WEEK 6: BUSYNESS AND EXPERIENCING YOUR EMOTIONS
The primary goal in capitalism is efficiency. More “x” per hour. We want to speed things up. Be more productive. Have more things. There are so many wonderful little things to catch out of this video. If mass production is going smoothly, that means we should speed it up. In other words, any productivity gains do not go to giving us more time, they go to giving us more things. See Charlie Chaplin comment about this 100 years ago:
Perhaps you prefer I Love Lucy, 60 years ago. The assembly continues to speed up:
As you all know, financial freedom is really about time freedom. But what if we’re collectively trading our time freedom for more things? Historically, productivity goes up around 3% per year. Another way to understand this is through the miracle of compound interest, we have twice as much as we did 25 years ago (3% compounding doubles in 25 years). But that means we could just made the collective decision to have as much as we did in 1996 but only work half as much.
In a real way, we collectively keep on trading time for things.
Chronos and Kairos
Understand that there are two types of time. Capitalism and the ego works in chronos, on the clock. The soul works in kairos, “timeless time.” In many ways, I view FF the triumph of kairos over chronos. When you own all your life hours, you no longer have to be, as Charlie Chaplin in the factory, on the clock. Read this beautiful article here:
read: Chronos vs Kairos: How Ancient Greeks Saw Time
The greatest cost of being “on the clock” is that your attention and presence is not your own. Not only is it work time, but the constant barrage of attention that capitalism and technology demands in our leisure time. Professor Cal Newport talks about how technology was supposed to free up our time, but instead, has invaded all of it: texts, emails, and digital advertising keep us involved in the productive capitalist system for our entire waking lives. And what we lose is what so many of you describe as your primary satisfaction: presence.
“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday” - English mystic Evelyn Underhill
Attention and presence are basic forms of lagom. More than any material deficit, it’s our inability to savor what we have that makes us feel like we don’t have enough.
“One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is the feeling that the present moment is not good enough.” - Pema Chodron
“Occupied and Preoccupied Space”
“Being busy, active and on the move has nearly become part of our constitution. When we are asked to sit in a chair, without a paper to read, a radio to listen to, a television to watch, without a visitor or a phone, we are inclined to become so restless and tense that we welcome anything that will distract us again.” - Henri Nouwen
I have a sneaking suspicion that we actually want capitalism to occupy us, both in our literal time and in terms of our emotions. Our addictions to our egos and capitalism (remember: they are the same project) means we want distraction, so much so that we’re willing to pay money (i.e. give up time freedom) for it. Why are we afraid of emptiness? Why are we afraid of the discomfort inside?
“What is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.” - Rilke
Remember in week 1 that Francis Weller said that the work of a mature person is to hold grief in one had and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them? Now we get to fun stuff! Jungian therapist Bill Plotkin described America as a “patho-adolescent society.” One of the characteristics of patho-adolescence is the inability to hold paradox, or understand that two opposing truths can be true at the same time. Adolescents see the world in black and white, wholly good or bad. (perhaps even seeing capitalism as wholly good or bad?). Like how a mature person is able to hold gratitude and grief at the same time, the movement towards the soul is ability to feel the true depth and complexity of our feelings.
In “About Alice,” Calvin Trillin’s love letter to his decreased wife, he writes:
“She wasn’t among those whose response to tragedy or loss was limited to offering the conventional expressions of sympathy before moving on with their own lives. In 1988, an old friend phoned us to say that his grown daughter, a young woman we’d known since she was a child, had been raped by an intruder. This was a dozen years after Alice had been operated on for lung cancer, and among the things that she wrote to our friend’s daughter was that having lung cancer and being raped were comparable only in that both were what she called “realizations of our worst nightmares.” She said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. “No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,’ or to begin to understand the line in ‘King Lear’—‘Ripeness is all.’ You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness.” Alice had a large envelope in which she kept copies of letters like that—along with copies of some letters she had sent the girls and copies of poems we had written for her on birthdays and documents like the announcement of a prize for community service that Abigail, our older daughter, had been awarded at Yale and an astonishing letter of recommendation that a professor had provided for Sarah, our younger daughter, when she applied for her first job after getting her M.S.W. On the envelope was written “Important Stuff.””
Fado, soul, and blues
What if what is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love? To welcome everything that you experience in your body and changes your experience of it? [Footnote]
In capitalism, we want to run away from our emotions (as you remember, addiction is the use of a secondary satisfaction to stop feeling discomfort, temporarily). But what if you embraced all your emotions?
The ability to fully feel your emotions is soul work. And work isn’t really the word! The ability to feel into our emotions and enjoy them is simply the soul peeking out and saying hi!. Denying them through hyper and hypo-arousal is the ego and capitalism. Even “accepting” them through therapy and some forms of new age thinking is weak sauce. Embracing and loving your emotions, even the sad ones, is the secret. Many people love a line from a Rumi poem: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” But according to Buddhist teacher Tara Brach, what they miss the last piece of stanza, finding those barriers to love and embracing them.
Embracing “negative” emotions sounds hard and like work but it isn’t. People around the world do it in the arts: tragic novels, sad movies, memorials to the dead. We love art that has “soul” because makes us feel the complexity of our emotions. And realize that we embrace good art because it makes us feel a wide range of emotions. Let’s use the example of music. Oftentimes, good music makes us sad. The complexity of emotion in the Portuguese music of fado. What are the blues? What is soul? Or for you younger folk, emo? It’s all art that connects us to feel and enjoy deep emotion, and because we embrace it, we feel good. Amazing. Contrast to corporate, or “soul-less” music (i.e. music without emotion). Imagine if you were only allowed to listen to “happy” music.
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now
-Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve
What “progress” and perfectionism and Charlie Chaplin’s factory denies you is the empty space to just stay with your emotions. To just savor whatever you are feeling. This is the emotional consequence of capitalism. Again, it’s also the consequence of the ego project: running away from or clinging to your current emotional experience.
Think of the ability to feel your emotions as emotional freedom. On the hamster wheel you are not free to fully experience your emotions. You have to fill yourself up with things and experiences to distract yourself. You can never just Be. Because Being works in kairos, we need emptiness: time, space, and presence. Chronos, and “the clock” don’t want to us time to embrace and savor emotions; it will never be “efficient” or “productive.” But living a soul-based life isn’t supposed to be. Our inner lives contain ten thousand forms of loveliness. To fully live our lives, all we have to do is turn our attention to them. But that requires practices that support that.
"When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.” - Richard Rohr
Next week, week 7, we talk about making Sabbath: planning and creating room for the banquet to begin.
Footnote: Emotions and feelings are often used interchangeably but it’s good to distinguish them. In short, emotions are in your body and feelings are your cognitive interpretations of them, which create meaning. By changing your thoughts (i.e. feelings) you may be able to shift your emotions. Bonus article about PSTD and post-traumatic growth here.
Prompts:
A lot of quotes this week! Choose one and talk about it with your walk-and-talk partner.
Thoughts about savoring ripeness? What ripeness in your life have you learned to savor?
Let’s give each other a dose of enjoying all our emotions! Drop in a Youtube link to your favorite “sad song,” one that makes you happy. This is a fun prompt, so feel free to add any fun backstory why this song is delightfully sad to you. Here’s mine. Can’t wait for yours!