Choosing Obligation

A joke that circulated among some progressive educators I knew in the day ran like this: The little boy comes to school on Monday and says: ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’ This is funny because progressive education is about allowing children to be active participants in shaping their education. The most radical experiments, like Summerhill School in the UK in the 70’s and the Grassroots Free School in Tallahassee allow the children to pretty much decide how they want to use their time. Adults are there to keep them reasonably safe and to support the natural process of learning.

For a number of years, my Zen teacher and I led week-long silent retreats in a small house that abutted the school property. The school was struggling to find enough families were willing to trust the natural curiosity of their children beyond the first five years. There were only about ten or so young people who would roam the fields and gardens during the mornings and the afternoons while we sat still in the living room on our black cushions.

What I remember most from the intimate mornings of meditative silence is how long these young people could scream and shriek together in joy and excitement. The delight and wildness of their social freedom was not lost on these young practitioners of progressive education.

But the joke, ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’, is also funny because it’s actually challenging to have nothing to do.

Also in the 70’s, I took a solo backpacking trip in the Beartooth Mountains in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. With my trusty orange backpack and tent, I hiked several miles in to a pristine lake up above the tree line. Crystal clear glacier melt water nestled below fields of mountain flowers—just like the Sierra Club calendar photos. I figured I’d stay there for several days and just ‘peace out.’ (It was the 70’s after all.)

After several hours of taking in the beauty, with no books to read and no projects to do and no drugs to take (I had already passed through that phase of the 70’s) I got astonishingly bored. My mind’s daydreams got weirder and weirder. I suddenly understood what a gift responsibility and even busyness is. Without the usual pressures of work or school or social expectations, I was utterly adrift—and not in a pleasant way.

I had enough sense about me to get out my map and make up something to do. I planned and then started out on an adventure through the mountains. Up and over, around and through. Making up a destination and walking, it turned out, was enough activity to keep my mind tethered to consensual reality and allow me to appreciate the gorgeous scenery.

But remembering the gift of having things we have to do can create new possibilities of appreciation in our lives. While it’s lovely, as I wrote yesterday, to follow some sweet aliveness that calls to us, it can also be lovely to feel like we have no choice.

But it’s not really true. Obligation is a social construct. Indeed you never have to do anything. You may choose to do things because you don’t like the potential consequences of the alternatives, but choice is the reality of our lives.

The freedom we speak of in Zen is not the freedom of sitting by the pristine lake in the mountains, though that is nice too in small doses, but the freedom to engage with what is right before us. The freedom to shovel the snow, to wash the dishes, to make sure the children are logged into school and not the video game with their friends.

So whether your day is the responsibility of choosing what you want to do or the freedom of meeting the responsibilities you have chosen, can we all appreciate whatever invitation the moment offers us?