On Remembering Why You are Here

By Laura Rediehs

Parker Palmer, reflecting on the meaning of work in his book The Active Life, shares a prose poem from The Way of Chuang Tzu about a master woodcarver named Khing. In the poem, Khing has just carved a wondrous bell stand, so stunning that “all who saw it were astounded.” The Prince of Lu, who had commanded that Khing make the bell stand, now marvels at its beauty and asks Khing his secret. Khing replies, “I have no secret”¹ and proceeds for the rest of the poem to describe his process. The entire poem is inspiring, as is Palmer’s commentary. Especially striking, perhaps, is that after guarding his spirit, fasting, and meditating for seven days, Khing says,

By this time all thought of Your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.²

What is interesting about this passage is that Khing tells the Prince that he needed to forget about him before he could work—to think about the Prince and the court counted as a distraction that had to vanish before the woodcarver could make the bell stand. Palmer points out that Khing was not “a dreamy artist creating ‘art for art’s sake’”³ but was making the bell stand because the Prince of Lu had commanded so: The threat of the Prince’s command and his potential displeasure hangs over the woodcarver’s work like the sword of Damocles. As the woodcarver’s action proceeds from this initial point of coercion, it does move toward the freedom of art for art’s sake. But this is not a freedom granted by the prince or some other external authority. It is a freedom the woodcarver claims for himself, on his own inner authority.⁴

If the woodcarver has a secret to his amazing work, it is this ability to live from the center of his own creative power. Spectacular work does require freedom, a pure spirit, an attitude of love. The hopefulness of this story is that even within a coercive, distrusting context, we can claim our freedom, refusing to be intimidated by the external pressures we still must respect.

Higher education in the United States is full of intimidating external pressures. It can even be said to constitute a coercive, distrusting context. What distinguishes a context of distrust from a context of trust is that in a context of distrust, the structures or systems that are meant to ensure accountability become controlling forces and move to the center of attention. A context of trust, in contrast, is one in which a high level of mutual respect shields people from the potentially manipulative effects of fear-based external motivation, so that people are instead trustingly encouraged to live generously from their own self-motivation and creativity. What marks the difference between these two kinds of contexts is whether people feel pressured by fear or anxiety into conformity with externally-defined standards. When people feel controlled by fear, when it is clear that they might be expelled not only for destructive misbehavior, but for simply not being “good” enough (that is, for not conforming to the specifications of standards that others define), then they find themselves embedded in a context of distrust. Because students can flunk out and junior faculty can be denied tenure—and both of these are systems that presume that people need the threat of expulsion to be kept in line—higher education in the United States institutionally constitutes a context of distrust. Students and junior faculty alike can feel under pressure to prove their worthiness over and over again, living in anxious attentiveness towards trying to please those who function like the Prince and his court in their lives.

New faculty especially can be surprised by the transition from the relative creative freedom of the last years of graduate study to the demands of academic employment. However idealistic we were when we aspired to the academic life (“How noble it is to teach! How I love research and writing!”), to enter employment in the profession is to find the tables turned—it is to find ourselves externally commanded to do what we had wanted all along to do, as if without being so commanded, we would no longer strive to do our work well. While it is wonderful to have the external commands correspond with our internal drive, it is disconcerting to find the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Because people keep pointing out that sword to us, we feel more and more pressured to conform to others’ expectations. If we are not careful, this steady pressure can erode our self-motivation and make us feel untrusted, perhaps untrustworthy, and defensive.

It took Khing seven days of guarding his spirit before he was no longer rattled by the threat behind the command, before he was finally reconnected to his own artistic sense and to his inner sense of motivation. It took him seven days to attain the state of being from which his work could become authentic, original, and excellent. While Parker Palmer interprets this story as a metaphor for what our own lives could be, I am struck by one notable difference between the woodcarver’s situation and our own. I marvel that Khing was able to spend seven days free from other distractions. Many of the pressures in our lives seem to forbid our taking seven days to ready ourselves for each new difficult task. Many of these pressures are pressures to busyness. We do not live in a world where the Prince simply commands us to make a bell stand. We live in a world in which our own Princes command us to make a bell stand, a bird cage, and a banquet table with thirty chairs, all by next Thursday! The task of maintaining our freedom and integrity is not at all easy under such circumstances. Our culture does not support the need for reflective time—even in the supposedly contemplative world of academia.

Nevertheless, there are some practical ways we can reclaim our inner freedom:

1. After making sure you have heard the Prince’s commands very clearly and thoroughly, shun all further conversations about tenure anxiety or contract renewal! Trust that you and your colleagues are already committed to excellence in teaching, research, and service, and talk about the substance of these activities for their inherent interest instead of for their role in helping one to attain tenure or otherwise keep one’s place here. Refuse to shake the sword of Damocles above your own head or the heads of others—doing so reinforces the structures of distrust.
2. Be in touch with (or get in touch with, or get back in touch with) your inner sources of motivation. What drew you to the academic life? What are your teaching goals? What important research needs to be done in your field that so interests you that you would like to work on it yourself? What ways would you most like to contribute to the quality of life and institutional health here at St. Lawrence? (Remember that you do not have to do everything at once—structure your goals as a progressive series rather than feeling you must do it all immediately.) Develop ways of keeping in touch with your goals and your inner sources of motivation.
3. Be aware of and reflect compassionately on your failures. You might not have failures. Most people do. What is a failure? Anything that you yourself worry might be a failure needs processing. Many of these may turn out, in the end, not to be true failures. But if you have worries, then you need to face your anxieties and process these situations. To process means to reflect thoughtfully on both what went wrong and what good still can come out of the situation. Processing also means coming to terms with the highly likely possibility that no one (including yourself) meant any harm, and forgiving everyone involved (including yourself). The final step of processing is to find a positive way to move forward from what you have now learned: by letting go, making amends, and/or planning new ways to approach similar situations in the future.
4. Tune in as much as you can to what is good and meaningful in your work and in the work of others. Live by positives more than negatives. Education is nurturing and growth-oriented. We should think of ourselves as gardeners, whose task is to create conditions conducive to healthy growth: the growth of our students, and the growth of good new ideas. The good news is that even though higher education institutionally embeds us in a problematic context of distrust, making it difficult for us to maintain our integrity amidst the many competing external pressures we face, the Prince is not a real person or even a real group of people. It may be that everyone is guilty of uttering the Prince’s pronouncements occasionally (often doing so by pretending to quote someone else!), but overall there is a high level of mutual supportiveness among the actual, living, breathing human beings you meet and interact with from day to day. We can all participate in creating more of an environment of trust by working to center ourselves back in the inherent meaningfulness of our work and refusing to pressure ourselves or each other by fanning the flames of anxiety. Just as the woodcarver could tell the Prince that he had to forget about His Highness before he could get to work (and the Prince did not then have him arrested for insubordination), so too are we allowed to forget the external pressures that try to control us, seeking instead to remain in touch with the original inspiration that drew us to this profession.

¹ Quoted in Palmer, p. 55.
² Quoted in Palmer, p. 56.
³ Palmer, p. 58.
⁴ Palmer, p. 59.

Source Cited

Palmer, Parker J., The Active Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1990)