The importance of living .... reprise

Would you do me a favor? Find an easy chair, or better yet, go outside to a secluded spot and read this essay at your leisure.*

*The art of letting go ...

I've spoken of Lin Yutang before, and here i found a wonderful short essay by someone else on the book: The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang, and some of the ... less popular of his outlooks. Go read it first, at leasure, here's a favourite part though:

"Life in the West, according to Lin, is "too complex, too serious, too somber, and too involved." He would agree with Henry David Thoreau: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." Following Taoist philosophy, Lin warned against "over doing, over achieving, over action . . . of being too prominent, too useful, and too serviceable." The "perfectly square" house, the "perfectly clean" room, and the "perfectly straight" road rankle in him. He goes on to say, "O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!"

There's a thread, woven through our thinking, that stays the same no matter where it's found. It's a frail thread of sanity, of human human-ness and the triumph of mankind. Common sense, perhaps, but even that differs from culture to culture. It's a wisdom, that ultimately we are all doomed, our works and efforts like smoke on a windy day. And yet we are forced to smile at the sunrise, and make the most of our smoke break. Not in an industrious way, but a harmonious one, taking and giving in an endless flow, from the sunlight to the garden to the children playing in the water. Taking and giving. Communion with all around.

I don't like taking. It's a problem i have. And i give too cautiously, always wary for tricks and consequences. I block the flow. Admission for the day, late as it is.

I have the fortune of knowing what i ought to do ... and the intent to do it. What i lack is the strength, i guess. It takes a strong man to be calm, and himself, and in control of himself, in the daily whirlwind. To stand outside "society" and it's silly precepts, and yet to function within as part of it. For it is opposite to everything sane, and human, this ultra sane and ultra human world we have created.

I marvel at the motorcar, this creation which is utterly ours, it is designed entirely around the human form, it's needs and comforts. Yet how utterly inhumane it makes us? From the morning traffic to late night accidents, what has it given us but long commutes, death and disassociation from each other? Cell phones would be the next logical target. Given us so that we may "communicate" with each other, it's doing everything BUT. People wandering around in a daze consumed by the contents of their magic box. Speaking to everyone in the whole world except those in closest proximity to them.

These 2 are the most obvious examples, but starting from when you wake to an electronic NOISE to when you try ignore the night time traffic for some blessed sleep, the entire daily life we lead is working against our best interests.

To switch off the phone, ignore the metal metal madness outside, and to enjoy being who and where you are is a skill i am only just learning to enjoy. But i never can relax, not truly. I'm still connected to the machine. Plugged in. Hard wired. Dependant.

You cannot fight the machine, you can only let go it's hold over you. That hold begins in the mind, and is the only place you'll ever truly escape it. But that alone is cause for celebration!