I’m sat at the back of my cousin’s house, looking forward at the expense of land that is their backyard. The woods and trees beyond what isn’t really a fence, a little canal streaming silently by, birds dotting across the sky and the light hum of chatter from back in the house. It is in this moment I am able to reflect on Alan Watts’ thoughts on life having no purpose.
Rather than feeling the shame and worthlessness that capitalism attaches to purposelessness, I am at peace.
I am watching nature and i’m leaning into it, allowing myself to trust it, letting myself sit in this without questioning whether it is good, bad, real, or whatever questions that come from our inbuilt distrust of nature.
Instead, I think of the trees going though seasons, blooming, letting go of their fruits, losing their leaves and dying, just to live again. Now nature doesn’t care whether this fruit falls on the ground of my cousin’s backyard, or is plucked by the course hands of a labourer far away, it just does.
So do we. We eat to nourish and pass out, we grow, we get sick and heal, we sleep to rest the body and eventually we die, but life begins again, or shall I say it never stops, it is simply cyclical.
To accept this is to accept nature, no easy fit for humans burdened by consciousness. We have created and accepted an engineering view of life, one where there is a mechanism for every move, every breath, everything. We have not been taught to see ourselves as we see the birds, the bees, the oceans, none of it. We view our bodies as machinery, with separate parts that need to be isolated from the whole being and studied, but the body is a product of nature in the way that each unique star is a product of nature, the universe experiencing itself.
Although there is beauty and function within nature, there really is no explainable order, no reason, it is purposeless. We see the clouds, each alike but not the same, none following a specific pattern in how they stretch across the sky and we accept the unknown of this beauty. As with snowflakes, and stars, we accept what the Chinese know as Tao. The spontaneity of life, the random course of nature, the source that loves and nourishes all things without lording it over them.
To accept nature, to accept Tao is to have faith in self, this self being your nature and all nature that surrounds you. To lean into a nature which Watts’ states does not have a boss, because a boss is a system of mistrust.
This is not easy, years of viewing ourselves as separate from nature have led to the hyper-vigilant and policed individual, one who cannot trust others nor human nature, because it is ‘evil’.
Here is where the concept of morality limits us. We say trust in nature but this does not mean that nature is trustworthy, that is it wholly good and will never let you down. Like nature, human beings are complex, we are both bad and good and neither. The ability to recognise that human nature is giving and greedy, loving and selfish, is what Confucius theory describes as the virtue of human heartedness. This philosophy begs us to extend humanness to ourselves and others for it is more important who we are than the individual things we do. It asks that we reject the status quo of only interacting with likes and avoiding dislikes. It is when we are able to hold space for both that we are able to live right, that we are able to extend empathy to others.
One can begin to see how this lends onto certain “radical” and revolutionary desires for society. For example, it is with human heartedness that we can achieve restorative justice. We have learnt to distance ourselves from criminals, people who commit crimes, because surely it is better to show the world that you are so far removed from the thoughts and actions of a “bad” individual than to recognise that we all experience these thoughts and offer that individual the support to do “right”, aka to empathise.
Being a healthy and loving being able to extend this grace comes from accepting that we too belong to this purposeless nature. We spend years researching the hows of our body, mind and actions, why?- to survive, they say, but why survive? Why live? What is the purpose of living? There is none, life and living just are. Watts’ uses the great example of music and dancing having no purpose, no aim. What is the purpose of dancing if not to dance, he says. Sure, we can create goals with dancing, like learning a new move, but would one then say that learning this move is the purpose of dancing?
Similarly, we exist in a society that lords purpose over us. Our purpose is to survive, and to survive we need money, and to make money we work. So, we send children to schools for years, not for the scholarly gain of knowledge, but so they can work. We release millions of burnt out children to the working world and say, “here you go, this is life”.
Life is schooling, life is working, life is paying rent and bills, life is building relationships, life is procreating, life is ageing just to be told that the ageing population is an issue, and on and on this toxic cycle goes, where all we do is for the purpose of something.
What happens when we just live? When we do things without expecting self gain; whether that be financial growth or the furthering of your conscious.
It is when we are able to rid of a system in which we tie worth to purposefulness, that we are able to be rational loving beings, that we are able to be human. To be human in nature in the way that the tress, the animals and the sky are in nature, not against it; fearing ourselves, our nature, the nature of others, the nature around us, till the very last leg, what a terribly unhappy life that would be.
“If you do not have room in your life for the playful, life’s not worth living. All work and no play makes Jake a dull boy, but if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he’s not really playing, he’s playing cause it’s good for him… he’s not playing at all.”
- Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy.
