Balancing Act

According to Zen philosophy, “simplicity is the exact balance between too much and too little.”

This echoes the arch over the temple at Delphi – meden agan – nothing in excess. It seems that it’s an age-old problem, this attempt at moderation in all aspects of our lives. Which implies that it’s something we’re really not very good at achieving, if we haven’t figured out how yet.

How do I decide what’s too much or too little? A lack is easier to define than an excess, most of the time. Lack implies an unmet need. Excess? Well, that implies waste and redundancy. I’ve questioned how many shoes/jeans/shirts I need – and yet, the way we live our lives makes Thoreau’s advice on wearing a single outfit until it falls to rags somewhat impractical. We are visual, however much we want to deny it, and we’re also acquisitive. This isn’t cultural, it’s survival. We are the descendants of those who made sure they had at least enough – food, shelter, warmth – because they’re the ones who survived to procreate and raise their children. It’s just that we’ve now reached the point at which some of us have far more than we really need, and we’ve created an entire, multi-billion dollar industry – hell, economic structure – on the basis of manufacturing need.

Zen philosophy runs counter to this mindset of material acquisition – and that’s why most of us find it so difficult and also so intriguing. I’m searching for the balance – between the culture in which I live and work and the attraction of a simpler philosophy. It’s a fine line, and I strongly suspect, sketched in feathered pencil. 

No Particular Place to Go

It doesn’t take much to make me happy – an open road, a full tank, no deadlines and no particular place to go. I’m stuck at my desk, looking out on a beautiful summer day, and my to-do list is suddenly irrelevant. My job deals in the intangible but my taste in pleasure is simple and solid: a motorcycle, tarmac, time.

The growling purr of the engine, the feeling of endless raw power and the miles rolling by… There is a biker slogan, found on T-shirts, mugs, bandanas, bumper-stickers, you name it: If I Have To Explain, You Wouldn’t Understand.

I might be a writer by nature, but I’m a biker by blood. So call me a petrolhead, a rebel, dangerous, antisocial, anarchic - call me anything you want – I’ll just put my lid on, hook my comms to my iPod, and follow my heartbeat out onto the backroads: discovering new villages, monuments, forests, pubs – places I wouldn’t discover by train or plane or car, because on a bike there’s no metal between me and the environment. There’s a reason we call cars cages.

At the end of the day, when I park up and swing my feet back onto the ground, I’m tired, but exhilirated. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what’s important? That we enjoy the journey, the experience, so if the particular place we end up in isn’t quite the one we had in mind, at least we have that sense of satifisfaction, of simple pleasure, from the ride...

Wealth of Nations

“The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniencies and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.” – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776

In the wake of widespread rioting, looting and vandalism, the question in the media is “Why?” There’s no clear political motivation or focus to it. There’s a lot of pointing and wagging of fingers, comments about the wealth divide (chasm) and immigration causing disaffection and socio-economic apathy among the youth.

There are accusations that it’s economic policy, cuts and the dismal international financial outlook that caused this. But the truth is far simpler: this is caused primarliy by boredom, but also by instant gratification and consumerism.

We live, in the developed world, in a highly materialist society, that judges value and success in material and monetary terms. We pretty much always have – see Adam Smith’s comment above.

And it doesn’t help that we glamourise and romanticise criminals, pirates and outlaws in our popular fiction. We’ve forgotten that an outlaw once meant someone truly outside the law – legally dead and without any rights.

In the current economic climate, there are a lot of young people out of school, out of work, out of cash and Bored. For them, civil disobedience and the idea of something for nothing is an appealing change of pace. It’s Freud’s Id unleashed: see= want= take= have, and it continues because there’s no fulfilment in the new possession. People are posting pictures of themselves to the web, with all their loot displayed – which may be criminally stupid, but speaks to a need for attention and affirmation – look at the things I now have, and see me as successful.

If we didn’t place, as a society, such an emphasis on conspicuous material wealth as indicative of success and value, perhaps the wave of looting and destruction across the UK wouldn’t have been so widespread or so severe. 

360°

In broadcast media, the buzzword is “360°”. This is supposed to mean multi-platform programming, although nobody really seems to understand what that is, beyond online catch-up and facebook pages for shows. The theory is that you let viewers access content (or bits of content) via different media/platforms and then interact with the content more than in the traditional broadcast model. It doesn’t really work that way in practice. The closest most shows get to User Generated Content (despite the great work done during the writers’ strike a couple of years ago) is red-button/premium phone voting, and facebook and web-forum sniping.

The fact is that we’re not very good at focussing on more than one thing at a time, or watching multiple screens or windows simultaneously (which is almost certainly why those annoying ads with the automatic unmutable sound were invented. We’re better with multi-layered sounds than visuals).

At work, we opend several documents/windows and jump from one to the other to the first, cross-referecing, updating, task-hopping and calling it multi-tasking when in fact it’s more like hopscotch – leaping from one point of precariously balance to the next in an attempt to get it all done.

In certain martial arts styles, you learn to block and strike simultaneously – which is damn difficult because the big, unspoken failing of multi-tasking is that humanity isn’t very good at rubbing its stomach while patting its head.

Any steps I take to simplify life has to deal with this fact. Trying to streamline my time by multi-tasking seems almost doomed to failure, unless I can somehow translate the martial arts skills to the rest of my life – once, of course, I manage to acquire them. After all, driving a car (which I’ve been doing for years now) requires a certain amount of multi-tasking, mainly on a purely physical-memory level, allowing the consciousness to pay attention to the road ahead, the conversation in the car, the song on the radio, the directions being followed.

Maybe that’s the root of the pat-head-rub-stomach issue – that we tend to think about it too much when it should be muscle memory, which would allow us the consciousness to think about how stupid we look.

Tense and complicated

Time dilation, officially, is the observed difference of elapsed time between two points moving relative to each other, or differently situated from nearby gravitational masses. A will see B’s clock ticking at a slower rate than his. This effect is down to the nature of space-time described by the theory of relativity.

Time dilation, unofficially, is a perception of the rate of the passage of time, and doesn’t require movement or gravity. When we’re absorbed in something, time either dilates or contracts – because we don’t notice it. Martial arts often talk about, and train to get into The Zone, a.k.a. the moment. They do this because when you are not worried about past or future, but are entirely absorbed in the present, you react better to the dynamics of a situation – almost as if your focus is buying you more time to react.

I wonder if this time dilation effect is why so many philosophies focus on The Moment and being present in it? If you are in the present – no worries about past or future – then the world is simple. The simpler things are, the more they purport to help you stay in the moment, which in turn simplifies things. (This is circular at best – if you’re only concerned with the present, then your needs and wants are lessened and simplified as when you’re travelling).

As children, we get absorbed in things so easily, we don’t really notice time passing. As adults, that purity of focus is rarer, and we notice time more. We clock-watch our days away in boring jobs, ticking off lists of things we have to, rather than want to, do. We stretch our seconds ever thinner, and think ever more of things we should have done or need to plan for. No wonder we get so tense, when our lives become so complicated.

In my attempts to find the simple life, maybe I’m missing the point – maybe what I should be looking for the Present life – forgetting the past and future tenses, and living in the moment, however twee and New Age that sounds. When I practise the Buddhist 3 Arrivals, the world seems to slow, the blur of noise and colours and whirlign shapes resovling into something comprehensible.

I’m starting to think it’s not a coincidence after all, that in English “now” and “here” are both covered by the word “present”.