Last month I was too overwhelmed, too busy, to write. That was a choice. The time, as Einstein would say, is always there. I chose to do other things instead of sitting down to put reflections into words. And that is a micro-choice which at the macro level may be heating up our beleaguered planet.
What was I doing instead of writing? Well…working, driving, shopping, cooking, planning, eating, reading, exercising, driving, parenting, talking, swimming, building, driving, biking, loving, caring, driving, preparing, driving. Pouring water into tubs and watching Felix climb in and pour it out. Chopping vegetables and putting them on skewers for the grill. Going into the hospital for a late-night admission. Driving out to Omak Lake and trying to dodge the wasps and seagull poop precipitated by too much garbage left by too many people. Drafting resolutions to try to reverse the widening income gap between rich and poor with its attendant misery. Following the unfolding war in Syria on NPR. Listening to TED talks while doing dishes. Trying to keep up on my physical therapy for an Achilles tendonitis. When it is all too much, distracting myself surfing the internet.
Once, on a river trip, I had the rare pleasure of finishing my work early. I was running the baggage raft, the often-overloaded 18-foot boat that runs down through the day’s whitewater ahead of everyone else to secure a site for the night’s stay and set up the immaculate camp demanded of outfitters. On this day we were only going from Oregon Hole to Sheep Creek. At that time Sheep Creek had a small cabin staffed by the Forest Service. The man staying there for the summer was named Ed Carr. I’d known him as a boy, when he swam with my older brother and I in his pond and helped us make a treefort in the jungle by his creek. Ed had a bushy beard, warm smile and a quick wit that hadn’t faded in the years since I’d seen him. He showed me around the cabin, through a garden exploding with abundance, and gave me his theory of the world.
Of note, what follows is only the best I can recall and doesn’t do justice to Ed’s lively tongue.
“The problem,” Ed said, “is that humans are too smart. We buzz around like busy bees. We’ve figured out how to drill into the earth and take out all these rare and precious metals. Then we concentrate them into building our skyscrapers and jetboats…what we need is to become dumber. We need some sabertooth tigers to thin us out a little. We need to make fewer bombs, fewer roads, and fewer babies, and we need the smart people especially to die off…we need to do less.”
At the molecular level, heat is simply increased motion. The more active the molecules, the warmer the substance. If the globe is an atomic soup and we humans the predominant molecules, we are doing an awful lot of activity—and it’s getting hot in here.
But I would put a slight twist—or what I think was actually the intended meaning—of Ed Carr’s idea of “smart”. The molecules among us who are doing the most activity are those who control the most resources, and I, simply by virtue of being an American and a physician (albeit a family doctor and not a cardiothoracic surgeon) fall towards that end of the spectrum (though again, it is also worth comparing to a Fortune 500 CEO). I like to think of myself as smart.
The last month’s busy-ness has made me question that. Whatever our ontologic reason for being here, whether self-perpetuation, beneficence to others, or simply the pursuit of happiness, there is ample evidence that doing more results in less.
And doing less, for me at least, seems to result in more. “Do what is essential”, said Leo Buscaglia, and he meant that we should spend more time loving each other, and less time doing things. The smartest people I have met are far from the most successful or active as measured by our material standards.
So before I rush off to wash the dishes, let me take a moment to cool the planet. To sit, and do less, and savor the memory of a peanut-butter-covered finger exploring my eyebrow.
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