A few years back, at an event in which Rebecca Solnit was talking with Joan Halifax Roshi, she said something I remember as “You know what you do. You don’t know what you do does.”
That apparently can be traced back to Foucault. I am not well-versed in Foucault, but I like the idea a lot. You should just do your work – the work that you think matters – and leave what it does to the future. You can’t control what it does.
I know, for example, that various things I learned from Aikido teachers along the way have stayed with me, and that I have been pleased – and sometimes surprised – when someone tells me that something I said on the mat or in a presentation stayed with them.
Likewise many things I’ve read have affected me, such as the ones I’m writing about here. And I’m always thrilled when I discover that something I’ve written had an effect on someone else.
You do what you think is important and sometimes someone else gets it and takes it somewhere else. That’s what life is about.
I just finished reading Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End, and was struck by this sentence:
You yourself are not a single garment of destiny, but a thread or a stitch in the tapestry.
She is talking about how interconnected we are, despite all the efforts to disconnect us. It’s also a warning to let go of the hero myth, to reject the idea that there is one hero coming to save us all, that one hero becomes the garment of destiny. Continue reading “Threads and Stitches”…