Much Ado about Doing

If, like me, you’re a fan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you’ll be familiar with the following exchange between the two principle characters, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak;

Holly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul: The mean reds, you mean like the blues?
Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Paul: Sure.
Holly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

Tiffany’s is Holly’s antidote to the “mean reds”. Fortunately for me (and for my bank balance!) I have found my own antidote which is much closer to hand and, in my opinion, holds far more sparkle than a whole room full of platinum and diamonds. For when I get the “mean reds”, or even “the blues”, I always have the urge to rush out and head for the greens, the browns, the ochre. When that feeling of claustrophobic fear strikes, my instinct is to run to space – to the ‘great outdoors’. A wood, a park, the sea. Somewhere I can feel the edges of myself, the limits of me, paling in my insignificance into the limitless world of nature.

But what is it I find there? Quiet? Serenity? A sense that “nothing very bad could happen to you there”? Yes. Perhaps. Maybe all these things. But more than this, what I encounter in the quiet space of nature is Being.

We all spend so much time 'doing' in our lives that the question of 'Being' and what this means often drops out the bottom of our existence.

Have you ever walked around a supermarket, piling it high with your weekly shop, only to get to the checkout to find that the small item you placed in the trolley at the beginning of the shop has fallen out the bottom? More often than not it is an item you purposely went shopping for, with everything else just impulse buys and unnecessary luxuries. This is what happens with Being I think – it falls out the bottom of our trolley of existence.

Sometimes I think it happens just like this – a single occurrence resulting from our being distracted by other things or piling our trolley too high. Other times it’s a more gradual, insidious draining away – like sugar draining from a hole in the bottom of a packet; you don’t notice until suddenly the hole becomes so large and fragile that everything comes gushing out.

“What is it you do?” - Isn’t this a question we’re all familiar with at parties, gatherings and social functions where we are meeting strangers for the first time?

“What did you do today?” – A question asked by mothers to children, wives to husbands, friends to one another.

When do we ever ask, “How did you ‘be’ today?”. And no, it isn’t just a question of grammar that prevents us from asking this question.

I often don’t know how to answer that question of “What do you do?”. I often don’t really know what it was I ‘did’ on any given day either. It’s all too easy to lose our sense of what it is we’ve ‘done’, should be ‘doing’ or what it is we’re even good at ‘doing’. And there are times in our lives where that painful presence of an absence of ‘doing’ feels suffocatingly close. Like tinnitus in your ear, its shrill noise rings in its persistence and deafens us to the sound of our Being.

So on days where I’m struck by the “mean reds” I run to the greens of nature. For in nature you find no ‘doing’ but only ‘Being’. The concept of ‘doing’ makes no sense out in nature, for ‘doing’ implies purpose and what purpose does nature have other than to be?

Does a tree ever ask itself what it should be doing today? Do birds ever remark upon one another’s birdsong and reflect upon whether they could be doing a better job? Does a gentle breeze ever agonise over what direction it ought to blow in today? No. Being need not make any reference to purpose, to any concept of what needs to be done. Being just is. Its this sense of ‘is-ness’ that I feel most clearly when I take myself out into nature.

The other day, feeling just a little ‘blue’, I decided to take myself off for a walk. I headed to Nymans Garden, a National Trust property in West Sussex, and found myself following the Bluebell trail. It was a cold but sunny March day. I sat upon a pile of trees - cut down for making a pathway it seemed. I felt my skin prickle with cold and a warm red glow of winter sun on my cheeks. I heard a woodpecker busy at work and watched a tiny rabbit scampering through a blanket of crisp golden leaves. I felt a shivery breeze through my hair and heard the gentle bubbling of water over rock in a nearby stream.

Had you asked me on that afternoon, “What did you do today?”, I probably would have said “Not a lot” and at once have felt a definite absence of purpose, a lack of any sense of achievement. But had you asked me, “How were you today? What did you feel?”, then my answer would have been altogether different:

I felt something of the world today.
I felt my heart beating.
I felt alive and real, and it felt good.

When our time is up and we exist to be, I wonder what will matter more – what we did, what we achieved or whether we lived as ourselves, in the fullness of our Being. Will it matter most whether we taught ourselves how to 'do' or whether we really learnt how 'to be'?

To be or to do – now that is the question. I know my answer, the question is, do you?