Today, I am revisiting a topic I covered in an earlier blog
I took my four-year-old grandson to a little amusement park, to one of those kiddie rides — a small car running on a track, with a bright steering wheel the child can turn. He turned that wheel with tremendous seriousness, hauling it left and right, leaning into the curves, utterly absorbed in the great responsibility of getting us safely around. When the ride wound down he looked up at me, flushed and beaming, and asked, “Was I a good driver, Tatha?” Tatha means Grandpa in Kannada, my native tongue.
I looked at his eager face and proclaimed, “You are the best driver in the world!”
The wheel, of course, was connected to nothing. The car went exactly where the track sent it, at exactly the speed the motor decreed, whether he spun the wheel like a champion or never touched it at all. He had steered nothing. And he had never been happier.
I want to suggest something to you that you will resist, and I want you to sit with the resistance. Your life is that ride. Initiative – the proud sense that you size up a situation, choose your response, and bend events to your will – is very largely a myth. You went to a good school, you worked hard, you showed enterprise, and therefore you succeeded: so runs the story. But you are the child at the wheel, certain he is driving, on a track that was laid before he ever climbed in. The Bezoses and the Musks of this world arrived where they are because that was their road, their destiny – not because they followed a formula you can lift and apply to yourself.
You know this, if you are honest. Think of the times you did everything right – prepared flawlessly, executed perfectly – and it came to nothing. Think of the times you did almost nothing and abundance fell into your lap. Where was your vaunted control then?
There is a moment in Lawrence of Arabia I love. A man has fallen in the desert and the others shrug: he is meant to die, “it is written.” Lawrence rides back into the desert furnace and returns with the man alive. “Nothing is written,” he declares. And an Arab answers quietly, “For you, nothing is written.” It is a thrilling scene. But the film does not ask the deeper question: what if Lawrence’s riding back and rescuing the man was also written?
So – if you steer nothing, why act at all? Why not slump down in the little car and let the track carry you where it will?
Because you do not know what has been written for you, and there is only one way to find out: to try, with everything you have. You act not because effort guarantees the outcome – it does not, it never did – but because the trying is itself the point. The grace given to you is not the result. The grace is the growth that happens inside you as you strive, the person you become in the striving. If the result comes, very well. If it does not, also very well, because the growth has already occurred and cannot be taken from you, and so the absence of the result need not disturb you in the least.
Carlos Castaneda’s Man of Knowledge understood this. Knowing that nothing matters more than anything else, he nevertheless chooses an act and throws himself into it as though it mattered immensely – and when it is done, he walks away in peace, indifferent to whether it “worked” or didn’t. Castaneda called it controlled folly. It is the razor’s edge of a life well lived: to act as though you held the steering wheel, while knowing, all the while, that the wheel turns nothing.
Spin it gloriously, then. And when the ride ends, do not ask whether you steered well. Ask only whether you became, in the turning, someone more awake.
Peace!
