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What Do You Do?
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I have just read the first few chapters of a little book called "Caught In The Act" by Toinette Lippe that got me to thinking along the lines below. Anyone who can get me to thinking about anything these days is due a bit of recognition so I want to cite Ms Lippe as the one who did it and admit that some of the thoughts but not the actual words below are attributable to Ms. Lippe. I doubt that I would care for Ms Lippe if I should meet her.
She was born and raised to adulthood in England and has been in the US since 1964. She was an editor for a publishing company and founded a "spiritual publishing house" of her own dedicated to some particular strain of Buddhism or maybe it was Taoism I sort of skipped over that part of the text. So Ms Lippe and I do not see eye to eye on all things or maybe even most things but I can still appreciate her very clear thinking about what she calls "reflections on being, knowing and doing". She is also an accomplished oriental brush artist who paints primarily flowers.
In our brash American society we frequently have people ask us "What do you do?" and I think I would be correct in saying that we nearly always take that question to mean "What is your occupation". If someone asked me that question when I was in the working corps I would usually answer "I am an industrial manager." And note right off that my answer has assumed a fact not in evidence. Use of the first person indicative form of the verb "to be" assumes that what I do is what I am. With that assumption I crossed a linguistic chasm. I gave every person who asked that question the right to believe that I "was" what I "did". But I was not the only one who twisted the linguistic arm with the assumption that our occupation was our existence . The interrogator placed that implication in the question itself. Since I now live an almost solitary life no one has asked me lately "What Do You Do?" but I have resolved to reply "I eat Otis Spunkmeyer Double Chocolate Muffins and gain weight".
In England and in France I don’t ever remember being asked that question. I think that those people consider it just a bit rude to inquire after your occupation. We Americans are not so conversationally inhibited. In Italy strangely enough I have been asked "What did your ancestors do?" and was able to reply that they were silk merchants. When I was a child in West Texas I was instructed by my parents and grandparents that it was rude to ask a person's occupation or from whence the person came. Those were things that you let the person volunteer if you got to know them that well--- besides children were inhibited from asking any personal questions at all about adults.
Twenty seven years ago I ceased to either "do" or "be" an industrial manager and except for five years at another company as an industrial manager at the behest of a former boss I have been rusticating here on the banks of El Rio de los Brazos de Dios with no honorable occupation at all yet I "do" things. Now when people ask me "What Do You Do?" I could reply that I am a reader, a writer, a book collector, a Christian, a Texan, an American, a traveler, or a father----those are all things that I do hence by the formula they are what I "am" but I usually perpetuate the incongruity outlined above and say "Nothing". I haven’t had an opportunity as yet to use the Otis Spunkmeyer answer.
I will admit that all of my life it seemed that my job was what I was. I think that most men and a rapidly growing number of women do still to this day define themselves to themselves and others by what they do for a living and consider that what they do for a living is "what they are". Even in my retirement befuddled senility I am inclined to think that identification of self with job is not altogether bad. It provides the worker with an intensity necessary to do a good job and when I was in Industrial Management if an employee came to identify himself with his occupation we could rest assured that person was on the way up the corporate ladder and had or would develop the intensity to go on up the corporate ladder and become a successful executive. There was a movement when I was in the work force to advise persons to not let their job dominate their lives and to relegate their occupation to a secondary role in order to avoid "burn out". Balderdash! I never believed it then or now. I really believe that was a mere masque for a lack of dedication.
It is also difficult for us to grasp that this inventory of things that we "are" and "do" is a fluid and ever changing thing. Sometimes it is difficult to quit "being" something when we quit "doing" it. I had a pilots license forty years ago and could say "I fly airplanes" but it would be rather stupid for me to say that now—I have four exclusions on my license to drive an automobile and even though I have amassed an amazing record of safe driving all over the world it doesn’t mean that I am a good driver now—and I am sure that I ncouild never get my pilot’s license renewed and don’t want to do so. I have a scuba certificate that has allowed me to fill my tanks in many foreign countries as well as the USA but I with 40% heart capacity I don’t intend to use it and can’t say anymore that "I am a scuba diver". The inventory of what we are and what we do changes with time, with location, with circumstances and we make a big mistake if we try to make it static.
So Ms Lippe got me to thinking about what we "do" and what we "are" and they have led to the rambling above. I may have some more comments after I read more.
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