To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
"This Only" by Czeslaw Milosz

A three-day weekend and nothing to do. I had been working hard for months and now that everything appeared to have been taken care of, I felt becalmed. I cast about in my mind for an appropriate something to fill the empty time.

Someone had sent me an interesting-looking book, Going Native by Tom Harmer, about an Anglo seeking Native American wisdom from a Salish elder in the Pacific Northwest. The evening it arrived I opened it and began to read. Not only was it exquisitely written --- reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses --- but it was extraordinarily powerful. And, as usual, it offered me precisely what I needed to hear in that moment:

"That how the crazy White man take back his sickness," Clayton said, shaking his head. "To be the natural man, same as all the world around, that not good enough. Gotta get busy. Gotta worry and lose touch with what's real so he feel okay inside. The White man not feel good enough, not worthy just to be alive in this world. Have to prove something. Race against each other to be something more. But what? If a man is alive, here in this world, he have that right to be here, that's all. Not anything we have to do to deserve this life, be worthy of it. Just accept it, live it, remember it."

Tom Harmer goes into the wilderness, exploring forests and rivers, to find himself, to understand what a human being is. But surely it is possible to learn the same lesson here in this busy metropolis where our lives are almost defined by stress? It is just as important to comprehend this truth here in Manhattan, to live it, and by coming into contact with so many people, to share the knowledge by embodying it in our lives each day.

Now that I think back, I realize that this idea is not new to me. Two memories surface: Almost thirty years ago I was at the zoo with a photographer from East Germany. We were standing in front of a cage gazing at two brilliantly colored toucans sitting side by side on a branch and he asked me, "What do birds do all day?" Without a moment's hesitation, I replied, "Birds don't do; birds just are."

On another occasion I complained to someone that I didn't know how I would occupy myself during a transatlantic flight to London. He looked at me strangely and pointed out that it wasn't necessary for me to do anything. That was the crew's job. All I had to do was sit there.

It is curious that it has taken me so long to attempt to put this into practice. And it is ironic that I was moved to put these thoughts down on paper because I had reached that blessed state of nondoing. True to form, I immediately began to fill the vacuum with more doing. I sat down and started typing. But at least this time I have noticed it.

Not only do we spend most of our lives "doing" something, we tend to believe that we are what we do. In the United States, when people are introduced, their first question is, "What do you do?" and my usual response is, "I am an editor (or a writer)" rather than "I edit (or write)." Yet the inquiry was not about who I was but what I did.

Back in 1837 Emerson addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in a speech known as "The American Scholar." In it he described how we have somehow forgotten who we are:

The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship. In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

When I say that I am an editor, what I am saying is that my main identity is what I do to pay the rent and put food on the table, whether I enjoy doing that or not. Wouldn't it be nice if I felt free enough to respond, "I paint, I garden, and I enjoy listening to music. During the work week I also edit books and write"? Yet that is not the way we tend to see ourselves and so it is not how we answer. Also, of course, when people ask us what we do, they are seeking to pigeonhole us, to get a handle on how they should view us, and to find out whether, perhaps, they are in the same industry and might have friends or colleagues in common. The inquiry about what someone does is a way to discover a great deal about a new acquaintance but it is also very restrictive and limiting, particularly if the answer is one word, like "editor." My response implies that this is not just what I do but who I am, that I have completely identified with whatever function I fulfill during the workweek. I am not saying that it is wrong to tell people how you earn your living. I am pointing out that this is only one aspect of you and there are a host of others that are equally important. It is a well known fact that when people lose their jobs or retire, they often find themselves in a kind of limbo because that identification has been severed and they have to find their feet again and explore other parts of their being.

This is a heavy burden we all carry around and it obscures so much from our view. We see neither our own lives clearly nor any of those people we meet for the first time. When I go home to England, where people hardly ever discuss their work, no one asks me anything about what I do and I get the sense that a large part of my life has been amputated. I am so used to talking about what I do that when that opportunity is removed, I feel bereft.

Another aspect of all this is that as long as I think of myself as an editor, I am frozen in that role. It doesn't occur to me that perhaps I could use those same skills, or others I might have, to do different work. We identify with a particular role and thus become typecast, like an actress who plays an ingénue in her first and second appearances, and her third, and then finds it hard even to get considered for a different role. So we are never stretched. In the job that I held at Knopf selling paperback rights for 32 years, I had begun to feel like a piece of old furniture. No one even noticed that I was still there because I and my role had become so familiar to them, they no longer questioned it or me.

Some years ago I met a small boy who asked me, "What are you?" and I was completely floored. Perhaps he was asking what I did for a living and phrasing it in a much more appropriate way for the answer "I'm an editor," or maybe he wanted to know my name, but it shook me out of my complacency while I considered his question on an existential level. A line from Psalm 8 flashed into my mind: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" My world opened up as I realized how much more I was (or could be) than what I do, either for a living or in any given moment.

The most frequent question passersby put to me when I am working in the community garden in Riverside Park is: "What is the name of that flower?" People believe that if they know the name of something, they know what something really is. I see this happening in my own life also but the whole thing is an illusion. Knowing the name assigned to something does not bring us any closer to realizing its essence. In many ways it prevents true understanding because by naming something, we come to believe that the description is the thing itself. We put labels on objects and people and then see only the labels. We never actually see who or what is in front of us. Labels are a form of limitation: "This is (or I am) just this much and no more." I may be an editor or a writer, but I'm also an Englishwoman, a mother, a sister, a friend, an almost-Buddhist, a curious traveler, an ardent linguist, a beginning gardener and painter of flowers, a yoga practitioner, an inveterate dictionary and atlas reader, and so on. And even if you added up all these attributes or ways of categorizing me, that wouldn't tell you who I am. Yet we all assume that articulating our view of how other people appear to us gives us insight into their nature. We don't want to acknowledge that people are processes not fixed identities. We are masterpieces in the making and at any minute everything could shift.