Facing No Solid Ground

Hello All,

Today I’m featuring excerpt from Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist.

Best, Vicki P.

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People have occasionally objected, in response to that 2014 blog post (“Everyone is just winging it, all of the time”), that “everyone is winging it” is something only a journalist could write about politicians, other journalists, and people in similarly mushy lines of work. Surely airline pilots, heart surgeons and deep-sea oil engineers are very much not making things up as they go along?

This objection helps clarify what “winging it” really means. Of course pilots and doctors and engineers – people highly skilled at navigating complex bodies of specialist knowledge – aren’t just bumbling randomly through life like idiots. But in another, arguably deeper sense, they’re totally winging it. Like anyone else, they can never grasp the whole of the situation in which they find themselves; and like anyone else, they can never be certain about what’ll happen in the very next moment, let alone a week or a month from now. Like all of us, they’re just crossing bridges as they come to them: they can’t depend in any absolute way on the bodies of knowledge in which they’re trained. Life is always bigger, and more unknowable, than any set of concepts we use to try to make sense of it.

I think this might be what’s meant, in Zen Buddhism, by the idea of “beginner’s mind”: a state of mind that doesn’t pretend life can be completely stuffed into conceptual boxes, because no level of knowledge or training can ever insulate us from the openness of the very next moment. And a state of mind that approaches this fact not, mainly, as something to be scared of, but rather as a reason to show up more fully for whatever’s coming next.

Because, yes, of course in one sense it’s terrifying to realise there’s no solid ground here, no infallible parental figure who knows exactly what to do in the event of a pandemic, an economic crisis, or rising tensions between nuclear powers. (That’s one reason people like conspiracy theories: it’s calming to think there are all-powerful adults in charge, even if their motives are bad ones.) But the absence of solid ground is also deeply freeing. Because if there’s no solid ground… well, it means you don’t need to beat yourself up for having failed to scramble onto it yet. And it means you don’t need to wait until you can feel it under your feet before you turn to the things that matter to you most.