When you see people ensconced in their craft, you’ll notice that they are often living what I’ve come to think of as a Zone 2 life, after the exercise trend. They are not manic; they are persistent. They’re not burning out with frantic energy; they are just plowing their furrow, a little bit farther, day after day.
They live with an offensive spirit. They are drawn by some positive attraction, not driven by a fear of failure. They perceive obstacles as challenges, not threats. On their good days, they’ve assigned themselves the right level of difficulty. Happiness is usually not getting what you want or living with ease; it is living, from one hour to the next, at a level of just manageable difficulty.
By the time you’ve reached craftsman status, you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work. You may want to be a rock star, but if you don’t love the arduous process of making music and touring, you won’t succeed. The craftsman has internalized knowledge of the field so she can work by intuition, using her repertoire of moves, relying on hunches, not rules. W.H. Auden captured it perfectly:
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
When people have reached this stage, they are living a life of leisure. These days we think of “leisure” as the relaxation we do when we’re not at work. But that’s not how people historically defined leisure. To them, leisure is the state of mind we are in when we are doing what we intrinsically want to do. The word “school” comes from the word “schole,” which is Greek for leisure. School is supposed to be any place where people are engaged in the passionate search for knowledge. In his memoir, Murakami doesn’t treat writing as work and running as leisure. They are both interconnected forms of leisure. Van Gogh was in a leisurely frame of mind when he wrote about painting in a letter to his brother, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”
A person at leisure is the opposite of a person who wants to be an influencer. She is driven by internal propulsion, not for outward display. When that is your mentality, it alters your attitude toward the suffering involved in the process of growth. The drudgery of the work feels like the unfurling of your very nature — a chef endlessly cutting vegetables, a bricklayer endlessly laying brick. One falls into a rhythm that is characteristically one’s own.
“No matter how mundane some action might appear,” Murakami wrote, “keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative even meditative act.” It becomes your natural way of living the world. Michelangelo once reported that things were only right with him when he was holding a chisel in his hand.
#Opinion #Passionate #Life
