How do you balance the necessities of life with pursuing your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art?
Or to put it another way:
How do you balance making a living with living a meaningful life?
This question, in all its variations, is something I have thought about for a long time. So when I saw that Bryan Kam was inviting people to record their answers to it I jumped at the opportunity. His audio prompt (with transcript) can be found here. He’s collected 7 responses so far, including mine (the last one), and released them all together on his podcast Clerestory, which you can listen to here. I encourage you not only to take a listen, but to submit a response yourself.
Eventually I’d like to go into more detail about what I said. But for now, I wanted to share the sources of some of the references I made in my response.
Thoreau
The passage I read was from the “Friday” chapter of Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. This was the book he was writing while at Walden Pond, memorializing a boating trip he took with his older brother who had since died. It is a severely underappreciated work, and a complex one at that.
The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.
My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.
If I had more time I would have read a little more before that passage, like the following a few paragraphs earlier:
We talk of genius as if it were a mere knack, and the poet could only express what other men conceived. But in comparison with his task, the poet is the least talented of any; the writer of prose has more skill. See what talent the smith has. His material is pliant in his hands. When the poet is most inspired, is stimulated by an aura which never even colors the afternoons of common men, then his talent is all gone, and he is no longer a poet. The gods do not grant him any skill more than another. They never put their gifts into his hands, but they encompass and sustain him with their breath…
The poet’s body even is not fed like other men’s, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.
These passages suggest, to me at least, that a meaningful life is not a life that has mastered the balance between making a living and pursuing meaning, but that they are one and the same. The life of the true poet is his poem. So to me, the question isn’t how to balance life and work, meaning and money, but how to live one life where everything you do is in pursuit of and an expression of meaning and value.
To say that Thoreau was preoccupied with this same question is an understatement. Here he is in a letter to Harrison Blake discussing this:
How admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art! The wood-sawyer, through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better wood-sawyer, but measurably a better man.
And again in Walden, which is in many ways, I think, preoccupied with this question of how to live a meaningful life while also making a living. The book itself is, among many things, an answer to that question.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
And finally, in a long journal entry on September 7th, 1851, perhaps the most explicit consideration of this problem:
The art of life! Was there ever anything memorable written upon it? By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts. To observe what transpires, not in the street, but in the mind and heart of me! I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon. I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, by what means to grow rich, that the day may not have been in vain…
How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand, and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax…
The art of spending a day. If it is possible that we may be addressed, it behooves us to be attentive. If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?…
I am convinced that men are not well employed, that this is not the way to spend a day. If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated for an instant upon Pisgah, the world which was dead prose to me become living and divine, shall I not watch ever? shall I not be a watchman henceforth? If by watching a whole year on the city’s walls I may obtain a communication from heaven, shall I not do well to shut up my shop and turn a watchman? Can a youth, a man, do more wisely than to go where his life is to [be] found ? As if I had suffered that to be rumor which may be verified. We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little? To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in nature or to the eating of oysters, would they not be attended with very different results?
I could go on but that’s enough for now. There are many indications, as I read him, that Thoreau was just as concerned about how to combine making a living and living a meaningful life into one endeavor.
Zhuangzi
There is far less material, and less clarity on authorship, to consider when asking what the Zhuangzi has to say about this issue—if it has anything to say at all. I don’t really think that this question was one that preoccupied the author(s) in quite the same way as Thoreau or myself even. But I do see hints, suggestions, and surprising resonances with some of what Thoreau was saying, even if you have to squint a little to see them.
In my response to Bryan’s prompt I referred broadly to the skill passages in the Zhuangzi. Much has been written about that by many smarter and more knowledgeable people than me, so I won’t attempt to add anything. I tend to take a view closer to Eric Schwitzgebel‘s, viewing the stories about skillful artisans with skepticism, and not necessarily as models of ideal behavior. Yet, there is still a sense that the stories suggest a way of being in the world that collapses the distinction between doing ordinary, mundane things—the “making a living” side of the equation—and pursuing the sagely path. I’m thinking specifically of the constant tension between the “Heavenly” and the “Human” paths or ways of being in the world. Or maybe a better way to think of it isn’t so much collapsing the distinction, but recognizing both of them can be done simultaneously, or that the sagely way often looks much different than you think it would.
Consider the following fairly famous story from chapter 3 (from Schwitzgebel’s paper, loosely based on the Ziporyn 2009 translation):
The cook was carving up an ox for King Hui of Liang. Wherever his hand smacked it, wherever his shoulder leaned into it, wherever his foot braced it, wherever his knee pressed it, the thwacking tones of flesh falling from bone would echo, the knife would whiz through with its resonant thwing, each stroke ringing out the perfect note, attuned to the “Dance of the Mulberry Grove” or the “Jingshou Chorus” of the ancient sage-kings.
The king said, “Ah! It is wonderful that skill can reach such heights!”
The cook put down his knife and said, “What I love is the Way, something that advances beyond mere skill. . . . When I first started cutting up oxen, all I looked at for three years was oxen, and yet I was still unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the spirit instead of scrutinizing it with my eyes. . . . A good cook changes his blade once a year: he slices. An ordinary cook changes his blade once a month: he hacks. I have been using this same blade for nineteen years, cutting up thousands of oxen, and yet it is still as sharp as the day it came off the whetstone. For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. . . .
“Nonetheless, whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt. My activity slows, and the blade moves ever so slightly. Then all at once, I find the ox already dismembered at my feet like clumps of soil scattered on the ground. . . .
The king said, “Wonderful! From hearing the cook’s words I have learned how to nourish life!”
What I like about this story is the suggestion that there is a way to do things that “nourishes life” even in the most unclean and unsavory activities, such as butchering an ox. It gives me hope that the things I have to do on a daily basis (caregiving has its fair share of unclean tasks) can also have some value. That I don’t have to wait until my shift is over to pursue the really important stuff. I don’t like living in that sort of bifurcated way, separating parts of my life from the rest. I’m of course reading into the story above perhaps in ways it wasn’t intended. But I think, especially when considered alongside Thoreau, it offers something that, to me at least, is a much more attractive way of living than attempting to “balance” doing work and pursuing meaning, although it is hard to describe what exactly that way entails.
It is especially intriguing to think about how both the Thoreau passage from A Week and the story above seem to be slightly dismissive of attaining a high degree of skill (again, see Schwitzgebel’s paper). Thoreau specifically says that the poet is less skilled (“The gods do not grant him any skill more than another”) and, in a very Zhuangzian way, tells us that in the very moment the poet is most inspired is the very moment he loses his poetic identity and vocation. The gods do not grant him special gifts or powers, but instead merely sustain him with their breath. Similarly, the cook loves the Way (dao), something which is beyond mere skill. The cook similarly has no special powers or gifts bestowed upon him from the Heavenly. He is no gifted virtuoso, just as Thoreau’s poet isn’t. Something about these two figures, the cook and the poet, when presented together, make me think there must be another way of living our lives that doesn’t maintain the division between making a living and living meaningfully.
Nature/Culture Divide
The least formulated part of my response is, predictably, the newest to me. I just recently discovered the “new animism” and the works of Graham Harvey and Rune Rasmussen, all of which is very exciting to me. I’ve been reading (slowly) the book Cosmologies of the Anthropocene by Arne Johan Vetlesen, in which he says the following about the nature/culture divide:
“[human] culture connotes subjectivity, activity, signification, meaning, identity, and purpose, and nature connotes object, passivity, body, instinct, animal, and law-like.”
The anthropological concept of a nature/culture divide is new to me but intuitively makes sense. Perhaps it’s just my naivete with the subject matter, but I find it a helpful way to conceptualize not only the competing sides of making a living and living meaningfully, but why we struggle with finding a balance between them in the first place. Making a living, obtaining the necessities of life—these are the pursuits that map onto the “nature” side of the divide: the regrettably necessary work required to sustain our physical, animal bodies. Finding meaning, purpose, and value, living a meaningful life—these are found in the “culture” side of the divide: the higher, loftier goals that the physical keeps us from pursuing.
Just like the mind/matter dualism, the nature/culture divide is, I believe (and I think I’m in good company) a fiction. If we assume momentarily that it is a fiction, then my question is not how to maintain those false binaries by finding balance between them, but how to live in such a way that they both come crashing down and making a living and living meaningfully becomes, as Thoreau is fond of saying, a distinction without a difference.