At a certain point in my “development” career, I began to question the whole notion of who’s impoverished. As the years passed abroad, I sensed that Truman had the thing turned on its head. Amazingly, most of the so-called impoverished beneficiaries of my programs were better off than me. That is to say, their cultures had come up with a way of living in the world that contributed more to happiness — in Dr. Seligman’s sense of “general well-being” — than my culture. Throughout the Global South, people, by and large, had achieved higher levels of Seligman’s three factors: they had bigger smiles; they were very often engaged in the moment; and through their kinship networks and close relationship with Mother Earth, they achieved a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
Thinking perhaps that my lived experience was too subjective, I decided to check the social science data. Holland’s Erasmus University ranked Colombia — of all places — as the happiest nation on earth. Great Britain’s Journal of Happiness Studies put Colombia at number four in the world. And the Happy Planet Index of the New Economy Foundation ranked Colombia second. These studies essentially ranked general well-being, or how people feel about their own lives.
The fact that folks in Colombia, a so-called underdeveloped country — which ranks below forty other countries in terms of GDP — is so darn happy is curious only when one equates higher material living standards with higher levels of well-being. In the Biswas-Diener survey, 96 percent of Colombians defined themselves as content with life. Most rich nations rank miles below Colombia and tend to have the planet’s highest rates of divorce, child abuse, addiction, and suicide. Indeed, a recent Emory University study showed that just 17 percent of Americans were “flourishing” in mental health terms, while 26 percent were “languishing” in depression.
Eventually, it dawned on me that while, according to my job descriptions over the past decade, I had been working in underdeveloped nations, perhaps I’d actually been working most of the time in developed nations — and that I came from an unhealthily overdeveloped nation. Like a bodybuilder so loaded with steroids that he becomes impotent, America’s hyper-consumerism came with unwanted environmental and psychological side effects.
I do not mean this to glorify material destitution. I make an important distinction: even in this revised conception, not every Global South country would qualify as “developed.” I’ve accompanied some of the millions of people who cannot afford to live even 12 × 12. They live a × a, with no lush organic gardens, no gently flowing creek, and no shelter at all overhead. They live in what you might call the Fourth World, those anarchic, failed spaces where community — the glue of enough — has been decimated by war, famine, and natural disaster, as well as by the great unnatural disaster, corporate economic globalization.
When discussing relatively “poorer” countries, we need to make a clear, explicit distinction between people living in a state of material destitution and people living healthy subsistence lifestyles. Terms like poverty and Third World mask this distinction and give license for modern professionals — of whom I’ve long been one — to undervalue, denigrate, and interfere with sustainable ways of life.
There’s a point where one’s material life is in balance: one has neither too much nor too little. Per my own analysis of GDP and global happiness studies, roughly one-fifth of humanity has too much and is overdeveloped; another fifth has too little and is underdeveloped. Neither of these groups experiences general well-being. The former, with materialism caked on like a million barnacles, can rarely experience the simple joy of being. The latter are so destitute that they can’t sustain their bodies physically. Fortunately, the third group — those with enough — is by far the largest. It is what I call “developed,” ranging from subsistence livelihoods like that of the Maya of Guatemala to the level of the average European circa 1990.
By this rough calculation, 60 percent of the world lives sustainably, in a global sense. In other words, if everyone lived as they did, one planet — the one we’re on right now — would suffice to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone. (In contrast, if everyone lived at the level of the average American, we’d require the resources of four additional earth-sized planets.) One solution practically jumps out: The 20 percent with too much should share with the 20 percent with too little. Of course, there will always be inequalities, but isn’t it in our best interests to lessen the grotesque differences of today’s world? Social science research, spiritual traditions, and most of our personal experience tell us that neither too much nor too little leads to well-being.
Idleness has been under threat at least since we stamped “underdeveloped” on the majority of humankind, most of whom actually live in enough. In the past two or three generations, a significant portion of the Global South has flocked to cities from tiny rural villages, where they lived and worked in concert with nature and traditional values for centuries. Why is this? In part, it is the allure of modern life, of technology and industrialized affluence, leading to what you might call a voluntary flattening. This is exemplified by those highland Bolivian women (cholitas) who leave behind their mothers, still wrestling Pachamama for potatoes, and light out for the city to find jobs sewing underwear or selling cheap Chinese electronics — and then spend their hard-earned disposable income on neon-colored Chinese silk, wool Italian hats, and dangly earrings, becoming proud, flashy members of the Flat World. There’s an undeniable seduction to individualism and consumption, especially when that seduction is sweetened by trillions of global marketing dollars.
However, there are trade-offs and often disillusionment: many cholitas end up living in the polluted, sprawling El Alto slums; Mexicans find themselves in cookie-cutter suburbs crowding the hills outside the Tijuana maquilas. Nor is this change wholly and truly “voluntary”: cholitas sometimes cannot stay on the family farm because the potatoes are gone or nearly worthless. Crop failures fueled by climate change; price crashes caused by global agribusiness; and the sense, even in those small villages, that tending your local corn crop is a devalued, almost useless skill in the global economy.
Tough choices face both the Workaholic North and the Idle Majority. We’re in the same ship, trying to navigate choppy twenty-first-century waters. Those in the Idle Majority who navigate it best seem to be the ones who don’t exchange their entire culture for seductive consumption. In Bolivia, El Alto is an interesting example because many families living there go back and forth between that sprawling urban area and their traditional villages. They still maintain a connection with the land, including continuing to plant and harvest potatoes. They retain the best of what their grandparents knew, stewarding “vernacular culture” — a body of knowledge that has evolved over thousands of years in every corner of the globe. Vernacular culture is the enduring wisdom that sustains a spiritually rich life, so it is regenerative by nature of survival. Most such wisdom has a keen awareness of how to nurture dignified life in a certain locale with particular soils, climate, water, biodiversity, and cultural traditions. Nearly all vernacular cultures embrace abundant idleness, the “beingness” that binds humans and nature.
Could part of the solution to our ecological crisis be found in rediscovering ways to maintain a place for idleness? Instead of merely handing out “development aid,” the North might also seek and receive “vernacular aid” from the Global South, gathering clues toward living more softly now.
AT THE 12 X 12, I NOTICED, part of wildcrafting involves reclaiming the right to be idle — a ratcheting down from overdeveloped to developed, from too much to enough. Jackie expressed it to me once like this: part of the joy of simplifying one’s material life is that you don’t have to work long hours to buy and maintain a bunch of stuff. This leaves time for open-ended chats — like the kind I began to have with Paul Jr.
I found myself hanging out with him quite a bit. One day, shortly after we met on his farm, we engaged in a playful dharma chat at an outdoor table at Adams Marketplace, a food co-op and lunch joint twel
ve miles along the highway from Jackie’s. He looked at me through his just-on-the-right-side-of-hip eyeglasses and asked, “Do you know Carlos Castaneda?”
I nodded. “
Okay. There’s this moment in The Teachings of Don Juan where Castaneda is with the shaman, Don Juan, in this tiny house in the southwest desert. Don Juan asks Castaneda to look at one of the walls.”
Paul Jr. paused melodramatically and looked at one of the co-op walls. “Castaneda studied the wall, taking comfort in the everyday objects in front of it: books, a lamp, vases, kitchenware …”
I pictured the wall of Jackie’s kitchen, the spices and preserves, pots and kettle.
“And then,” Paul continued, “Don Juan asked him to turn around and look at the opposite wall.”
In my mind, I turned around in Jackie’s, facing the wall with the windows looking out at the night sky, Venus in the window. Paul leaned closer to me and spoke more softly, “On the other side of the cabin, there was no wall, no comforting objects. Castaneda looked out into nothing but deep, cold space.”
He looked at me, bright-eyed, appearing much younger than his thirty-seven years. “Do you get it? There’s nothing. That’s the point. We live in a cold, meaningless universe.”
“What do you think?” I asked Paul.
“This is maybe the biggest question in my life. And I’m leaning …” — Paul shook his head, grinning — “I’m leaning toward the cold void. Why do many people need a cuddly universe, loving them? What do you think?”
Paul looked at me. I looked into the blue sky behind him, with its wisps of cloud, as if for an answer. There’s no answer, I thought. Like nature, God is now you see her, now you don’t. Is Castaneda right, elsewhere, when he insists that “all paths are the same, they lead nowhere,” and that the only important thing is to choose a path with heart? Castaneda found himself staring into Nietzsche’s existential void. I was about to respond, when Paul said: “Oh look, that’s Jenny Jespersen coming our way.”
“I’m on the tail end of my lunch break, so can’t dally,” Jenny Jespersen told Paul in a staccato voice. “And do you work here, Paul? Because I always see you sitting here.”
“I’m an ociologo,” said Paul with a grin. Jenny shook her head. “A leisureologist,” he translated.
Jenny was all business: she gave us a rundown of her agenda as the senior finance committee chair for Adams County, and then, just as quickly as she had arrived, she was gone. All around us, even in the supposedly laid-back Adams Marketplace, everyone was in a hurry, all the hip nonprofit people and biodiesel brewers and organic farmers on the prowl for markets, for cash, for status, but Paul hadn’t stopped grinning. This was what I liked about him; he simply loved the present moment. He never hurried, or hustled after money or prestige; he just remained blissful in each moment. One time, I accompanied Paul in his old pickup truck to the organic farmers’ cooperative. His job was delivering produce around the state — but he worked only one or two days a week, by his own choice. That day we stopped to collect his paycheck for the past two weeks. Ten dollars an hour times a couple of days didn’t add up to much. But Paul smiled, looking at the tiny amount on the check, shaking his head in wonder at this bounty. He turned to me and said, “Bill, we’re going to celebrate!”
I felt a rush of pleasure. The so-called enlightened master — the bodhisattva, the sage — has so much in common with the archetypal “fool,” those blessed with Forrest Gump innocence and optimism. There was Paul Jr., a tiny paycheck, an enormous smile. He had a master’s degree; he had every opportunity to find work that paid better than truck driving, but he valued time more than money. Slowing down, for him and others like him in Adams County, was a radical act in the context of an overscheduled America.
AS TIME PASSED, life in the 12 × 12 became a course in Leisureology 101. Embraced by a local subculture intent on joining the world’s Idle Majority, I felt less guilty about the open days stretching out before me, with nothing on the agenda. Whenever the workaholism bug began to bite, I recalled Jackie’s advice: For now, be, don’t do. It occurred to me that the times when I slowed down — in the 12 × 12 and at other points in my life — were ironically the times when I got the most work done. Creativity flows smoothly out of nonaction, from deep wells of idleness. The creative self savors aimless wanderings where you slip into your own snug skin. It’s what writer Brenda Ueland calls “moodling,” or productively dawdling away the hours. When you moodle, your subconscious works out aesthetics and structure without the overactive rational mind’s interference.
One day I flipped to a new card in Jackie’s pile: DON’T BE SO PREDICTABLE. I smiled, picturing Jackie writing it and thinking about how “serious” science and spirituality, for her, intermingled with self-effacing humor. Her card said to me: Live uniquely in this unique moment. I must have subconsciously taken it to heart later that morning when I left the breakfast dishes unwashed and walked quite abruptly down the road — in my pajamas.
I didn’t realize that I was wearing PJs — a faded T-shirt and paint-splashed sweatpants — until I was twenty minutes down the train tracks. I stopped, embarrassed for a second, but then laughed out loud at myself. I was on a train track in rural North Carolina. Who was I going to meet? I did twenty stretch-shouts — an energy-boosting technique I’d picked up at the wonderful Kripalu yoga center in Massachusetts — and then let my gaze fall into the distance, where four or five textured clouds staked a claim to the southern horizon. They were probably down in South Carolina someplace. All that space between the clouds and me! I smiled broadly and closed my eyes, imagining myself taking flight from the tracks and soaring over ponds flush from last night’s storm, nose-diving through soft clouds.
The creek flashed below the railroad bridge, the fastest I’d seen it, thick with bubbles and pounding noisily against the bridge pillars. I found myself staring down into the creek, not thinking of a thing. Just listening. The sun climbed the sky. Still I sat there, listening to the creek. Eventually, when I felt like doing so, I got up and walked back along the abandoned train tracks toward the 12 × 12, realizing that my days were beginning to pass more like those of the Thompsons, the Pauls, Jackie, and so many others in the Idle Majority — in a blissfully subversive leisure. Jackie was shifting from overdevelopment to development. She is a talented physician who could have easily risen in wealth and status, and you could say she’s instead chosen to live in poverty, but that’s not entirely correct.
She lives in enough. She has abundant fresh food in her gardens, the music of a creek, a network of friends, neighbors, and family. She and other wildcrafters in Pine Bridge and throughout the rich world are choosing downward mobility — living well instead of forever striving to live better.
DON‘T BE SO PREDICTABLE
15. THE DRAGON
ONE DAY AS I WALKED by the Thompsons’, a few of their younger kids ran up to me. They stopped and looked at me as if to ask, “What are we going to do?” So I picked up a handful of rocks and said, “I have ten rocks.” They watched as I counted the gray gravel.
They each picked up rocks and started counting them. Brett held out two. “You’ve got two dollars!” I said.
“How much do I have?” asked Greg.
“You’ve got some pennies and quarters in there … six dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“And me?”
“Five euros.”
“Huh?”
“The money in Europe is called euros. And look, Greg, you have twelve Mexican pesos.”
For an hour or more we explored the currencies of the world, and did a bunch of math to boot. The next day, Michele thanked me for homeschooling them.
“We were just playing.”
“Exactly,” she said, explaining that kids learn like adults learn — by following their bliss instead of having the three Rs force-fed in forty-minute blocks. She said she likes the traditional village concept of education, where children spontaneously pick up knowledge while working on the
farm or interacting with neighbors like myself.
The Thompsons homeschooled five of their six kids using a freely adapted version of the Mennonite homeschooling curriculum. (Their eldest, Zach, attended a charter school because he was from Michele’s previous marriage, and her ex-husband insisted Zach receive a more traditional education.) There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what or when they studied. I’d sometimes see Kyle and Greg relaxing for an hour on the porch in front of their pond, shirtless, their little tan bodies soaking up the morning sun: Intro to Idleness. Other times they’d be feeding the hogs, out in the forest, or biking. Then, for large spurts — once I saw Kyle at it for an entire day — they’d read intensely.
“What ya reading?” I asked Kyle that day. He showed me. Though he was only eleven, he was fully engrossed in an engineering text. I asked Michele about it, and she chuckled, saying, “That’s his gift. Kyle is always building things and it fascinates him. He wants to be an engineer, so I focus his homeschooling around math and science. When he feels like it he reads entire novels, but I don’t force it. It comes from him.”
As it turns out, there are some twenty-five hundred homeschooled kids in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area alone, and overall, homeschooled kids have admission rates into college equal to those of traditionally schooled kids. Homeschooling isn’t for everyone. For starters, it means at least one parent must be home. But it reflects a wider pedagogical trend, in which education is returning to the original Latin derivation of the word education — meaning “to draw out.” For example, new European models of “holistic teaching” or “facilitation” consider the instructor to be a coach in the child’s own spontaneous exploration, particularly of the local communities and nature. Waldorf schools point in this direction, too. The factory education model that drives most US public schools, with its rigid time schedules and standardized testing, parallels the factory economy of twentieth-century workplaces. In the twenty-first century, the internet is softening the edges of that industrial way of working, providing the opportunity to invent more fluid ways of educating children.
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