Do equals Don't

Aside from keeping the Cave vermin free, and emptying the sink of dishes periodically, I spend most of my time wasting time.  Killing time until I die is how I like to put it.  I watch old movies on TV, I poke around on YouTube, and I am proficient at several on-line video games.  That is how I spend most of my days.  There was a time when I did other stuff, or I tried to.  I tried to do lots of things, but I never learned how to do anything very well.

I tried hard to find something to do, something I could learn to do, something I cared about doing.  The best I was able to do was to pretend I knew what I was doing.  That sort of sums up my career as an educator.  I pretended to know what I was doing, but I was merely a useless cog in the educational bureaucracy.  But that’s not what I’m getting at.

I’m going to keep wasting time, because that’s what I do.  And just what is ‘wasting time’ anyway?  We do this, or we do that.  Time isn’t wasted, time is used, one way or another.  In my case, most of what I do is a waste of time, but like I said: I do what I do. 

Lately I’ve been trying something new.  Instead of merely staring mindlessly at the monitor while playing board games or slaying monsters, I turn the sound off and I listen to music or a lecture on YouTube. I'm still wasting time, but I'm brushing up on some of my favorite music at the same time.  Besides that I'm learning a lot about, ancient civilizations, space aliens, Gnostics, and other arcane topics.

Then one day I happened across on YouTube a talk by Alan Watts.  I remembered Watts from my Bohemian period, after the first unfortunate marriage.  Back then I didn’t quite get what he was talking about, but I liked the way it sounded.  He got me interested in Oriental philosophy.  I was, I am, especially fascinated by Zen Buddhism.   And now, coming across these talks by Watts has renewed my interest.

As I understand it, it’s all about desire.  You have to rid yourself of desire.  Desire causes all kinds of problems.  Get rid of desire!  But be careful!  You might work so hard at getting rid of desire, that you will start to desire not to desire.