being and doing

Being and doing (or ∞ instead of "and", but I probably won't copy-paste that all the time) is a rich polarity for me right now. Doing-ness - immersed in the hamster wheel, the rat race, striving for accomplishments - has this property of stickiness that comes from eating up all your slack. You try as hard as you can to do as much as you can and fit as much as you can into the time... which doesn't leave slack for self-awareness, introspection, retrospection, or moving to some better state. Inside the diseased religion of "busy-ness", our energy just goes to making it through the day, doing everything you "should" do, so you can keep up and keep going.

It seems to me like this is inherent in doing, whether you're in the highs or lows of that path. Being-ness, in contrast, is in large part about the kind of expanded awareness that facilitates that reflection. Just "being" is about experiencing the experience of what it's like to be, independently of and in relationship to everything else. The funny thing is, that investment in the meta space is what can help expand one's capacity to hold complexity and grow one's ability to do more!

At a little over a month post-retirement, you'd expect that I'd be soaking in the decompression of just being, away from so much doing. But A) a job is only part of life, and B) I've been on the "being" train for a good year-and-a-half now, so it's not quite so new. I feel some pull to continue doing, and also a rich enjoyment of living in an expansive, aware, and integrated space of being-ness as well.

The polarity-mapping path looks like an infinity sign: driving far into the upsides on one pole, then sliding down into the downsides, then shooting over diagonally into the upsides of the other pole, then down into the downsides, repeat repeat. I was thinking today that this track needs some combination with the "spiral upwards" path (think Spiral Dynamics) that's more "rhymes, but doesn't repeat". But I found that someone already captured the synthesis/integration visually:

See the double-helix spiraling upwards in the middle? That's what I'm talking about.

To rest in being-ness at all times while fluidly and skillfully doing as well... mmm, yeah. That's where I'd like to live. Though one can't live at a static fixed point, I'm well aware. Perhaps a shrunken tiny infinity-shape path up near that upper arrow: to be able to dance in the upsides and lean back and forth a bit while staying aware and managing the little ebbs and flows of life breathing in and out.