20 Apr A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived
So many of us spend so much time trying to be useful; to achieve and make our marks.
And that’s great.
The life we know wouldn’t be the same if people didn’t strive for success and progress and more.
But at the same time, some of these constructs can, in some ways, detract from happiness.
Sometimes, they can lead to us never feeling satisfied and content.
What if, then, we could enjoy more happiness but not striving, by accepting nothingness and uselessness?
Sound interesting? Then read on …
via Psyche by Joseph Keegin
John Alec Baker was not an ornithologist by profession. He had a regular English schoolboy’s grammar-school education, then won his bread at odd jobs and minor clerical positions in the Essex county town where he was born and raised (and where he would, at the age of 61, die). Despite having worked for some time at the Automobile Association, he never learned to drive a car, so when he travelled the quiet roads into the English countryside around Chelmsford to watch the birds, he walked or – despite his poor eyesight and increasingly debilitating rheumatoid arthritis – rode his bicycle.
In his free time, Baker watched and documented the habits of birds, with particular attention to one raptor that had, by the middle of the 20th century, become seriously endangered: the peregrine falcon. Afternoons in the woods, and evenings recording his observations in a diary – a decade of such labour bore Baker his small, luminous masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), now recognised as some of the greatest nature writing ever set to paper:
For 10 years, I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.
Not money, nor fame, nor even the improvement in man’s estate that motivates the knowledge-gathering activity of the modern scientist: Baker’s effort was for the sake of something else entirely. He sought something splendid and beautiful, to be sure, but – in worldly terms – completely and utterly useless.
Scarcely a decade after the publication of The Peregrine and half the world away, two working-class California teenagers formed a band. Neither knew how to play any instruments – ‘they didn’t know bass guitars were different from regular ones,’ a historian reports; ‘they didn’t even know about tuning at all’ – but their moms thought it a better idea than aimlessly wandering the rough streets of San Pedro, so they thought they’d give it a try. A few months of rookie jamming generated clumsy Alice Cooper and Blue Öyster Cult covers, before an encounter with the Ramones and the Clash won them over to punk rock. They started writing songs and, a few drummers and band names later, they finally settled on calling themselves the Minutemen. Over the course of their brief but intense five-year existence, they would become one of the most beloved and inspiring punk bands in the United States.
Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way
Punk rock, of course, doesn’t seem much like birdwatching. It’s a theatre for status-seeking and pretence: you start a band to strike it big, to get signed, get paid, get laid. But the Minutemen were indifferent to the glamour and the preening. Punk itself seemed to them like a thing worth participating in, and the most obvious means of participation was making music. ‘Sometimes you have to act out your dreams,’ said the bassist and singer Mike Watt, ‘because circumstances can get you crammed down. And instead of getting angry and jealous of what they got, why not get artistic about it and create a little work site, a little fiefdom?’ The activity – meeting other bands, ‘jamming econo’ (touring on the cheap), cutting records, acting out one’s dreams – was its own goal, and building a DIY punk rock world was a happy consequence. The meagre profits just kept the fiefdom running…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE