"Dolce far niente." by Ceci Lumley
1. And what science and industry don't understand is how critical investment in doing nothing is. Goals are well and good. Goals that benefit many people are more than well and good. Even while creating machines and devices of monstrous destruction, we have managed to work toward goals that lessen suffering, offer hope for the cessation of many kinds of pain, and create a world in which the minds of more children can be nurtured and encouraged to blossom. All praise-- and much profit-- to those who set and work toward such supportive, expansive goals. Who, in their right mind, can gainsay a world where the blind may see, the paralyzed may walk, the pain-ridden may sleep in peace? This very magazine rides a wonderful wave of the kind of technological exploration that Larry Smarr wants to encourage. (Smarr was involved in the development of Mosaic, the primitive first graphical browser, which morphed into Netscape and Internet Explorer). And we at Magellan's Log glory in the freedom and the endless stimuli to the silliest and the most serious creativity, offered by Internet. But (you were waiting for the "but", right?). But: So compelling are the obvious global needs (so much hunger, so much pain, so much poverty) and so tantalizingly close are many solutions that we can easily fall into a kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior, a sort of trance. "I've GOT to do this, and then this, and then this, to get to this worthwhile and beneficial goal." I've got to help my company achieve economies of scale, I've got to help my school figure out ways to teach better, I've got to improve these lines of code so this program will run better, I've got to figure out why this gene produces that destructive deformity... Having done all that, at the end of the day, what do you have? Some have prizes acknowledging their work. Some have profits. Some (mainly teachers and parents) have the quiet satisfaction of knowing they tended the human garden well.
Is that enough? Is that all? Are the prizes, the profits, the satisfaction enough? Are they all? And of course the symbol, after you think about it a long time, powerfully suggests the awful answer: No, they are not enough. But it also suggests the wonderful answer: No, they are not all. If you believe those rewards (prices, profits, satisfaction) are all, then at the end of the day, you are, sadly, left with nothing. Because, the terrible truth is, they are ashes. You take none of them to the grave with you. But if you can get yourself somehow to the place, contemplating that symbol (or others) where you glimpse the possibility that there is something beyond the bracing indifference of the infinite universe, then you have taken the first baby-step toward what one person a long time ago referred to as "the other shore." Not death. Not heaven. Not paradise. Just the other shore. Boats, countless boats, stand at the ready to transport you. One's leaving now, if you want to take it. Tickets are cheap, but, unfortunately, not easy to come by. They require a huge investment, not in basic science and industry, but in precisely and exactly the opposite: in basic non-science and non-industry. For millennia philosophers and martyrs have filled books and lives with words and deeds to try to communicate the price of the ferry ticket. Few have noticed that the Italians, with typical easy succinctness, said it best. They got it down to three words: Dolce far niente. "Sweet doing-nothing." The truly ineffable sweetness and the truly infinite rewards of doing nothing. Where "doing nothing" does NOT mean lolling about, being a media parasite, feeding off the numbing flow of information. "Doing nothing" here means "stopping doing anything." (Buddha comes to Bologna. Samsara comes to Sicily. Nirvana arrives in Naples.) Manage that, and lo, you find yourself on the ferry to nowhere, which, happy day, turns out to be everywhere. Truly, an investment of great, in fact inestimable price, beside whose worth the huge investments in basic research pale to nothing. END
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