Lives are verbs. Humans are being, like rivers are being, like anything that moves and grows and suffers the spectrum of life are beings

We live too often thinking that a milestone, or a collection of milestones, will build us into a monolith of adulthood. As if all wisdom, knowledge, and experience can be encompassed in a life. I once conceited that the best approach to experiencing life was to suffer, celebrate, be destructive and cruel as well as kind and creative. Why not know how it all works?

I think when people approach their jobs, they view it as an end-all-be-all to their growth. They hope to find fulfillment through something that requires you to commute 2 hours/day; work 8 hours/day; and think about more than appropriate on something that ultimately is perhaps a distraction from their true interests and vision. But it’s not so. We’re beings. We need to recognize what is our work and what is our distraction, and being our work means that we’re making the concerted effort to live.

Buckminster Fuller says it best.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

• “The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), 

This may be a bit scattered, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Perhaps, like all other things in life, it’s a work in progress. And perhaps that’s apropos for this entry.

This is what all jobs look like, for people who have 50,000 ft optics