A woman in a Facebook group for medical transcriptionists/editors on our particular team posted this today: “There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.--Dalai Lama.”
I love the quote, know virtually nothing about Dalai Lama, although of course I know the name, but it got me restarted wondering some things I’ve been wrestling with for a while.
Useless things, mostly: For instance, what if we all just bailed out of the “corporate world,” quit working for them, quit buying their products, etc. Obviously that is an impossible idea--we all have to work, we all have to eat, and our consumption is the driving force of two-thirds or thereabouts of our nation’s economy. It might make us FEEL all “fuck you” and so forth, but we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, or maybe in the heart.
Still . . . .
The notion of simplifying our lives, learning to live inside the temples of our brains and hearts, can be tantalizing. Who wouldn’t want to dispense with all the BS, all the daily rush (or the daily monotony, depending on what you do for a living), the daily nightmare or daily recalcitrant pain of just trying to make it from one day to another?
Life can be so fatiguing, sometimes, and it really shouldn’t be. Exhausting, yes--exhausting can be a good thing. But fatiguing? Whole ‘nother thing. Life should be glorious. And in fact it is.
“Exhausting” is an exhilarating workout; “fatiguing” is a wear-you-down-to-nothing grind.
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who does not wish, at some point or other, that s/he could simplify his/her life, step off the treadmill, quit simply (or simply quit) worrying so damned day-to-day MUCH about whatever their hearts/minds are really “about.”
There is probably not a person in this country, maybe even in the world, who doesn’t wish that s/he had the luxury of simple time--even just a worry/stress-free hour to spend daydreaming, or watching cats or dogs or bugs or other people. A worry/stress-free hour just to relax.
We spend our lives in a continual state of tension, a continual state of competition, one way or another. Working at home alone, I’m spared some of that, though obviously not all. Most medical transcriptionists, even when employed by companies, are paid by what they produce, not by the time they put in. When you’re an employee, you are in fact limited to 40 hours a week. What this means is that, if you want to make a living at it, every day when you sit down at the keyboard, you have to make every minute count. It’s continual tension because you have to be aware of the “real” cost of every interruption or distraction--a 15-minute chat with a neighbor, for instance, costs you, say, a couple of loaves of bread or a pound of ground chuck. The clock ticks while you chat, and you can never get that time back. (May be a bad example: Sometimes a 15-minute chat with a neighbor is an invaluable break. To pass up the chance is another kind of missed opportunity).
I suppose in some ways tension and competition heighten our awareness, at least in terms of survival. Plus, a life free of tension and competition probably would be BORING.
Would the Garden of Eden really be all that great a place to hang out, every day of our lives, for the rest of our lives?
(I selflessly volunteer to be the first one there!)
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