10 Jan 2025 / Viewpoint

Calibration

I have done this as surely as almost everyone: the grind. Mine was especially rough. I was incapable of hustle because of an innate, and misplaced-in-the-world, sense of fair-play and because I have never been completely invested, immersed in the ways of the world. I cannot eulogize. I cannot feign respect or affection. And do not swear fealty to any social flag. And I don't suffer the excessive profusion of fools and charlatans there is. I cannot sell snake-oil or gaslight or take moonshots. Huge handicaps, these. Transacted across mutually agreed terms of engagement, professional etiquette and required collaborations, my work in the business of earning a living remains what it has always been by both choice and character ---- pleasant, precise, transactional. The fact that I try to live my own metric means missing out on making more money, knowing more people, making more music. I am fine with that. I have laboured and belaboured and generally run the course. Towards the end of it all, I realize the damage one causes oneself as a chattel to mere career is pathological. And that germs of defeat sit hidden in every victory.

Now that I calibrate how much and how, the ride is decidedly better. There's equilibrium and there's reflection. A degree of peace and creative satisfaction swings between this. From 'having' I veer towards 'being'. To each their own. I merely draw your attention to the fact that all success is fleeting, greatness (real or imagined) is relative and it evaporates on feet of clay. That while important and fair, materiality cannot be equated with refinement. And that a man of intelligence, even a little of it, is left aghast at the sight of endlessly, viciously competing clones besotted with chimeras.

"To live content, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, to babies and sages with open heart. To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, to let the spiritual unbidden and unconscious grow out of the common, this is to be my symphony." -- Henry William Channing.

Between the pillars of Spirit and Matter, the Mind has put up a swing....We are aloft on height and speed. There's certainly a case for calibration.