Posts in this series are now listed at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/p/recovering-from-corporate-life.html.
PPS - in addition to not being as drained as I used to be, I am finding I don't feel the cold as much this winter as I used - despite my increasing age generally making me more sensitive to cold. I suspect being less physically tense is the reason for this.
When I was a kid, like all kids I would from time to time say to my adoptive mother “Mum, I’m bored”. She would usually come up with something for me - except for those weird nights when I wanted something to think of while I fell asleep.
As I grew, I developed a love of reading - this was at primary school - and painting/sketching. That usually made me fairly self reliant in terms of finding something to keep myself occupied (except for the long road trips interstate to relatives at the end of the year). Just before we moved (back) to the state where the rellies were, my interest in reading had taken me to camping and then sailing, and sailing kept me occupied outdoors, with reading being indoors - and, on some sleepless nights, listening to short wave radio.
I found listening to the radio peaceful - it was a fairly slow and relatively still activity, but there were times when my preparation for dinghy races involved just watching the patterns of wind, wave and water - although I also revelled in the power of Nature on a rough day (and was quite good at that sort of sailing - although, being in dinghies, there was a limit to what we could go out in).
Nature was often also peaceful for me as a kid too - before my primary school years, I used to love getting into and just sitting in the first fork of a tree in our backyard, feeling pleased at being what I thought was “brave” - but Mum’s face was always above me, so I couldn’t have been that high.
My adoptive father would collect fallen branches for our open fireplace from a State forest down the bottom of the hill in those days, and I found the world of Nature there fascinating - for instance, I felt like I spent hours looking at a shed snake skin, but it was probably only minutes.
So my start in life included stillness, silence, and space.
But our money-driven ultra-materialistic Western society doesn’t accept people living that way - we have to be “busy”, “productive”, and always active or occupied.
We even have nasty sayings along the lines of idle hands not being good in various ways.
I didn’t know enough back then to choose a way of surviving outside of the corporate world, and, in any case, I wanted to do something useful, which is why I wound up in public utilities (the Australian version of that, fortunately - not the insanity of US or UK utilities).
However, once there, I was subject to the same sort of pressures as everyone else.
It’s called social conditioning, and it’s an IPOC.
I have hated the “rat race” all my life - as I mentioned here. I wanted what was often termed an alternative (in the counterculture) lifestyle then, but not one based on communal sharing of everything or too austere a lifestyle, and I couldn’t find what I wanted.
I took a year off engineering to try to develop something in the alternative healing field, but that was looking inadequate for financial comfort, so I eventually wound up back in engineering.
I’m writing a series on my recovery from a near half century of work in the corporate world as I prepare for and eventually move in to (early, because of health reasons) retirement, with the latest as I write this being at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2023/05/post-no-2445-recovering-from-corporate.html (each article will include links to all the articles in the series - and I have just started, and expect to continue for at least another six to eight months).
The series will cover quite a few aspects, and one that I want to lightly examine in this post is the transition from busyness to being able, once again, to just sit, and be.
When I first came back to Naarm (also known as Melbourne), I loved watching the seasons change, and watching the weather pass by (especially the passage of showers), and I can now start moving back towards that.
I have reduced my work hours, so I’m edging into having the opportunity to take things slower. At the moment, that may include just listening to music, but I’m also rediscovering my love of listening to birds, and listening to silence.
I first developed that with some of the early meditation exercises when I became a Buddhist as a teenager in the 70s - and one book I read from a book exchange in Mackay encapsulated that quite well, with what I term “Po’s exercise”.
This comprises listening to the sound that is furthest away, then progressively focusing on sounds that are closer until you start to listen to the sounds of your body (breathing, etc), and then continue inwards to listen to the sound of silence.
This is something I've done regularly since the 1970s when, as a teenager, I came across this in the autobiography of an English woman who had returned to Hong Kong after World War Two (her family had lived there before the war) and explored spiritual matters (including an experience of coming close to levitation with two shamans - until she changed her mind), till she was ready to return to England. (I've been looking for that book ever since ... the book exchange in 1970s Mackay was quite a remarkable place, spiritually — Po. incidentally, was the name of the person who taught her the listening exercise.)
As I’ve been writing this, naturally (!) I’ve come across a relevant article (see here) in my inbox: an article on a one inch square marker of what has been nominated as “the quietest outdoor spot in the United States” - it’s not actually entirely silent, but it is free of human-made sounds, allowing the sounds of nature to resume their proper - IMO - place.
Because of lung problems and a rental with carpet, I often have to run an air filter at night - and have all my life: I treasure those quiet nights when I don’t have to.
Apart from being enjoyable (when I can choose it - this would be different if I was deaf and had no choice in the matter), the absence of sound helps me, I feel, with healing the damage that has been done to my mind - which has been shattered by work, starting with a day I still remember in the late 80s when I was pushed into doing mental calculations and making assessment at an extreme intensity (because my manager at the time wanted to show off to clients that we didn’t need normal time management skills and would sacrifice our wellbeing to their “convenience” [i.e., incompetence]).
That damage has not been helped by the exhaustion of multiple demands in the decades since, including what is required to survive in the corporate world, cope with discrimination, deal with family illnesses and other major life events (moves, changes to living circumstances, the pandemic, etc), and - I suspect - a touch of long COVID.
As an example of what is involved in this, I used to enjoy the intense focus of chess (although I have never been any good at it), but now I feel an intense revulsion if I try to gather my mental energies for that intense focus. So I now choose to pursue less intense mental pastimes, when I do - things like word puzzles or games and even Solitaire (which I’m finding does involve a surprising amount of strategy).
Similarly, I find I am losing some words - and short term memory can seem to be a problem, but that is usually that I just didn’t care enough to focus on absorbing points. As an example, when constructing my weekly news posts over at my political blog, I used to have no trouble remembering the source publication when writing a short descriptor of an article, but now I have to make an effort to notice and therefore remember that, leading to me going back and forth a bit between original news article and my post.
One could say that is a short term memory problem ... and one would be wrong: it is the bone-deep emotional revulsion that a near half century of unremitting mental overload has caused me to have towards any intense mental focus. (I have no trouble focusing for psychic work but that is often - or in part, at least - mediumship.)
However, my mind is no longer a core part of my existence - my beingness is.
On that, Paul Callaghan wrote, in “The Dreaming Path: Indigenous Thinking to Change Your Life” by Paul Callaghan and Uncle Paul Gordon (Pantera Press, Neutral Bay, NSW, 2022, ISBN 978-0-6487952-7-8; Amazon, Readings, Apple):
“Aboriginal people to this day are very comfortable with silence. It is something that can be unnerving to people who are used to a world where constant sound invades their ears, visual imagery saturates their eyes and information overload inundates their brain.”
I have been using the phrase “human being not doing” quite a bit of late (it is, for instance, part of my social media profile, and is a handle at the bottom of many of my blog posts), which I came across - I think - on social media somewhere years ago, but it encapsulates the philosophy Paul Callaghan wrote about and that I am trying to live now:
not thinking I have to justify my existence by my busyness
On that, meditation (not relaxation and definitely not mindfulness) is doing - spiritual doing rather than physical, but still “doing”.
It is time for me to stop doing, and start just being.
That doesn’t, however, mean stopping my spiritual growth. Back in the 80s a (flawed) teacher told me that existing in this world with a good aura was enough to be an active contribution to making the world a better place: that is a bit of a simplification, but it is a notion that I personally find helpful now - and it emphasises that I still have to take some care to ensure that my aura - my being - is healed, healthy and hale, so that my beingness will, in and of itself, be good for me, those I love, and this world.
It is a new balance - no longer work-life, but spiritual doing vs. spiritual being.
Blessed be.
I am writing this series in the hope that it will contribute to a better understanding - or at least better research into the effects of - the so-called developed world’s economic systems - which are based on the world-destroying amathia of perpetual growth, and patriarchal oligarchical capitalism expressed as often expressed corporatism and neoliberalism.
If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below.
Vote Yes for the Voice in Australia.
Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.
