I’ve been thinking a lot about agency over the past year or so.
During my 13-month, pandemic-induced (but thoroughly-enjoyed) return to my childhood home in Arizona, I was forced to reckon with a lot of things. While I’ll spare you the details of the other discoveries I made about the life I was living, I’d like to share some of my musings on agency.
I only recently stumbled upon the following excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh, but it sums up a lot of what I struggled to articulate for the better part of a year.
The excerpt is about how to properly wash dishes, but its implications span far beyond the realm of the kitchen sink.
“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us afterwards, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’
What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink.
If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”
The way I see it, the road we must travel to successfully learn the art of dishwashing — to shift the way we view what we do day to day from acts of helpless servitude to acts of intentional choice — has two bridges, both of which we must cross.
The dishwashing example speaks more to the second, but I’d like to step away from the kitchen sink for a moment. Partly because I’m trying to dial down my use of drawn-out metaphors, but mostly because viewing something as a means to an end is a luxury reserved for the few of us willing to admit to ourselves that we are the makers of our own destiny. The few of us brave enough to cross the first bridge.
To join this distinguished club of semi-autonomous individuals, we must first do the scariest thing of all — we must admit to ourselves that no one is coming to save us.
We must admit to ourselves that while it might not necessarily be our fault[1] for ending up where we are, it is (almost) entirely our fault if we stay there. It is our fault because we are the only ones capable of doing anything about it.
This cardinal admission, terrifying for more reasons than I would care to discuss today, provides us with the metaphorical cap and gown that signifies our graduation to the second phase of learning the art of dishwashing (achieving agency).
When we stop resenting[2] the cruel indifference of the world that (in a narrative sense) has delivered us to our current circumstance and, in turn, begin to acknowledge that no one is forcing us to show up to the job we hate or study for the class we aren’t interested in, something (bordering on) magical happens.
We grasp the pen. The same pen that we had previously convinced ourselves was being held by some other entity and begin to write the story that is our lives (only this time, consciously).
Once we realize that no one is forcing us to show up to the job we hate[3], we are faced with a question, the answer to which is almost always the same.
If no one is forcing us to do this, why are we doing it?
By and large, we do the things that we do (consciously or unconsciously) because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of not doing them.
If we don’t show up to work, we’ll get fired. If we get fired, we won’t have any income[4]. If we don’t have any income, we won’t be able to afford food, shelter, or any of life’s other necessities. If we can’t fulfill our basic needs as humans, we will be unable to go forth into the world and acquire the higher-order things that we long for (i.e. start a family, buy a home, win master chef, become a chess grandmaster, etc.).
To finish first, first you have to finish.