Rick's April Tirade
Obligations!
They're what keep us from living the lives we'd rather live. They
nag us and vex our spirits with the insistence of hungry housecats.
Only infants, madmen, dead folks and heavy sleepers are entirely
free from their malevolent grasp.
I speak of obligations -- those strutting, whipcracking overseers
on the cotton fields of life. Obligations turn our lives into
perpetual "to do" lists: each time we cross off an item we
add two more; finish those two, and four more suddenly appear.
They're always a step ahead of us, like the orange growers who
cleverly charge their captive fruit-pickers a few dollars more for
room and board than they pay in wages.
All right, that makes three metaphors in as many sentences. And
here's another, probably the best and most maddening of them all:
obligations are the fragile dinner-plates you have to keep spinning
on top of skinny poles, like that classic vaudeville act on the Ed
Sullivan Show.
Remember it? No matter. You have six, seven, eight, nine plates
spinning at a time, and you dash frantically from one pole to
another, giving each plate a spin just as it starts wobbling and
threatening to crash to the floor. Plate number six is wobbling;
give it a spin. Now plate number two needs a spin. You're constantly
watching for the wobbling plates and hoping that two of them aren't
wobbling simultaneously.
Each plate represents an obligation, and most of us keep vastly
more than eight or nine of them spinning at once: getting ourselves
to work on time, driving kid number one to cheerleading practice,
watering all nineteen houseplants, paying fifteen bills, taking old
Bowser for a walk, calling marginal friend number three, mowing the
lawn before the neighbors file a complaint, supervising employee
number two, remembering to wash behind the ears, scraping a feline
hairball off the rug, attending meeting number fourteen, pulling
weeds from flower bed number five, checking phone messages, scooping
out the litter box, caulking the bathroom tiles, taking vitamins B,
C, E and calcium/magnesium supplements, plus a precautionary aspirin
every other day.
Marginal friend number six is wobbling; give him a spin. Now
credit card number one threatens to crash, now employee number
three, now kid number two. Mow the lawn again, sell declining stock
number seven, placate the spouse, water houseplant number thirteen
again (it's looking dejected), pay the overdue cable TV bill. Now
marginal friend number eight and your unflossed teeth are wobbling
together; with a mixture of reluctance and relief, you let the
friend crash to the floor.
And these are just the OBLIGATORY obligations. As if we don't
have enough plates to spin, most of us take on an abundance of
ELECTIVE obligations. In fact, these voluntary compulsions tend to
crowd out the obligatory ones, because they're potentially more fun:
cultivate a dozen e-mail correspondences, set up and maintain a
saltwater aquarium, run a website for the Spinoza Society, build
your cardiovascular fitness at the local gym, shave your head,
subscribe to magazines for birdwatchers and practicing Buddhists.
Meanwhile, the bills go unpaid; the crabgrass grows lush and high.
I should confess that I juggle fewer obligations than the average
citizen of our proudly busy republic. Having eluded both matrimony
and home ownership, I've managed to free myself of obligatory
obligations relating to spousal maintenance, child supervision, and
repair of the domestic infrastructure. I keep a persnickety cat on
the premises, but he's no match for a wife in that department.
When I arrive home after a long day hunched over the computer,
I'm free to hunch myself over MY computer and pass a few genial
hours there, posting a retort to a rant on my message board or
keeping an eye on my unpredictable investments. I'm free to respond
to my e-mail and voice messages, free to be drawn into a chat with
online buddy number twelve, free to write a membership campaign
letter for the local independent cinema, free to glance at the
magazines that reproduce alarmingly on my sofa.
By the time I'm finished enjoying all that freedom, I've nodded
off on the living room rug from acute overstimulation. And I've
survived yet another day without having had to experience real life.
If my relatively slim list of obligations occupies all my
discretionary time, I can only marvel at the schedules of the lusty
majority, with their marriages and multiple offspring, their evening
MBA courses, soccer games, home-finance spreadsheets, alternate-day
sex, roof repairs and health-club workouts. Have they secretly
discovered the 36-hour day, or are they simply aliens with a
superior penchant for metabolizing cranberry muffins? Do they ever
stumble upon an uncrowded moment in which they can ponder the
constellations from the comfort of a hammock?
Look at me: I've scrupulously avoided the ties that bind. I've
never allowed my work to invade my home. I decided long ago that
life was too short to balance a checkbook, iron my garments, and
dust the horizontal surfaces of my furniture before I could write my
initials on them. And if I STILL don't have time to read a
reasonably fat book every other month, the rest of you must be in
dire need of an uncluttered hour.
Here, let me peel away the obligations for you until you're left
with nothing but life itself. Let me banish the surplus
acquaintances, dispense with the futile chores, cancel the magazines
that induce guilt when you don't read them, convince the kids to
find amusement within walking distance of home. Away with the
e-mail, voice mail and junk mail. To Hades with the houseplants.
Bump off a few relatives when nobody's looking. Cast aside the
checkbook register and computerized spreadsheets, and simply spend
less than you earn. Toss your cell phone into the nearest body of
water. Move into a prefabricated log cabin. Find a happy home for
your extraneous household pets, and while you're at it, send your
in-laws with them. Threaten to do the same with your spouse and
kids.
There. You've had the courage to confront the 1,347 demands on
your time and, like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, calmly
answer, "I would prefer not to." Wash the dishes? "I
would prefer not to." Meet that 5:00 project deadline? "I
would prefer not to." Pay the mortgage? You know the answer.
After all, your only real obligation is to breathe periodically;
anything else is a choice. You're free to let the dishes pile up,
lose your job and move out of your house.
As you strip your life to the bare walls, take a deep breath of
that forbidden freedom. Now, like a Zen master, you can begin to
appreciate the sound of silence, the fullness of emptiness, the
thingness of nothingness.
What's this? You're starting to feel fidgety? That's to be
expected at first; just lie back and stare at the pleasing blankness
of your ceiling. You're already bored with the ceiling? Start
chanting then, and live inside your head like a sage. You've become
pure essence, free of earthly obligations, free to focus on the
infinite. Did you say you can't focus without your contact lenses?
This is going to be a problem, isn't it?
It takes enormous inner reserves of courage and creativity to
lead an entirely voluntary life and live it well. Without a Greek
chorus of obligations telling us what to do with our time, most of
us start to shrivel inside our skins. We become beachcombers of the
spirit, aimless and miserable in paradise.
Beachcombing is exhilarating for a week, deadening after a month.
The truth is that, like it or not, life is an endless spinning of
plates.
So take up your plates gladly, and start them whirling upon the
poles one by one. The secret is to enjoy the spinning, to make it a
sport, to transform it into an INTERNAL imperative. As long as the
urge to spin comes from within, you have no obligations. You've
banished them to the infernal regions where they belong. You're
free.
Meanwhile, you'd better give plate number nine a good spin; it's
starting to wobble.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
