The Cure for Business
What if she’s the cure?
Like, well, posture maybe. I have bad posture. Most everyone I know does. Did. Does. I lurch over my desk, squeeze up when I sleep, settle down in soft couches that bend my back to the limit in the name of comfort. And I suffer for it. I suffer with cricks, cracks, and aches. I suffer with the occasional intolerable pain when something inside shifts just enough to say, “Enough!” after which I half-heartedly attempt to improve myself. Such leaf turning rarely lasts, however, and I am, soon enough, back to old habits. My posture is not in my best interest. I know this. Yet, change is difficult, and inertia strong.
Maybe keeping busy is no different.
I know better. I’ve given my attention to many poets and philosophers, great thinkers who admonish me again and again to slow down, to meet the pace of the natural world around me, to surrender myself to patience. True, there are stories meant to train us to work, the tortoise and the hare, the grasshopper and the ant, but for each of those, there are hundreds behind them reminding us to take time to smell the roses.
Yet, I am a busy person. I like to be busy. Like my bad posture, it matters little whether it serves me well or not. I simply feel more natural when I’m busy. Or, perhaps, feel anxious and scared when I am not. At the end of the day, when I lie in bed, I count the things I have done. I list, one by one, each task I attempted, tally up my achievements to earn my rest. I have been busy so long, I have forgotten what it means to rest properly. I sleep, true, but rarely rest. That my busy life has led to cricks, cracks, and aches was something I simply dismissed. Being busy felt normal, felt right. Were there repercussions, I ignored them for what I believed to be my comfort.
Yet, as I sit here, as I settle into quietness, as I slowly shed my need to accomplish, I wonder if I had spent my life suffering a disease, the cure for which only now has become apparent. Or, perhaps it was an allergic response. I have lived with the aggressive pollen so long I knew not that I could escape it. Only when she forcibly dragged me to a new climate could I see life without the sniffles, without the watery eyes, without the sinus pressure that I always took to be the natural state of life, rather than a cursed disease ravaging my soul waiting to be purged.
I am not a fool. I know I have contracted the virus, that she will ravage my body and soul until taking me from this life forever. I know that I could fight her, that I could survive a little longer were I only to make myself busy, make my mind busy. I know that the comfort of the meditation assemblies only serves to carry this angel of death across the world. I know that my desire to sit in peace, to commune with others as we let the elusive quiet settle upon our souls is only hastening the inevitable.
Yet, I wonder if I am, perhaps, not better off.
I’ve lost track of the days. I don’t think it has been months, though it feels like it. I no longer remember work. I remember the feeling of work, of being busy, of busy-ness, but I have no memory of my trade. Of my living. I have surrendered myself to the voice in my head. The voice that comforts me, that attends me, that keeps me company.
I have not read the news in some time, though I’ve seen enough to know what is happening. The virus has spread across the globe. This uncurable disease has asked us to trade action for apathy, tasks for tranquility, performance for peace. She has spread her tentacles across the earth and is putting us to sleep. She whispers in our minds, tells us to stop working, to find peace in the spaces around us, to sit with others without speaking, to make a world of peace and meditation, to seek nirvana as we each make our graceful exit from this life.
It is, we are told, a dangerous disease that will bring the end of our species.
And yet, what of the world she takes from us? What of the world of jobs and busy-ness, of focusing on ourselves, on our achievements at the expense of all else? What of the disease that has ravaged the human race since we first left the apes behind? That has pitted us against each other, has drawn us to competition and war? Were we better off with one disease than the other? Were we better off living for thousands of years to push each other about, work each other to distraction, blind to the quiet reverence of the world?
I suppose it matters little. The end has come, and I have surrendered.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder…
What if we are the disease, and she is the cure?