When I’m feeling over-whelmed at home or the world outside seems to spin beyond comprehension, my response is often the reflex to protect myself from whatever’s coming next. In some primitive part of my brain, I’m sensing a tripwire ahead that will make everything in my orbit—all those moons, planets, stars and space debris—come crashing down, so why not avoid it altogether?
I’ll get a few nights’ sleep, the daily demands will lessen, the world beyond my home, city and country will calm down. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a better chance of accomplishing something I’ve been meaning to do and can feel good about doing, which around here is more or less the definition of good work.
These reflexive moments of hesitancy are when taking steps in more constructive directions are the hardest. Because there’s the potential for even more chaos to contend with, I keep bargaining for inaction.
Over the past few months, I’ve been bargaining for it (inaction that is) a lot.
But I tell myself that my excuses aren’t so bad (“You’re not really a slacker”) because the day is coming when things will be different: a playing field will open that stretches to the horizons, without the litter of mass shootings, annihilating earthquakes, somebody needing just one more thing from me, another bill I’ve forgotten to pay or tree limb I should have cut down before that wind came through.
As the story goes, if you’re patient your patience will be rewarded. So I tell myself that I’m only doing what prudence dictates, holding my powder for long enough that I can take a take better shot.
Perhaps because some different brain cavity has been telling me that that hoped-for tomorrow might never come, I’ve been throwing self-protection to the wind more often. I’d call them spasms of commitment and productivity even though I initially suspected that “fool’s errands” like these would be easily defeated by the domestic and global calamities that still bedevil almost everything.
But to my growing surprise, just getting the juices flowing again like that makes the daily and cosmic challenges matter less than the joy of doing that one, small thing I’ve been meaning to do, and then, after that, throwing myself blindly behind the next and slightly larger assignment.
Maybe those storm clouds will never part enough. Instead of waiting for their sunshine, I've been realizing that I might as well create some of my own by recovering “a little of what’s good” about doing good work again.
Congresswoman Margorie Taylor Greene acting up at Biden’s recent State of the Union is a kind of stand-in for today’s “screaming chaos” in my mind and a trigger for my reflex to stand-down in the face of it. On the other hand, English author and storyteller C.S. Lewis argues for recovering “whatever good work means to you” in spite of the blaring mess.
In England, during the peak of World War II, C.S. Lewis (who was already a celebrated author, scholar and broadcaster), delivered a sermon to a dispirited congregation at a local church. (His words that day were later included in a collection of his public statements under the titleThe Weight of Glory and Other Addresses).
Lewis was himself dispirited by how many of his countrymen and women seemed frozen by the domestic horrors of a grinding war. If they were to act on their pre-War commitments, it would have to wait for a future when the fighting was over and the anxiety around it had passed. Lewis was having none of it.
He challenged this kind of sleepwalking by making the difficult argument that wartime was not so different from any other time. But as his words came to ground, his listeners that morning (and beyond it) saw that he had a point.
“The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.... If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
“[Moreover] we are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil…turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities [that is, everything other than waging war] until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.”
He continued that morning by weaving new patterns out of the same yarn, hoping that repetition might help his advice to sink in:
“The war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable.
“Favourable conditions never come.”
Then came that moment when I could almost hear the trumpets in the nave as Lewis raised his voice for a final call to arms:
“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
I was introduced to C.S. Lewis in 5th grade. It was raining or snowing, we couldn’t go outside for recess, and instead got to listen to the teacher reading us a story to pass the hour. In coming days and weeks, my classmates and I ended up begging her to continue reading that story to us—to find out what happened—whether there was rain or snow or the sun had come back out. Of course, it was Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was also set in the English countryside during World War II.
I was reminded of those storytelling hours when I came upon his sermonizing a few days ago. And for some reason, I remembered that the magical allegory he spun about Narnia, a talking lion and a white witch doesn’t take place outside of time or in some mythical past or future but as an intensification of the present moment—just like Lewis was trying to animate a congregation of church-goers who were caught in the very same time and place.
When Lucy, the first child goes into the wardrobe (and discovers a whole new world of dangers and opportunities), her sister and two brothers are chattering in a hall-way just beyond the portal she entered (what she thought were) hours or maybe an entire day before. This is Lewis again, writing about Lucy's return:
“Presently, instead of rough branches brushing past her she felt coats, and instead of crunching snow under her feet she felt wooden boards, and all at once she found herself jumping out of the wardrobe into the same empty room from which the whole adventure had started. She shut the wardrobe door tightly behind her and looked around, panting for breath. It was still raining, and she could hear the voices of the others in the passage.
“‘I’m here,’ she shouted. ‘I’m here. I’ve come back. I’m all right.’”
But no one had noticed she was gone because no time had passed. Lucy’s whole adventure took place in that glorious moment that is already here, right now.
The following may seem a long way away from the immediacy of a quest in which two boys and two girls fight a winter that never ends so that the spring can finally return. But actually it’s not.
Because my little dog has been struggling this week with something his vet couldn’t handle, I brought Wally to the ER at a nearby veterinary hospital on Friday for treatment that he quickly and ably received.
The excitement (if you can call it that) around the process made me realize two, closely related things.
The first was how much I’ve been “bargaining for inaction” given Wally’s unresolved health issues in recent months. Getting the right doctors, the right treatments, takes time and it makes no sense at all for the other work that I need to do "to be put on hold” while I get him sorted out.
My time at the emergency room with an extraordinary doctor, ER nurse and intern also pulled me back from the future where all this “good work of mine” and “getting back to normal” would supposedly happen.
In an ER, good work has no tomorrow, only what needs to happen right now, along with the rewards that follow when you're doing or experiencing work well done.
“This is what we’ve got. This is what we’ll do,” before taking your skills, experience and effort to do what you’re there for. What powerful witnesses these women were.
They testified that whatever the future holds should never interfere with the immediacy and power of the opportunities that are in right front of us. This is how “just do it” looks and feels: the best you can do in the here and now and the benefits to all concerned that flow from that.
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I’ll see you next Sunday.
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