vita contemplativa?

[This morning, work is awful. So to the drafts file to find something to remind me how to function. Useful thing, is a blog. So here, a reminder.]

I think of this as a calling. [The statements of others that because it is a calling it is not work, or because it is a calling I should not have standards for my treatment and that of others, reader, these are bullshit.] I think of this as a calling and I describe it in religious terms. I talk about blessings and grace, about revelation and mystery. I talk about ritual. When I am feeling cynical - often - I talk about cults, in the pejorative modern sense, cults and dark rites of initiation.

Your fool is a godless one, reader. Religion and the interpretive, however, relate intimately in the tradition in which she was raised, is being raised. The metaphor should not surprise and it is no accident.

What is missing from this calling is meditation, contemplation. The slow and open mode of thought. Because it is work, because it is institutional, because it is (gasp) professional, it is difficult to recall that there is also some mystic element of this calling that cannot be practicalized. That element is what I on this blog call mindfulness.

Zero has a post on Self. "If you want to do a deep project" - and all the projects one really wants are deep ones - "you have to have access to self."

I wrote in the comments:

This is so difficult [...] not only because confidence is hard to come by (I’ve earned mine hard, such as it is), but because intellectual selfhood is so nebulous and weird and half-institutionalized and half pure gut and just hard to effing dis-cover and then build. And Self also comes through work, which is easy to put off without Self. A bind. THE bind, maybe. The one I have made it my principal goal to keep at the front of my mind, to deliberately disentangle bit by bit.

You do not only have to have access to self, you have to make self. This is also true elsewhere in life and in other professions, but in this profession, with its inevitable conflation of work and self, we are doubly bound.

It is probably true that the more investments one has outside of this worklife, the easier work-self is to come by. I have so few commitments. There is my partner, half in the worklife herself, and my cat. There are my parents. There are the details of keeping house. The rest is work. All of it. Friendships, quasi-parental mentorships, habits, hobbies, all turn back to the worklife. Children would change all this radically. So might, less radically, a legitimate, embodiable hobby. Dance, pottery. Something. (For now, I blog - insufficient.)

I am fortunate that I love it, this worklife. Mine is better structured than I have a right to expect, and it is full of good people and good books and travel and cities I love. And wonderful food. I have my room and my five hundred a year. It is a loveable life. But, as my younger self would say (herself reaching for access to self), love is not enough. Meditation is key, contemplation is key. Seek distance from the urgency of work, remember the "life" half of the term. I must remember that this, whatever it is, is mine and I must give it sense as mine.