Wind-up Toys

A few days back, I suddenly remembered a toy that we grew up with. The wind-up toys. They are wound up and keep walking and finally fall over, when the winding completes its work. I think I remembered this because I was feeling like one. Keep on going till you drop dead! This is what life is, for many of us.

Some of us have no choice, but others like me, have a choice to slow down. But then, I have  lived like this always and so it has become a life style. 

Judith Shulevitz, in a 2003 article wrote this " We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember." (See reference below). 

She starts this article with this story from Freud's era. 

"Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud's, once identified a disorder he called Sunday neurosis. Every Sunday (or, in the case of a Jewish patient, every Saturday), the Sunday neurotic developed a headache or a stomach-ache or an attack of depression. After ruling out purely physiological causes, including the rich food served at Sunday dinners, Ferenczi figured out what was bothering his patients. They were suffering from the Sabbath. On that weekly holiday observed by all ''present-day civilized humanity'' (Ferenczi was writing in 1919, when Sunday was still sacred, even in Budapest, his very cosmopolitan hometown), not only did drudgery give way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach. The Sunday neurotic, rather than enjoying his respite, became distraught; he feared that impulses repressed only with great effort might be unleashed. He induced pain or mental anguish to pre-empt the feeling of being out of control."

Which means, this is not just a modern day phenomenon! When we are busy with work, we are in control, but when we do nothing, we are not! 

The problem with us baby boomers is, we grew up with an ethic. We call it the protestant work ethic - work is what we are created for. This is good but  we allowed work to define us. 

I need to reminded daily, what Charles Ringma  writes "First, we are all more than workers. Work is important, but so are rest and creativity. Work should not define who we are, for we are also lovers and dreamers who long for more." (from "A Fragile Hope: Cultivating a Hermitage of the Heart" by Charles R. Ringma)

But then, unlike me, who has freedom to decide what I can do or what I should not do, (though that too I mess up)  most others do not have that choice. Charles says in his book that the modern urban-space, has pushed us to be inwardly rootless, transcendentally absent, morally derelict, and we have become restless “wanderers”. 

But the question is, how can I develop a discipline of stopping to remember and reflecting, in the middle of restless wandering the world pushes me into (or I push myself into). Because the huge pressure on us is not to be reflective. But working without reflecting seriously about  value, purpose, or effectiveness, will make us automatons, (if we have not already become one). 

It is when I develop such a discipline, a life with an open and attentive gaze to what is happening around me, I become more compassionate and human. 

When I give up my preoccupation with my own projects and issues, and listen to what is happening in Wayanad, Delhi rains, Manipur, Gaza, and many other locations or stories of people who we meet on a daily basis, I move from being a wind-up toy, to Homo Sapiens - true 'Human Beings', and not just 'Human Doings'... At the same time, do effectively what I am expected to do too...

I hope I will "remember to stop because I have to stop to remember" - and listen to all what is happening around me...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/bring-back-the-sabbath.html