Going About our Business

Going about our business

“For us, there is only the trying,” Eliot writes in “East Coker,” speaking as a poet who has no way of assessing the success or failure of his work: “The rest is not our business.” His sober reminder has been helpful for me and, I imagine, has helped others who have worked with words or clay or paint or wood or children or irrational numbers or the flickerings they follow through an electron microscope. My business is to do the work I’ve been given. Every wisdom tradition teaches some version of this: do what your hand finds to do with your whole heart and let go of the result. It will be what it will be. It will go, like water, where it will go. Once it has left your hand, it’s not yours to control.

People will misread what we have written. They will misinterpret our intentions. They will profit from our mistakes, or worse, from successes we failed to recognize. But that—hard as it is to accept—is not our business, any more than it is our business to follow the course of the air we exhale.

What is our business isn’t always easy to determine. The more curious among us have made it their business to peer into the anatomies of other creatures into outer space, or to write another biography of Lincoln or a new history of the Great Plague or experiment with new musical scales. And the rest of us have benefited. Curiosity, especially in labs and libraries, is celebrated as a virtue. But more than one wisdom tradition also warns us against “idle curiosity” or a “spirit of curiosity” (as Pope Francis recently put it) that distracts us from the tasks and needs around us and from the “kingdom of God” that is among us.

Gossip sells. It seduces us as we wait in grocery lines or languish in a dentist’s office, having only People Magazine to while away the reluctant minutes. Suddenly other people’s bitter divorces or glittering dresses or public faux pas occupy our captive imaginations.

Other people’s stories can, of course, be sources of instruction, and occasions for reflection. But “idle” curiosity leads to pride (“Thank God I’m not like those people”) or envy (“Why wasn’t I born with her body or his wealth?”) or avarice (“I deserve a new kitchen or a cruise down the Seine”) or any of the other “seven deadly sins.” Minding our business is a spiritual practice: daily we are invited to discern what that business is, and do it—to listen for the call of the moment, to quiet enough to hear it, and, forsaking all other occupations in that moment, to say yes.

Poet Robinson Jeffers praises, above human arts “the essential reality / of creatures going about their business”—pelicans in flight, horses and cows grazing, poppies giving their colors to any passing eye. They know what is theirs to do. It is a little harder for us, who are so capable of confusing ourselves and squandering our attentions. Twelve-year-old Jesus’ answer to his anxious parents who had searched for him among the crowds stays with me as an iconic teaching moment—an example of what vocation looks like. According to King James’ translators, he asks, “Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” I doubt he used antique verbs. I imagine, though, that he sensed in some way he himself didn’t yet fully comprehend that he was here on assignment and had work to do.

And so, in our humbler ways, are we. We have a mission, should we choose to accept it. And even should we choose to dawdle along “distracted from distraction by distraction,” the divinity who “shapes our ends” will come “bidden or unbidden,” to find us, call us to attention and, if we are at all willing, direct our paths. Our business begins in being and continues in choosing, again and again. For us there is only the trying.

[Image courtesy of snappygoat.com]