I have employment. It’s a meager job that I thought would not require too much of me other than my ability to perform menial tasks. It was designed in my head that way. I did my best to make it clear that I was not interested in responsibility or management or the amount of money that was to be made. The establishment to which I applied, and now work, was purportedly based on the teachings and life of a supposedly simple individual: Jesus.
Within days of starting, it morphed into exactly what I feared and hoped it would not: a business. I have spent the last two or three years doing my level best to get away from “busy-ness”. The world is very adamant in its efforts and insistence that one not be allowed to exit from that cruel taskmaster. For, if too many people were to find the doorway out, where would that leave all the other people that still want to be busy? The irony is that very few people are interested in finding or even looking for the door. But the world demands us all. Why? Why would the world care about a single individual or several thousand or even a million that choose to walk out on its divertissement?
Is there peace to be found in this world? A quiet solitude that does not mean that you are alone just that you are away; away from all the things that are not true.
“How long will it last, this peace I have found at sea? It is all of life that I contemplate–sun, clouds, time that passes and abides. Occasionally it is also that other world, foreign now, that I left centuries ago. The modern, artificial world where man has been turned into a money-making machine to satisfy false needs, false joys.”
The Long Way – Bernard Moitessier
Until I began seriously looking to simplify my life and had settled on a sailboat, I had never heard of Moitessier. I have now read The Long Way three, maybe four times. I find something new every time I read it. Or maybe, I don’t find it, I just rediscover it.