On Reworking Things
A friend’s wife asked how to rework her life. To me, this is a chronic issue. “Think back to other times when it’s come up, because how you dealt with it then is likely to be relevant to how you’ll resolve it now,” I wrote. Resolve is the right word. Life demands episodic reworking, up until the end. “New facts,” as Maynard Keynes called them, force us to revisit our assumptions. Resisting them is symptomatic of a mind that’s lost its timbre.
I too have wondered lately how to rework my life. It’s an ongoing issue, part of moving from fulltime work to leisure dotted with obligations. Leisure is a commitment to oneself, but arguably also to an imagined audience. I do it “out loud,” this work I do at my own volition, a trail that others can follow if they want.
The reworking is a freedom granted us, implicit in the time we have genuinely at our disposal. Disposable time is like disposable income, capital of a sort that we can invest or squander. In my previous working life, I fit it in. A certain amount of time was needed to recover from obligation. Now, relatively freed of obligation, investing time seems to want a structure. It no longer has another to which it relates as a leitmotif, but becomes the main event.
I could reverse the field and make the obligations the leitmotif. My calendar suggests this, each obligation an island or hillock in a river or landscape of flat or fallow time, undifferentiated on first view. These less important things draw my attention. But for someone in a river trade or a field’s husbandry, the view is different. Obligations could shift in light of this to what serves these occupations, as opposed to what distracts. Abandoning what was is likely to be a good idea, lest it hinder me from knowing the river or the field, and setting out into it committedly.
Following up on this thought, I asked the I Ching for advice on what to where to put my emphasis. It gave me hexagram 33, “retreat” and, via the fourth moving line, hexagram 53, “development (gradual progress).” I consult two versions of this classic, and the older one noted the tendency to remain attached to what we love, which I took to mean “what’s habitual,” habits being small vices and virtues in my view. But the main message was to proceed carefully, in a slow and friendly manner. The older version also noted that a tree on a mountainside takes forever to root, but — once rooted — is visible. Success in small things, the first hexagram declared.
Retreat from what? One question is, What’s habitual? What are my small, potentially destructive loves? Another: the hexagram distinguishes between a strategic withdrawal, giving way in order at some point to return, and panic. But still, from what? The holdovers of my working life came to mind — the risk of repeating what I’ve done before. A dream I had compared this to a river that meanders in such a way that you cross it many times. Make the crossing of it a theme, I was told. I wrote this down, but it didn’t take hold. I took it to be a theme for poems, but I think it was directed at life itself, rivers as Zen barriers, and crossing always into new territory.
In Michael Nylan’s new translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War I read a discussion of terrain. Whether one is retreating or advancing, terrain is a variable — familiar but different, unfamiliar but like others. We bring what we know, and the dangers of knowing are hubris and assumption. Terrain is best understood as new. The river when we encounter it again is always new.
