Being & Doing

A heavy conversation with a friend on a mid-Manhattan rooftop this weekend spurred me to pick up Chapter 7 of Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island. What I ended up reading sounded so familiar and I think could convict even the quietest, most contented New Yorker.  We city-dwellers are great at doing– but what I sometimes long for when I imagine my alternate life in the country on a farm– is to perfect being…

Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being.  By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.  This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.  But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the quantity of our acts, without perfecting their quality.  And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair.

There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing.  And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.  The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.

We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act wisely or taste any experience in its human reality.  As long as we are not in our own possession, all our activity is futile.  If we let all our wine run out of the barrel and down the street, how will our thirst be quenched?

The value of our activity depends almost entirely on the humility to accept ourselves as we are.  The reason we do thing so badly is that we are not content to do what we can.

We insist on doing what is not asked of us, because we want to taste the success that belongs to somebody else.

We never discover what it is like to make a success of our own work, because we do not want to undertake any work that is merely proportionate to our powers.

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations?  He will accept such work only as a “means of livelihood” while he waits to discover his “true vocation.”  The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

…The measure of our being is not to be sought in the violence of our experiences.  Turbulence of spirit is a sign of spiritual weakness.  When delights spring out of our depths like leopards we have nothing to be proud of: our soul’s life is in danger.  For when we are strong we are always much greater than the things that happen to us, and the soul of a man who has found himself is like a deep sea in which there may be many fish: but they never come up out of the sea, and not one of them is big enough to trouble its placid surface.  His “being” is far greater than anything he feels or does.

…One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing.  For we cannot make the best of what we are and what we are not.

…If we do not no how poor we are we will never be able to appreciate what we actually have.  But, above all, we must learn our own weakness in order to awaken to a new order of action and of being– and experience God Himself accomplishing in us the things we find impossible.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity.  Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it…  If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music.

…Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the “one thing necessary” may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest.  For then, by divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.