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This isn’t elegant, or eloquent or profound. It’s just a little though I had while catching up on my RSS.
Some posts on engaged Buddhism, a little from “The Social Business Blog”, Doug Richard’s “The Naked Business”.. and then a thought. What would a Buddhist business look like?
Could my business be a Buddhist business? how would that manifest?
How many kinds of businesses could run entirely on dāna. Not charities, I don’t think the flow of money or intention would be the same, but commercial entities with variable fees set by the customer based on worth… kind of Gordon Ramsay-eque (but perhaps with more mindful speech). Ethical, honest, mindful entities.
..thoughts,
Buddhist businesses,
..a penny for them. or whatever you think they’re worth.
I write to all entrepreneurs; all creators, builders, visionaries and makers of things, a note of warning you will not heed.
No one,
… no one …
can make you believe: how much it will cost, how long it will take and how audaciously difficult and achingly lonely the path you are taking is going to be.
No one can make you believe you’ll willingly hold your head under the guillotine, time and over again; or the single minded determinism with which you’ll pursue your long term goals to all but the cataclysmic collapse of your short term welfare.
No one can tell you that having risked all you had, all you have found, and all you think you might be able to get – you’ll begin to risk that which is not yours.
No one can make you believe the strength you’ll find or the odd places you will find it, how often you can lose it, stress-test it to breaking point and (seemingly irreparable) find it intact again when you need it most.
No one can explain that not only will this occur, but you’ll come to enjoy it, rely upon it, almost. How expert you’ll become in tying a neat tourniquet around each wounding disappointment and riding right back into battle as if unscathed.
Oh, don’t take my word for it of course.
Plenty of others will tell you too, and many more qualified than I. God knows, it was told to me enough times by the life-weathered and wryly amused, those who’s arrogance had eroded down to a blunt bedrock of skill and experience.
Even if you could know, if there was some way to see, you’d go ahead, you’d do it anyway. No sooner than you had would you begin to give the cautions you couldn’t perceive to others you know will not heed them.
Keats had it right, and I know it well and through enough.
It’s likely to be the next credence I get needle-inked into my skin:
“Nothing becomes real until it is experienced, a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it.”
Having recently spent some time confronting the frustration that my ‘alternative’ career (life?) path occasionally inspires in others, I took to wondering for a while whether I should seriously consider making that antipodean step into .. ‘traditional’ employment.
And I admit, I do have moments, whole minutes even, where I wish I had taken a more conventional option; gotten a stable job with regular hours and a wage that arrived, in my bank account, each month. Found a nice house with a manageable mortgage, taken yearly holidays to destinations you can buy guide books for..
But what I suppose becomes clear to me, as I grow weary of these daydreams within seconds, is that I’d tire of this life before I even began to build it.
I’m in the Scottish Sunday Times today, a long and flattering article which makes me blush to read. And I know that if even a line of what is written there about my future prospects comes to pass, all the stresses and frustrations I speak of, and all the rest yet to come, will have been worth it.
If not a phoneme rings true a decade from now? As my stable wage chips slowly away at my debt, and normalcy has truely claimed me?.. Well, at least we can all say I went down fighting.
I promise to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,
that I will never accept what I am told,
that I will never fall in love with safety and forget liberty
I promise that I will look for the lie in every pretty story
and the bribe in every convenience.
But for now we see through a glass, darkly ... 