As an unrepentant idealist, one of the great challenges of my life has been the reconciliation of my idealism with the inexorable need for pragmatism. As with the political process of legislative reconciliation, the vagaries and specifics of which we are increasingly familiar, the reconciliation of ideals with what the natural cynic calls "reality" mainly involves those issues which touch the budget.
Tellingly, the typo I made in the above paragraph was to write "tough the budget." It is tough.
For a brief period in my life, I made six figures. The fact that this was in a contract involving the Social Security Administration, and that the contracting agencies and recruiters made more on my work than I did every hour, troubled me a great deal. It was as close as I'd come to the "American Dream", and yet I could not help but mourn the implications of the waste my good fortune seemed to rely upon.
I never did count on getting any benefit from the huge chunk of my lifetime earnings that have gone toward the FICA tax. But after seeing the agency from the inside, and especially this disgusting enrichment of Lockheed Martin Technology Services (yep) and its recruiters at the expense of the taxpayer, I am virtually certain that I will never see a dime in return, especially the way things are going now with the economy.
I wish I could say that I am some kind of spiritual prodigy and that I figured out the path of careerism and wage slavery were never, ever going to make me happy and that therefore I dropped out of the rat race both early and completely. No, on the contrary, I vacillated quite a bit between stints of hermitage and accepting well-paying jobs, until the jobs wore me down and I went back to the wilderness, then I ran out of money or got tired of not having any, and took a new job. And as I've written about previously, to please an ex-boyfriend.
Only this current environment, which has given me no choice but to leave the city and move to a farm, has given me the clarity of mind to recognize that, whatever the consequences, having a job does not have the capacity to make me happy, no more than merely "having a boyfriend" does; and looking back on it, the more I was paid for a job, the less happy I was overall at the time.
Saying all of this, I don't expect for you, dear reader, to agree with my choice of words such as "wage slavery" and my basic predisposition toward idealism. I've often been rather jealous of my peers, that I am not any better than I am, not more like others in the task of sublimating my intellectual and spiritual life to the necessity of "having a job."
As a child I lived with my family for a few months in Indonesia. (And no, I did not attend a madrassa, heh.) I was eleven, and fascinated by the possibility of psychic phenomena, and in that context I remember feeling certain that we would not live on Sumatra very long -- as though I had some kind of prescience. When this premonition came true, I thought for a time that the explanation must be psychic, specifically that I had experienced some variety of precognition.
Now, however, I look back through adult eyes and see that the signs were fairly clear; my family was in turmoil due to the fact that there was no international school class above the seventh or eighth grade, and my sister was in the ninth. So she had to go to school in Singapore. At the age of fifteen, she had been thrust into the equivalent of college freshmanship -- living in a dorm with poor supervision, and feeling the exuberant rebellion so common at that age, she did nothing but play. Psychic abilities seem to run in the family, as well -- even before this news was confirmed, my mother seemed to know that all was not well.
My point is that, there was an impasse in the situation that I could feel, even if I couldn't frame the issues mentally; just as my mom knew her daughter well enough to anticipate the inevitable fiasco that was brewing in Singapore. So no, I realize now that I am not prescient; but I do understand better how the mind and intuition work. Even when we cannot articulate and explain, sometimes we know the trajectory of a situation, by the gathering of threads of information, not all of which we understand logically.
The same holds true in my relationship to work and career. My first job was in the employ of a large corporation that was ruthless. The job entailed answering letters from investors whose money was gone -- elderly widows who had invested their husband's life insurance moneys in real estate limited partnerships, for example. Sold out by their financial "advisors" who made a handsome commission off the top; which was possible because the real estate investments themselves were highly leveraged, and most were lost to foreclosure during the recession of the mid-1980's. This tore my heart out on a daily basis, and in an effort to avoid seeing those faces in the shakily written words on paper, their pleas for help dignity, I became a computer programmer. I automated the heartless "read the fine print of the prospectus and then fuck off and die" responses that were mandated. I did a good job on that project, eliminated a 6-month backlog with my automation program. Whoo hoo!
I was angry in those first two years of my professional life. So angry. Where is the justice? How can it be that these evil men could profit by grinding the elderly under their feet, simply because those widows never thought to read the fine print, never dreamed that they could lose all their money in income-producing real estate, never would have imagined that any responsible businessperson would make such an unwise decision with their livelihoods? I discovered the principal of the "corporate veil," behind which individual executives are held harmless from their decisions and intentions. Don't you know that corporations are people, and the corporation bears reponsibility for its actions -- not the people it hires! At least, not the executives. Bah, I'm still pissed off about it. And that means, I still have a soul.
Shareholder value? Hell, that company made off like the bandits they were on the very backs of their shareholders! There is no justification for it, none the fucking whatsoever, and may they burn in hell as they deserve. The name of the company was Southmark Corporation, for whatever that's worth. The list of partnerships was long. I bet your grandparents might remember it, had they survived. Ironically, if they did retain enough savings for a nursing home, it might have been one that was managed by the very same corporation, who had a number of "health care limited partnerships" in their portfolio. Well, you've got to admit, in terms of supply and demand, there is no end to the demand for health care. If it is a profit-making proposition, the fair market value of another year of life, or even the possibility of another week of life, is equal to everything you have, and more. Isn't it?
To bring this back around to the subject of prescience; I never managed to drum up any enthusiasm for American corporatism, because I sensed that it was basically psychotic. I didn't know that the greed would run so amok as to tank the entire economy, but I felt that it should end, even if it didn't. Something told me though, after this first exposure, that something like our present situation would emerge from that madness, the complete psychosis of greed.
So, where does that leave the concept of work? I love to work. I love the sense of satisfaction at a job well done. I'm meticulous in my work, because I want to continue to love what I have done, not be repeatedly reminded of an ill-advised shortcut that diminishes the usefulness, beauty, or life of what I have made.
My spiritual training has taught me meditation, and the flow of energy some refer to as the Kundalini. I am familiar with energy work, with the unblocking and opening of the chakras, with bridging the gap between the lower chakras and the higher ones. And I have learned that this energy, the chi, the life-force, is most powerfully and profoundly governed and directed by the heart; by love. We are all animated by these forces, but a capitalist who considers the money of widows fair spoils in their game is not governed by his or her heart, rather by the lower chakras that are energized by personal power and base pleasures.
I am speaking here, really, of the proper operation of our bodies, of physiological tautologies -- nothing really so ethereal as "spirit." Opening one's heart is an act of connection with our own body, and it involves the activation and clearing of blockages that occur in any of our chakras, higher and lower alike. A person who manages to open their heart, to move and live and have their being in the physical experience of love, is a person who is firing on all cylinders, who is as in touch with their intellectual center as their sexual center. But both the mind and the genitalia are happily submitted to the open heart, through which flows the power of life and creation.
Even simple carpentry is a magical act; we create in our minds an image of a building, we dream it up. Then we take up hammer and nails, timber and saw, and we bring into physical reality that dream image. A carpenters' tools are magic wands, and such apparently mundane tasks are as magical in reality as Harry Potter is in imagination.
Of course, to build a chicken coop, as I am doing now (well, not right now of course), it is not strictly necessary to engage one's heart or mind. All I want to express is that, it is possible to do so; that to do anything, any work at all, it is possible to work in the enveloping energy of love; and that doing this, acting in love, opening one's heart during work, is one of the most beautiful experiences available to us as humans.
Yet this never happened to me in a corporation. I work now as a volunteer on a farm, and making my work a gift seems to be critically important in maintaining my heart connection to work. Get a job? How about, get a life!
This diary is already too long; but I will continue to try to express the practical consequences of our national karma -- the chickens of greed coming home to roost. It is difficult to make this adjustment. Bills do no magically disappear because of loving work! And the need for money in our society is extreme. However, I don't wish to support the status quo any more. I will lose a hard-earned credit rating, since this lifestyle does not meet the demands of the debts I racked up while trying to make sense of it all. But I am grateful that I am in this position; I will lose credit, and perhaps with it a measure of credibility in the minds of some. I will miss the "master of my own destiny" feeling that comes with raking in a good salary.
But if they come to me tomorrow and offer me a corporate job, I will laugh in their faces. In a loving way, of course.