Is just being alive enough? It is a question I have been facing, with continued difficulty, ever since I retired a dozen years ago after 25 years as a newspaper writer.
For all those years, and for the many years before, I held jobs that contributed, in some way — often small, even negligible — to the business of society. I had a sense of being productive. This is not to make any major claim about how important my production was. It was admittedly quite minor. But it was a contribution.
Doing so was a part of my sense of self, that being a productive member of society was not merely a way of occupying my time, but was actually a moral duty. If I were slacking off, I would be harming my society. And even worse, harming my immortal soul (something I don’t actually believe in).
This is not something I thought much about on a conscious level. In fact, when I do think about it, I realize it’s quite silly. Society gets along quite well without my input. But it is buried deep down somewhere in my psyche that I must be productive.
The opposite of being productive is being lazy. And I can’t help but feel that laziness is a moral failing. I have tried to excavate my brain to discover where this sense comes from and I cannot be sure.
The easy answer comes up, “Protestant work ethic,” and it is true that I was raised in such an environment. But religion has never played an important part of my life. As I have said before, I have no religion; I’m not even an atheist.
But somehow, I seem to have been injected with this guilt about not always doing something. Making something; teaching something; selling something; performing something.
It is true that my grandparents, on both sides of the family were quite religious. My father’s parents were even infected with a kind of Lutheran religious mania. They went to church three times a week, prayed constantly, and when they were young, before World War II, my father and his siblings were not allowed to listen to the radio, to music or to dance. In fact, this church-craziness led my father to promise never to inflict this kind of joyless religion on his children.
And so, although we all went to church on Christmas and Easter, it was only to make my mother’s mother happy. She was religious in a more normal way, and was always kind and loving. But I and my two brothers managed to escape our childhoods without any religious sentiment at all.
Or so it seems. While I have no supernatural beliefs — the whole idea of a god or gods seems pointless — something of the culture seems to have leaked in.
For all of my 25 years at the newspaper, I averaged about three stories per week. I always felt as if I were slacking off and that I should be writing more. My editors constantly told me I was the most productive member of the features staff. But it never felt that way. Even on vacations, I took daily notes before going to bed, and used those notes to write travel stories for the paper when I got back to the office.
Before I retired, I used the computerized data base to check on my output and discovered I had written something like 3 million words during my tenure. If an average novel is about 90,000 words, it means I wrote the equivalent of more than 30 novels in that time. My last project for the paper was a 40,000 word history of architecture in Phoenix.
And so, when I left my job, it was like stepping off a moving bus, racing to a halt and trying to keep my balance.
My colleagues at the paper bought me a blog site as a retirement gift, and I began writing for it instead of the newspaper. At first, I was writing an average of three blog posts per week, unchanged from my time at work.
I have slowed down greatly since then, and am now aiming for about three posts a month. I don’t always make that many. But I have written more than 750 blog entries in the 12 years since I left the newspaper. which is still more than one a week. And I also write a monthly essay for the online journal of the Spirit of the Senses salon group of Phoenix. That’s an additional 103 essays, each averaging about 1500 words. Blog and journal, it all adds up to about an additional million and a half words written since giving up employment. Old writers never really retire, they just stop getting paid.
And none of this is paid work. I write because I cannot not write. When I am not blogging, I am writing e-mails. Old-fashioned e-mails that are more like actual letters than the quick one- or two-sentence blips that constitute most e-mails. Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Nilsen?
But that all brings me back to my original concern: Is just being alive enough? Can I in good conscience spend an hour or two sitting in my back yard and listening to the dozens of birds chattering on, watching the clouds form and reform as they sail across the sky dome, enjoying the random swaying of the tallest tree branches in the intermittent wind? Thinking unconnected thoughts and once in a while noticing that I am breathing?
In 1662, Lutheran composer Franz Joachim Burmeister wrote a hymn titled Es ist genug (“It is enough”) that Johann Sebastian Bach later wrote into one of his more famous cantatas. It is notable for including a tritone in its melody. And, in 1935 Alban Berg incorporated it in his violin concerto, written “in memory of an angel” after the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler. It is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful musical compositions of the 20th century. Es ist genug.
I remember reading that in India, the idealized life is understood to be a youth of play, and adulthood of work and an old age of seeking spiritual truths. That one is meant to lay down one’s tools and contemplate what it has all been about. And I take some comfort in the possibility that, at the age of 76, it is now my job no longer to produce, but to absorb all those things that were irrelevant to a normally productive life. To notice my own breathing; to feel the air on my skin; to recognize my tiny spot at the axis of my own infinitesimal consciousness in an expansive cosmos. To attempt to simply exist and to feel the existence as it passes.
Richard Nilsen 