I think humans have a biological need for purpose, for goals to reach. I
think it’s literally what we are born for.
What, after all, is the ideal life that people imagine when they feel buried
by the noise and confusion of life? A monastery of some sort. That isn’t a
place where you sit and do nothing – it’s a place where you can give your full
attention to activity. A monastic life is spent, almost every hour, doing
something important: making wine, repairing churches, prayer. It’s not an
escape from goals; it’s paring down your day until it consists of almost
nothing except pursuing goals.
People imagine escaping from duty, labor and goal-setting, of a life where
all your needs are met lavishly without working, only because the goals set for
them come from other people, and the tasks are boring or worse, destructive.
Many people understand this, and imagine a life where they are free to choose their
goals, often difficult ones like service in the Peace Corps, or ones which
offer little monetary reward, like painting in watercolors.
Karl Marx envisioned the Utopian state of “True Communism” not as a place
of regimentation and overbearing rules, the way it keeps turning out in
practice, but as a world where a person could hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they
have a mind, without ever needing to find a paying job as a hunter, fisherman,
herdsman or critic.
This is the biggest reason I’m in favor of some form of Basic Income: you
can count on it that it won’t create a nation where nobody works, but a nation of people who LOVE their work.
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.
The Magic Eight-Ball says: "By hammer and hand do all things stand."
