Enjoy What You Do – or – Do What You Enjoy?

Do Without Doing

This is a balancing act if ever there was one. The tricky part is how our biology always lures us to ‘do what we enjoy’ (pleasure attracts, attractive pleases), and to resist doing what we don’t enjoy. This is what makes work feel like work. Contentment lies in making work feel like ‘fun’, to the point where work and rest become mysteriously the same. That can be a tall order.

I find that knowing what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ very helpful, at least when I’m aware of it. This knowing is not something one can get and stash away in memory somewhere. The knowing must be alive to each moment or it’s nonexistent. Perhaps this parallels the teaching that uses no words. Words are dead and after the fact. The knowing (or ‘teaching’) must be the living fact of each moment. Once one is generally aware of and understands this dynamic, how does one put it into practice? Ah yes, that’s the another tricky part to this.

Perhaps Buddha’s ‘right concentration’ helps, if we can just figure out how to evoke that. Then there’s the Christian, ‘by the grace of God’, or the Islamic, ‘if Allah wills’. It is difficult knowing the solution, and yet being unable to do something about it. I guess this is where Do without doing (‘wei wu wei’ -为无为) comes in handy. Now, how does that work again? Ah yes, it is empty without being exhausted;the more it works, the more comes out.