It
was, I imagine, following out this principle that Democritus taught that
"he who would live at peace must not do much business either public or
private," referring of course to unnecessary business: for if there be any
necessity for it we ought to transact not only much but endless business, both
public and private.
In
cases, however, where no solemn duty invites us to act, we had better keep
ourselves quiet: for he who does many things often puts himself in Fortune's
power, and it is safest not to tempt her often, but always to remember her existence,
and never to promise oneself anything on her security.
I find it
quite helpful to regularly run a bit of a personal inventory, where I try to work
out the difference between what I truly need to do and what I only believe I
need to do. If I am brutally honest with myself, I find that I get involved in
all sorts of endeavors, and yet almost all of them are not required for my happiness.
In fact,
all of that busywork is more of a diversion, and it easily keeps me from
attending to what matters the most. I neglect the essential, which actually
demands very little of me, at the expense of the trivial, which spreads my
efforts too thin.
What is
good in life is itself not that difficult, because it is simple, but what is
difficult in life is worrying about all the wrong things, because we make them
so complex for ourselves.
I may
need years and years of higher education and professional experience to learn
how to write an impressive report or sell the latest project to the investors,
and yet it only takes a bit of thoughtfulness and a touch of kindness to do
right by my neighbor. The thoughtfulness and the kindness only come hard, in my
experience, due to my own poorly built habits.
It isn’t just
that the life of the busybody is hectic, and grasping, and grueling; it is indeed
all of that, which is especially frustrating when we finally learn how meager
the rewards will be. No, what is most harmful is how it becomes a surrender of
our own lives, a dependence upon getting all of those circumstances lined up
just right. In the process, the world we are so eager to master takes a mastery
over us.
I
struggle to gain a control over the unfolding of events and the judgments of
other people, and I may deceive myself into thinking that I have gained it. All
that has happened, however, is that the way other things work on their own
terms has managed, for the moment, to be in agreement with how I would wish
them to be. I am really just following them around.
Once they
go off in a different direction from what I had planned, I wonder what didn’t “work
out”, or where my cleverness and power were most lacking, and it simply doesn’t
occur to me that I was betting on matters that were far beyond my power to
begin with.
Why enslave
myself to Fortune? Keep it simple, keep it reliable.
Written in 12/2011
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