The opposite of ambition is not laziness. It is being. Issue #107.
And neither is practicing meditation a form of idleness.
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Gornisht is a newsletter that tackles the state of design, the nature of mind and how designers (and others) might grapple with both. Please consider sharing it with other designers, if only out of commiseration.
For as long as I can remember, ambition — and the drive for some form of visible and viable success — is something that has pursued me, and I it. I have to actively fight against an internal drive to work long hours, to read and respond to every communication, and to tick every box, even after twenty years of doing this thing called design.
I actively tell myself to slow down, to slow down, and then… to slow down.
After many years of meditating, I’ve found that there is no trick to this. Slowing down your work life does not directly correlate to cultivating awareness on the cushion. And meditating alone does not attenuate your ambitions or make you less eager to please. However, while there is no one-to-one per se, what meditation does provide is a clearer understanding of what it is like to know when one’s mind has gone off the rails and what it’s like when an over-stimulated or overly anxious mind is unhelpful.
This capacity to witness and to observe the machinery of appearances when things get out of hand, be they projects or personalities, is a superpower.
When my own ambition takes on the form of generalized anxiety, for me, it is often about finding that lower gear — or even better, a gear as close to zero as possible. I know enough now to take a walk, go for a run, or just step outside. This taken me years — y e a r s — to learn.
A number of articles have appeared recently about ambition and our culture’s generally unsightly interest in keeping us busy in the pursuit of perpetuating a growing economy, a “growth" mindset” and grown-up ideals — and the larger toll that the celebration of ambition is taking on us all.
Kelli Maria Korducki wrote about tennis player Naomi Osaka’s recent withdrawal from the French Open in a New York Times op-ed, We’re Finally Starting to Revolt Against the Cult of Ambition:
In a society that prizes individual achievement above most other things, ambition is often framed as an unambiguous virtue, akin to hard work or tenacity. But the pursuit of power and influence is, to some extent, a vote of confidence in the profit-driven myth of meritocracy that has betrayed millions of American women through the course of the pandemic and before it, to our disillusionment and despair.
Korducki points out that, since the onset of the pandemic, droves of workers are simply no longer working — fundamentally, dropping out of the market. Why did they leave? The pace of the workplace has increased. Technology is putting new stresses on received processes. Where we once had a conversation, we now have a chat. Where we once met in person, we now Google Meet.
There is a race to a bottom line for many businesses and the first employee getting across that line is often the one that works the hardest. It’s hard to blame people for feeling burned out, fed up and giving in. Why should we “lean in” when it feels like the only workers who are compensated for doing so are prognosticating plutocrats like Sheryl Sandberg? Generation Z, which tends to see the world through very clear eyes, feels increasingly ramrodded through a world that is burning before them.
Korducki goes on to say that “a better solution is collective action”. We need workplace standards — and more standards generally, which I will discuss in a subsequent newsletter — that stick. Workers need to form and join trade unions and other organizations that fight for workers’ rights.
But. We designers are, all too often, “activist lite”. We may be political animals. But we tend to work alone or in small groups, sharing cutouts and code and commentary, delivering visual objects and orchestrations, eschewing the stage, the street and the storytellers. It’s not that we work in the shadows —but we do hug them and sometimes will even hurry to them. I know I certainly do.
It’s important that designers becoming active politically and fight for their human and economic rights. There is also an alternative and complementary form of political action: the practice of meditation. By sitting on the cushion, we extricate ourselves from the grind of daily work, we demonstrate our commitment to ourselves and to our bodies, we develop the capacity to observe more readily, and we make time and space to cultivate compassion, connection and courage. Fundamentally, meditation temporarily pauses the machinery of the economy, which tirelessly extracts value from your vision and vitality.
In other words, standing up for yourself can also mean sitting down.
The opposite of ambition is not laziness nor calm. Rather, it is simply being.
In the Zen practice called Zazen, which is impossibly and wonderfully self-referent, the goal is to learn that we can never arrive because we are always already here. We, designers and workers more generally, have everything we need, everything we want, everything we might expect, at this moment and in the next. In his article Goalless Practice in Tricycle, Brad Warner describes this concept:
One of the hardest aspects of Zen practice is getting your head around the idea that zazen has no goal. No goal at all. You don’t do it for anything except itself. It doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t gain you a damned thing.
As someone who had a hard time settling for anything other than “A” (and whatever that qualitative equivalent is in delivering design to clients), I believe that there is still room for ambition. But slowing down gets you closer to the ground, closer to closing, and closer to zero. In some ways, meditating and cultivating a sense of presence over purpose is also a form of protest — and a magnificent means to preserve one’s sanity and substance.
Reading: Almost finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), a story of two unrelated families, living a century apart, who live inside houses and relationships falling down around them. From the book:
You and I are not like other people. We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty... When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.
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