What you resist, persist
I was talking about the pandemic to a friend of mine who is a sculptor. I’m not sure we called it the “pandemic” but why not.
My friend has been steadily busting her ass in all different directions – a state of the art gallery, multiple moves, art work, all of it, and now it’s all come to a grinding halt. I told her I had returned here to write and record. She said she too was going to do a deep dive in her art having neglected it for too many other tasks.
The world has been too much with us. A long time ago, I memorized a few poems in case I was ever on a desert island and one of them is by William Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
I’ve resisted slowing down. I’ve resisted the siren’s call to be. I’ve resisted the muse whispering to write. In its place, I have WORKED like I was running out of time. WORKED for little to no money. WORKED while on a shaky foundation. WORKED to keep us afloat. WORKED hoping for miraculous bounty. WORKED praying for a break. WORKED dreaming of travel. WORKED till I lost all sense of play and mirth.
I did not memorize Thomas Merton’s The Violence of Overwork – I didn’t have to – I’ve committed this violence for longer than I can remember:
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful.
The pandemic has changed things. We’ll see how it changes us.
