Wear the World Lightly

There is a story I heard once about two relatives who were attending the funeral services of a wealthy family member. One of them, with a greedy glint in his eyes, leans over and whispers; “how much did he leave?“. The other looks back and responds…”All of it“. The point of the story was that when our time comes, we don’t take any of our possessions with us.

St. Francis of Assisi, who was born into a wealthy noble family, left his life of possessions and privileges to start a monastery and live a life of simplicity. His advice to those who wanted to join him was to “Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there but lightly”. 

St Francis Statue

The Alcoholic Anonymous organization adopted this teaching of St Francis and shortened it to the simple phrase: Wear the World Lightly. Their 12-step program for overcoming addiction uses lots of sayings to help people detach and overcome their addictions, phrases like: live and let live, let go and let God, turn it over, easy does it, and one day at a time.

All of these statements of detachment are not intended to send a message that we should be indifferent or dead to the world, or have no feelings at all. Rather their purpose is to teach people to face the world with a kind of mindful disengagement.

It is this “detachment with love” philosophy that can help motivate people to create a peaceful space within themselves, separated from the never-ending incoming arrows of uncertainty, fear, anger, and other painful events that plague our life. Practicing detachment helps people look past the daily shocks that occur, producing a change of attitude in the mind and a physical release in the body.

To wear the world as a loose garment is to acknowledge that the world and our life will always press at us and around us, but that it does not have to touch us but “lightly”. Most things are either outside our control or ultimately unimportant. 

We do not need to grasp, manage, dwell on or react to everything that happens to us. We can choose instead to keep the world at an emotional distance so we can stay focused on doing the next right thing. It is an attitude that can relax the body and relieve the mind of the poisonous emotions that overcome us when we are confronted by the people, places or things that beset us.

To be in the world but not of it, is to live and move through life without being emotionally attached to everything that happens. Life can get hard, but those who wear the world lightly learn how to live in the world with their hardships, neither fighting them nor being crushed by them.

St Francis was essentially encouraging us to not sweat the small stuff. To not get annoyed or depressed when life does not go your way or when you do not get what you want. When you have lived long enough you come to understand that most of the things that bother us are small potatoes. Even death apparently, which the Dalai Lama described as a simple change of clothes.

I’ve heard it said that the secret to happiness as we age “is to care less and less about more and more“. The wise elders I have been fortunate to know in my life carried that attitude with them; they tended to let fewer and fewer things bother them as they got older. It’s not because they didn’t care, most likely it was just that they discovered through their life experience that it is possible to walk away, without anger or agitation, from some things they felt passionate about – and still live.

I happened across an on-line sermon about this same topic of wearing the world lightly by Bishop Robert Barron. From a spiritual point of view, Bishop Barron also believes that St Francis’ famous statement was an attempt to teach his followers about the importance of detachment – especially from the goods and achievements of the world.

Not because the world itself is bad – there are all kinds of good, true and beautiful things in the world – but because the things of the world are not the ultimate good and we are not meant to cling to them as though they were.

There are stories throughout the Bible about the futility of clinging on to earthly power, riches and glory. King Solomon is one of the greatest figures in the history of Israel from a standpoint of wealth and power. He was somebody who had it all; nobody was richer, nobody was more famous, nobody had richer palaces or clothes. But, as an old man, looking at all the possessions he has acquired over his lifetime, he says: “Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity!“.

The word vanity in Hebrew signifies something that is insubstantial and momentary, like wind or vapor or bubbles; something that is here for a brief time and then it is gone. Solomon has experienced everything: power, sensual pleasure, wisdom, honor and wealth. He has built up a reserve of wealth through his knowledge and skills and yet when he is gone, he must leave all his property to others who have not labored over it and do not deserve it.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints like this from men as they become old and infirm; “I gave my whole life to my business, I worked hard and I made a fortune. Now I’m an old man and I’m surrounded by ungrateful children and grand-children; and I’ve done all this work and yet these people are going to inherit all my wealth. What’s it all been about“?

If you live to be old enough, at some point, you finally come to realize that everything in this world has a quality of evanescence – it disappears and does not last. It is a good thing if you have been successful and built up a fortune – but it’s not going to last. Because you are going to fade away and it’s all going to go to somebody else.

Should we just be depressed then? Father Barron says no, not depressed, instead we should be detached. Our wealth, power, pleasure and the esteem of other people. It’s good. We should take it in and then let it go. We should enjoy it the way you enjoy a firework going off. Learn to live in the present moment, savoring what we can, but then letting it go.

Why? Because we come to realize that the truly good and beautiful things belong to a higher world. We can sense them in the good things of this world but none of our earthly things last and so if we cling to them, what happens is they disappear, they crumble as we try to grasp at them. Rather see them, appreciate them and then let them go.

We can get caught in an addictive pattern when we cling to the goods of the world. You worry about them so you say to yourself, oh no I better get more. Instead, we would be wise to remember the cautionary parable of the rich fool told by Jesus:

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”‘ “But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared— whose will they be?’

Luke 12:16-21

St Francis asks us to cultivate an attitude of detachment in our life. To stop clinging and hanging on to the things of the world. The more we cling to them, the more we become imprisoned by them. We’ll become bitter, angry , empty if our only focus is on the acquisition of ephemeral things. But if we practice the proper spiritual attitude of detachment and keep our eyes on the true and beautiful things that do not fade away then we will know how to handle the goods of the world as they come to us.

Fr Barron closes his sermon by emphasizing again that wealth in itself is not the problem. He points out that wealthy people can be saintly when they know how to use their wealth, how to wear it lightly and how to become generous with it. The only thing we take with us into the life to come is the quality of our love and what we’ve given away on earth. So, we should forget about trying to fill up our lives with bigger barns; true joy in life comes through building up our treasure in heaven.

The publication of this particular blog represents a milestone for me and the achievement of a goal I set for myself way back in 2013 when I posted my very first Words to Live By blog entry. I have been publishing this monthly blog for almost 10 years now and and have managed to author 100 different blog entries in that time.

I have attempted in this collection of postings to communicate ideas and philosophies that have helped me along the way and given my life direction and meaning. It has been a wonderful mental exercise for me and a labor of love that has helped me recognize things that make life interesting and wonderful. I hope my readers have discovered some of their own words to live by that will be of specific value to them in their own life.

In the spirit of “wearing the world lightly”, I plan to cut back on my blogging activities moving forward so that I am can devote more time focusing on doing the next right things in my life that will increase the quality of my love. I don’t plan to walk away from blogging completely though, as there are always more words to live by to be discovered and examined.

So, keep an eye out for the occasional future posting from me; and until then, may the blessings abound in your life.

Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy

I was fortunate to retire from my traditional work career at the relatively young age of 56. Retiring early had become a goal of mine ever since I observed how much my father enjoyed his 30 year post-work life. My father was perfectly content to leave the working life behind and fill up his days with fishing, tending his vegetable garden, solving the daily crossword puzzle, taking naps and watching the home town Sports teams on his television.

When the time came for me to retire, I had an idyllic vision of spending my days in similar fashion. Finally, after 56 years, I was looking forward to being my own boss – thrilled to have the opportunity to wake up every day and do whatever it was that interested me. I believed that every day would feel like Christmas!

And those first few months of retirement really were magical. Gone was the stress of having to be available 24/7 to my company’s sales and management teams who were battling to close million dollar deals, gone was the daily 3 to 4 hour commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and gone was the chronic sleep deficit.

It was goodbye to all that. What replaced it was the pleasure of deciding which book to read from my list of “books I always wanted to read“, fly fishing in the beautiful rivers of New England, taking long rides on my electric bike, spending quality time with my grandkids, and attending stimulating concerts and plays with my wife.

Something begin to happen, however, that I was not expecting about six months into my retirement. As the novelty and thrill of being retired began to subside I began to notice that I was experiencing melancholy moods and moments of soul searching. I was spending time reflecting on topics like past loss, the certainty of my physical and mental decline, and the uncertainty of how future generations will deal with the big existential challenges the world is facing.

Without the rigors of work to occupy my attention, my mind was set free to wander where it wanted to go and to my surprise I discovered that it often wanted to contemplate dark and doleful topics. I was not that concerned about these sometime melancholy moods because I reasoned that it is one of life’s natural reactions to harbor feelings of both happiness and sadness; and I remembered the wise old grandmother who once said: “A good day is a laugh and a cry“. Still I wondered why my pensive thoughts were increasing in frequency at a time in my life when I expected to be most content.

Then I happened to read about a study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert which could help to explain the phenomenon I was experiencing. These researchers developed a smartphone app that allowed them to collect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people at random moments as they went about their daily activities.

Using the app, Killingsworth and Gilbert asked people what they were doing and how happy they were while doing it. They sifted through 25,000 responses from more than 5000 people and reported that 46% of the people were thinking about things other than what they were actually doing at the time (in other words, they were daydreaming about something other than what they were doing). They discovered that those people who were daydreaming typically were not happy; while those who were fully engaged in their activity were the happiest. 

The researchers wrote that unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating instead events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. This “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it apparently comes with an emotional cost. “We see evidence that a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” they said in their report. The bottom line is that we’re more likely to think negative thoughts when we let our minds wander.

Maybe that is why people who are waiting in line or stuck in traffic appear to be more irritable. And maybe my melancholy moods have increased in frequency since leaving work simply because my mind is no longer required to spend 10+ hours a day focused on the demands of my job.

This study confirms that many philosophical and religious traditions are on to something true when they teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and by training their practitioners to resist mind wandering and concentrate on the here and now. Yoga teachers and those teaching meditation practices usually stress the importance of “mindfulness” or “being present” for a good reason — because when we do, it usually puts us in a better mood.

When I look back at my work career, I can see now that those moments when I felt most fulfilled was when I was in the middle of product development activities, being part of a team inventing electronic test solutions to solve complex manufacturing challenges. During those moments all the powers of my mind were fully engaged in solving the problem at hand and there was a sense that the results of the team’s collective work would have a positive impact on the company, our customers, and to a certain extent, society in general.

William F. Buckley put his finger on the unique ability that meaningful work has in preventing the onset of depressive feelings when he wrote “Industry is the enemy of Melancholy“. Simply put, if we are busy doing work that requires a focused mind it becomes difficult for the mind to wander and contemplate spirit dampening topics that are likely to cause the blues.

I happened to listen to an online homily about work that touched on a similar theme from a spiritual point of view that was given by Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron made the point that our very being is deeply influenced by our actions and that the kind of work we do has a lot to do with the kind of people we become.

People who have no work usually struggle with depression because our sense of dignity often comes from work. Those who suffer from unemployment feel not just the financial burden of a lost paycheck, but also the loss of dignity brought about from the loss of their livelihood.

When you are feeling down one of the things psychologists recommend is to get to work on a project. It tends to make you feel better because work engages the powers of mind, will, creativity, and imagination and we become awakened when we give ourselves over to a project.

It doesn’t have to be a grand or complicated project. In fact, Bishop Barron mentioned that he found that one of the things that brings him the most satisfaction is doing the dishes. His day is usually filled with meetings and intellectual activities, so it is a relief for him to do some simple physical work at the end of the day. It brings him satisfaction to make order out of a dirty kitchen and to see everything clean and in its place when he is done.

The Bishop referenced this lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” to emphasize that work is a blessing and that souls can not fully prosper when their hands and feet are idle.

“May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift”

Bob Dylan; Forever Young

Not all work is physical, though. Pope John Paul II categorized different kinds of work for the faithful. There is physical work (the work of the body), intellectual work (the work of the mind), spiritual work (the feeding of one’s soul), and moral work (charitable work on behalf of the poor and mistreated). When we are attentive to each of these categories of work in our daily life, it is then that we best fulfill our divine potential and become collaborators with the purpose of God.

I like that idea. May we all come to see our work, in all its different manifestations, as collaborating with the purpose of God and as bringing us into a more perfect union with a higher power.