ONE

Teach Me What Life Is For

It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I began to wonder what life was for. I had gone to boarding school at four for a year (because my English parents felt I would be safer there than staying with them on an RAF base during World War II), and after that I was cared for at home by a strict Victorian nanny, the daughter of a Royal Marine, who had been hired to look after my little brother. When I was ten, I went away to boarding school once more, and for seven years I worked hard and tried to do whatever was expected of me. Eventually, I passed all my exams with flying colors; but instead of being accepted at a university where I had dreamed of exploring the universe and finding the friends I had never had at high school, I found myself with a state scholarship but no place at any college. It was hard in those days for a girl to gain admission. I believe I could have got in if I had said that I wanted to teach. But I thought that the whole point of going to college was to discover what you might want to do from the vast array of possibilities. Why would you make up your mind before you even knew what these might be? I felt that I couldn’t make such a commitment at the outset, and so when I was asked whether I wanted to be a teacher, I answered, “I don’t know.”

Since I wasn’t going to a university like everyone else, there I was with the whole of my life before me, and I didn’t know what direction to take. I remember asking my parents what life was all about. What was everyone supposed to be doing? How could I decide how to spend my life if no one had ever explained the point of it? My education had filled my head with information that might or might not turn out to be useful, but there had never been any discussion of why we were learning all this. Now I was launched, so to speak, yet without any guiding principles.

My parents were alarmed at my questions. They never seemed to have had any doubt about what their function was. They met while working with the poor in the East End of London and went on to become mayor of Harrow (each of them in turn). Their lives were devoted to public service. I didn’t see this as necessarily the only path, although I respected their approach. When I started demanding answers, they summoned the family doctor, the genial Dr. Waller (house calls were still possible in those days), to whom I tearfully posed my questions. He listened for a few minutes and then told me that people just didn’t ask questions like those. They weren’t appropriate. He reported to my father and mother that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown and prescribed a program of rest and exercise (I was not naturally athletic but soon found myself enrolled in fencing, skating, swimming, and “keep-fit” classes). I had been about to set off for Switzerland to become the secretary to the director of the Swiss Everest Foundation, but Dr. Waller decided that I had worked too hard at my exams and should not be even more stressed by earning my living in another language in a foreign country. So my questions were squelched, and I was made to feel as though I had done something unforgivable by even raising them.

I bring all this up because I suspect it may be a far from uncommon experience, even if the details of the dilemma are different for each of us. Our parents and teachers try to do their best for us, but either there never seems to be a suitable moment to address questions like these or they themselves have not found the answers and so hesitate to offer advice for fear of being more of a hindrance than a help. It is a little like the way sex education was then: no one spoke about it, and it was assumed that each person would discover the facts for him- or herself. There is, of course, one other possibility, and that is that a great many people simply never allow themselves to voice these questions. The aim of modern education seems to be to equip us to be suitably employed so that we can support ourselves and our families. And once we are employed, the idea is to get through our working lives so that we can enjoy ourselves in our retirement. How on earth did society lose sight of its reason for existence? And how can we know what to do now, in this moment, if we don’t know where we are going?

After three months of exercise and no intellectual stimulation, my questions faded into the background, and I set about earning my living like everyone else. Then, quite by chance it seemed, I started attending evening classes at the School of Economic Science (not to be confused with the London School of Economics). It came about this way: I was dating a rather diffident young legal student who mentioned that he planned to sign up for philosophy classes and asked me if I would like to accompany him. In the London Underground there were these plain black-and-white posters with the word Philosophy printed in large navy blue letters. (In those days I was unaware that this word meant “love of wisdom.”) While I waited for the train, I would study the few paragraphs of course description and was always puzzled by the fact that afterward I couldn’t articulate what I had read. Even now I cannot tell you what was on the poster, but I was so intrigued by this phenomenon that I decided to enroll together with Anthony and find out what the course had to offer.

I have to say that I found the first two lectures rather boring and simplistic. The course was taught through the Socratic method: raising questions. Answers were not often forthcoming, but at last many of the questions that had been troubling me were being asked. We had a rather benevolent middle-aged tutor who listened carefully to the response of each student and then smiled and said, “Yes.” I noticed that he had responded this way to two diametrically opposite answers, and so I challenged him. “When I say ‘Yes,” he replied, “I mean that I’ve heard you, not that I agree with what you say.”

Halfway through the first term, we were invited to sign up for the following one. At the coffee break, small groups of students were discussing their plans, and I hovered at the edge of one of these. There was one man in our class I particularly respected. He was tall, good-looking, intelligent, and solid as a rock. He appeared to know his own mind, and I always appreciated what he had to say. He remarked that although he himself had not yet found much of value in the classes, he had a close friend, an older man, who had been attending them for years. If his friend had found something worthwhile here and he had not, perhaps the fault was his. He said that he was going to sign up for the next term to see if he could discover what his old friend had found. And I signed up also, just because this logic was so persuasive. At least I had found a community where it was acceptable to ask important questions.

I remained in this organization for a considerable number of years, studying the philosophy of many of the world’s great traditions, and what I heard and put into practice there laid the groundwork for the rest of my life. At that time I believed that “the truth” was available only through this one conduit. Now I see that it is available anywhere and everywhere. But I probably would not have realized this without my early schooling in this particular discipline.

 

 

It was my friend and original publisher, Joel Fotinos, who dreamed up the idea for this book. The thought would never have occurred to me on my own. We were having dinner one night, I was telling him of my plans to leave full-time employment, and he instantly suggested that I write a book for him with this title. Once I had got over the shock, the notion seemed irresistible. When I stopped to consider it, I realized that everything I do is governed by the principle of not having anything left over. Still, I’m baffled that he was able to size me up so accurately.

I see now that living economically and wanting to be of service to other people and share with them whatever has come my way have always been themes for me. When I first came to the United States, I met with the head of the fledgling New York philosophy school, which went under a different name than the School of Economic Science, and she asked me, “What do you want from us?” I was taken aback by this question because both at home and in the school’s parent organization in London, I could not recall anyone ever asking me what I wanted. As far back as I remembered, I was simply told what to do, and usually I did it. I don’t wish to imply that I was a yes-person. I certainly challenged authority a great deal, but this took a certain amount of courage because challenge was not considered an option by Those-in-Charge. (This was England fifty years ago. In the United States there are always so many options …)

For a moment there was silence as I tried to collect my thoughts, and then I said, “I just want to be useful.” I understand now that this desire has characterized my whole life. I like things to be put to good use. For me, economy is all. I never buy or cook any more than is necessary. I am always going through my closets to see what I can pass on to someone else. I feel guilty if I am not using whatever I own—books, sweaters, shoes, you name it. And when I went through my files to see if I had ever written anything on the subject of economy, I found a quote from May Sarton (the epigraph of this book) that I had squirreled away five years before. Come to think of it, none of this should have surprised me, since I began my training at a place called the School of Economic Science! (The school had begun by teaching the economics of the American Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, and had gone on to add philosophy to its curriculum. I never found the economic aspect of what was taught there very appealing—or so I thought until now. I’d always been under the impression that I had gone there for the philosophy.)

As I thought about it, I realized that the result of gathering about you only what you need and relinquishing everything else is self-sufficiency—a lack of emotional neediness. This is another way of saying that it is wise to be satisfied with what you have. Lately, I have been mulling over the word content. I find it wonderful that it means both “that which is contained” and also “being satisfied.” Both meanings come from the past participle of the Latin verb continere. Contentment is a peaceful and unruffled state, but nowadays it is all too rare.

So everything you read in these pages is an exploration of how to live so that supply does not exceed demand or consumption; how to share whatever you may have with everyone else, not holding anything back in a miserly way; and how to trust that the universe will respond to you in the same way that you respond to it.

I visited the island of Bali in 1986, and my most enduring impression of it is its fecundity. Bali is located seven degrees from the equator, but since it is a small island, it never seems to get too hot. It does, however, rain every day for a little while. The result is that there doesn’t seem to be a square inch of land where things aren’t growing in profusion. And, in many ways, that is how it is with the world. Everything is available in profusion. It is just not always obvious when you are not in Bali.

I had always thought that I lived a plain and simple life until I began to write about it, and then I became amazed and almost overcome by the wealth and quality of my experiences. I now feel very blessed.

I have tried to put down my observations on how the world works so that you, too, can share in this abundance. In order to get back to the essentials, we must first identify what they are. Only then are we in a position to do something about them. What follows is not so much about what needs to take place at the physical level—practical instructions on what to do or not to do—as about what goes on in the mind. Don’t try to change things on the outside—in the “real” world. The work has to be done on the inside. It is a kind of interior housekeeping. Each time you drop an old attitude or habit, it is like spring cleaning: more space becomes available. There is room to move about and examine the situation from a new perspective, and everything feels freer and lighter. If you clarify the mind and relinquish some of the curious ideas that have become lodged there (most of the time we aren’t even aware of them), then you will be free to enjoy all the glorious things that are in the physical realm. So here are a few principles for clearing the mind of clutter.