Productivity - Is It In The Breadth or the Depth of Life?

As a society, we’re obsessed with being productive, running a determined race to “get it all done.” Our love affair with productivity goes something like this: we’re driven to know it all, work more and try harder, so we can make more money, so we can buy more stuff, so we can then be happy. We even have a name for this obsession, so we can feel good about ourselves for being trapped in it; it’s called the American Dream. Unconsciously, we have built our lives around the energy of “wanting,” in such a way that we’ll never be satisfied. When I think of this kind of productivity, it feels like the 100-mile-per-hour version: we’ve seen it all, touched a lot, noticed some, yet experienced very little. We’ve got the breadth handled, but lack depth.

When I ask others about their biggest dreams in life, they invariably speak of enjoyment, meaning, deep experience, relaxation, relationship, community, time, and truth … reminding me of why Thoreau went to the woods: “to live deliberately … and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” We don’t have to go to the woods to notice two things in these words. First, there is feeling in the message, beauty in the possibility. Second, there’s a gap as big as the Grand Canyon between what people say and how they live. The obvious question: “what’s up with this gap?”

True experience in life exists in the depth of each moment, not in the race from one moment to the next. While our biggest dreams always embody a deep felt experience of life, we’ve denied ourselves (unconsciously, at least) the experience of anything, simply because we don’t (won’t, can’t?) stop long enough to feel it. I’m not trying to suggest which kind of productivity is right or wrong. All I’m suggesting is that if you want one thing in your life and you’re living the opposite, it just may be worth the effort to make the gap conscious, so you can choose which of the two means more to you.

For over 30 years of my adult life, I chose (unconsciously) the high-speed version. Corporate America called me successful. The rest of my life saw it differently. Only after I’d missed it all did I realize my sons were adults, my mother had died, I’d lost more than one relationship, and I felt pretty empty inside. But man, did I have the breadth handled. My wake up call came 20 years ago, and it took 10 years from there before the seed even germinated. The story itself matters less than the transformatio
I’ve experienced in my life in the last 10 years. To an outside observer, I’ve slowed to a crawl. To my inner self, the story’s vastly different. I’m doing what I love, and I’m loving what I do. Because what I do, who I am, and how I relate to others are in alignment, I’m experiencing each moment, and myself, more fully, not missing so much along the way, and developing some rich and rewarding relationships with real human beings. I work harder tha
I ever did, yet it feels like play, so I’m no longer driven either by wanting or by stress. The olden days took their toll; yet at the same time, they were a great teacher for me. Every one of life’s experiences has, at its core, powerful lessons, lessons that can open us to new experiences of self and of life. If we’re going 100 miles an hour, we’ll neither learn anything from them nor even know they were there for the possibility.

So how might you tap into a new kind of “productivity” in your life? Here’s a practice you can adopt that will open a new path for you. Please know that your old beliefs will tell you not to do this exercise; only “you” can decide which of your internal voices you honor. The practice: stop what you’re doing several times a day. For a moment or two, replay in your mind all that’s occurred for you since the last time you stopped. Don’t try to change anything; simply notice your personal relationship to each moment. You might ask yourself these questions about each moment you recall: who was I being? what did I notice and how did I see it? what did I miss that was “there” all along? what criteria influenced the choices I made? were my actions consistent with my greatest potential and my biggest dreams? if so, what allowed me to choose that path? if not, what held me back? Just notice.

As you do this exercise regularly, you eventually begin to notice yourself being yourself, as you are being it. When you know what you’re doing, you can choose what you’re doing, in each moment. Awareness. This offers you the true felt experience of life that may have eluded you up until now. To me, that’s productive. A lifetime is a precious thing. It unfolds, the result of one small moment, followed by another, then another. If your experience of each of these moments is limited only to what it takes to get to the next moment, you miss all of life, simply by missing each of its moments, one at a time.

As is often the case, the world of nature can offer us powerful lessons, silently guiding us to our hidden greatness. All we need do is listen. As noted above, that takes noticing, a skill we seem to find in short supply in our lives. So let’s pretend for a moment that we did notice, and that we could learn from nature. What would she teach us about productivity?

The most obvious thing we’d see is nature’s relationship to time. Nature doesn’t have schedules. Yet at the same time we experience her as amazingly productive. Just look at all her creations – each perfectly adapted to its environment, each environment filled with creative expression. How does it all “get done?” In nature, things take what they take. This doesn’t mean nature is lazy; it simply means that in order for something to truly happen, it needs to be its innate essence, and thereby do its thing completely (another novel idea!). A tree does what it takes to be a tree, whether it takes 2000 years as with a redwood, or 20 as with a blueberry bush. A hummingbird flaps its wings at an amazing rate, but if it flapped at the same rate as does a swan, it would probably fall out of the sky. Water changes the shape of everything it touches, whether it happens in an instant as with a flash flood or over millennia as with the Grand Canyon. Tides come in and go out in a 12-hour rhythm. Imagine the ocean if tides decided to “be more productive” and cycled every 15 minutes instead. A river would no longer be a river if it were ever “done.” The point here is that nature is infinitely productive without trying to be productive. To nature, productivity is about the natural essence of a thing, “being itself,” as it were. Nature doesn’t favor doneness over completeness. Yet at the same time, she does both.

I’m often amused when I think of comments nature might make if she lived as we often do. The Colorado River couldn’t take an evening off from carving the Grand Canyon, simply because it wasn’t “done” yet. A Saguaro cactus would jump up and down complaining because it didn’t have enough rain to keep it growing. And a polar bear might say he’d had enough of catching seals, and decide to go to college so he could get a real job. You get the point. Productivity comes from the essence of each thing, not from the race.