How to Resolve the Tug-of-War Between Doing and Being

Source: By Inspiringteam on 123RF

A few years ago, I went on a vision quest in Death Valley—a rite-of-passage designed to help participants step beyond the status quo and see their lives from a larger perspective, and cry for a vision as the Lakota medicine man Black Elk put it. A dozen of us spent 12 days in Death Valley, four of which involved a solo fast.

Before I set off on that solo journey, one of the facilitators suggested an assignment that might address something I had spoken about at length: a feeling of restlessness at the core of my life, and a desire to get my breath back down into my belly rather than high up and shallow in my chest.

She said, “Build a circle of stones and sit inside it for a whole day, and see what happens.”

On the morning of my first solo day, I built a circle of stones a quarter of a mile in diameter. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. The assignment was unnerving, precisely because it drew a tight circle around my attachment to moving and shaking, being busy and productive. And for someone habituated to feeling power in action and oratory, and who felt like I was wasting valuable vision-quest time doing nothing, it was a bit too close to the void, to the cessation of all our doing that’s known as death.

But over that day, I experienced the familiar and fibrillating restlessness inside me shift from drive to neutral, from pacing around like something caged to sitting quietly and watchfully in the center of that circle, submitting myself to the fine and fearsome art of being here now, and noticing that boredom is quite interesting up-close.

I began to realize that, for me, doing nothing is doing something very important: slowing the show down, calming my nervous system, and regaining a sense of deep composure and presence. In fact, for anyone standing at the edge of a cliff (trading off health for productivity, for instance), progress can be defined as stopping, if not taking a step backward.

The way most of us were raised, however, that’s a high bar—the shift from doing-mode to being-mode. Most of us have been well tutored in the belief that value adheres to what we produce, so we're constantly doing. And when we're busy doing, we don't have to be busy feeling. Feeling whatever it is that’s flashing red on our dashboard.

Here we encounter the age-old dialectic between being and doing that’s summed up by the question, “Are you a human being or a human doing?” which insinuates that the former is better than the latter. It isn’t.

They’re both essential and need to be brought to the bargaining table to hammer out a treaty that serves them both (though we know which one tends to prevail). The doing mode is focused on action and accomplishment and tells you there’s always more you could be doing. The being mode is focused on presence, mindfulness, and the journey rather than the goal, and tells you that your intrinsic value and self-worth depend on who you are, not what you do.

The doing mode is characterized by the gap between how things are and how you want them to be, and if there’s a discrepancy (and there always is), you’re motivated to keep trying to close that gap, directing your attention and energy toward a desired future.

The being mode is closer to a state of acceptance of things as they are (a high art), and allows you to appreciate and enjoy the richness of the present moment, and the things you have achieved, and among its payoffs is a sense of freedom from the proverbial grind, the endless attachment to striving.

Whether you attempt to overcome this through meditation, music, retreat, nature time, or a news fast, it’s about disengaging from busyness-as-usual and coming to understand that since to be simply means to exist, there’s no need to strive for it. You’re already there, all the time. There’s no firm boundary where doing leaves off and being begins, and the drive to attain a state of being-in-the-moment can become a productivity trap in itself, another goal—and a false one.

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That is, there’s no way to stop the doing mode. It isn’t in the nature of nature to cease doing, and life is always out on the dance floor doing the twist and shout, every body a busy body, from the molecular level to the celestial.

The Earth itself is spinning on its axis at 1000 miles-an-hour, in an orbit around the sun at 65,000 mph, in a solar system traveling at 540,000 mph around the galaxy, in a galaxy charging through space at 670,000 mph, in a universe expanding at 160,000 mph per megaparsec, whatever that means.

It means that even when you’re sitting peacefully in the lotus position, you’re moving at a million and a half miles an hour, which you won’t notice, of course, unless something happens to hit your windshield. And every electron inside your body is orbiting its nucleus a million billion times in the blink of an eye, a process required for solidity and matter to even exist.

Sitting inside my corral of stones, time was passing ceaselessly through me, my breath continually rising and falling, the wind constantly moving, the clouds rolling by overhead, and my stomach grumbling with hunger. And I began to wonder if "smelling the flowers" is still technically doing something. Is being quietly watchful for thoughts while meditating a kind of effort? If I succeed at being completely in the moment, is that success an achievement—it feels like one—which once again puts me back on the treadmill of doing?

The truth is, I don’t need to attain the summit of pure being. Those who’ve managed to attain that state—and stay there—tend to have religions named after them. I’m not that ambitious. I’d happily settle for a better balance between doing mode and being mode: not automatically answering the door whenever life knocks, not always picking up when the phone rings, and the social media dings, not doing so much of what I don’t want to do.

The lack of a certain fruitful emptiness and spaciousness in our lives also makes it hard, I think, for our intuitions, passions, and sometimes even values to catch up with us, since these calls have a hard time getting through when they get nothing but busy signals.

By taking regular breaks from doing mode and the tyranny of the to-do list—whether by sitting quietly in the backyard for five minutes or heading out on a retreat that might also be an advance, we remove ourselves from the duties and dramas, relationships and roles that bombard us with messages that may be distracting or irrelevant or even destructive to our intrinsic (or emerging) sense of self.

In turning, however temporarily, from the distracting fusillade of activities that often keeps us from ourselves, what’s in the background becomes foreground, what’s overlooked has the chance to get looked over, and what’s waiting in the wings is given an entrance cue.