be, for it to be a
breakthrough
and not merely mundane and / or trivial?
It's this renewed outlook ie this renewed
being with
what there is to get done, that sets up the
Zenbreakthrough
(or the just plain common sense, depending on how you look at it).
While my outlook on what there is to get done may have altered
somewhat, none of my doing has changed in the slightest. A
breakthrough
in getting things done lives in the outlook on (ie in the
context
for) getting things done, not in a better strategy or in a different
time-management plan for getting more done.
So your answer to my question "What are you going to do today?" may be
twofold, depending on whether your answer is
"pre-breakthrough"
or
"post-breakthrough".
Pre-breakthrough,
your answer could be a long, rambling list of chores which you'd like
to get done today specifically, or just a selection from an annual
wish-list. It may be an uncertain list which may change, get updated,
deleted from, or added to, and which may indeed include things that end
up getting done, as well as many that don't.
Post-breakthrough,
the answer to my question "What are you going to do today?" is always
"The only thing I am going to do today, is what I do today.".