Don't Be a Voyeur

Live your life; don't watch it.

It’s easy to be a voyeur.  It’s easy to step aside and watch yourself throughout life.  I don’t much criticize watching others, for instruction or pleasure.  But when it comes to how I relate to the world, self-adoration is not, nor should be my truth.  The question is: do I enter the moment, when I make a diving catch, or a great dive, or laugh at a good joke?  Or am I always a spectator, evaluating, judging, comparing, marginalizing myself?    

Much of moral instruction and life guidance is recipe and design.  As the world becomes more complex and the rules of the game more contingent on immediacy, we seek safety.  Our actions are tentative and then deliberative.  The toe withdraws from a bath too cold or too hot.   

It is hard to put into words what I am trying to say.  I sense a difference between “being” and “doing.”  Paint by number is “doing.”  A brush stoke is “being.” 

Does it matter?  Does it relate to our many wider and more public and political difficulties?  When I look intently at public life, I see performance.  Unless you ARE Hamlet on stage, you are just going through the motions.  Identity is a construct; it is not personal.

Winning prizes, getting As, getting a promotion are trophies.  Like getting married, raising children and receiving the sacraments?  Life-like cardboard-cutouts stroll our streets, sit in our Councils and write their Tweets.   

Brian Reagan uses the old baseball meme, “Swing Batter, Batter, Swing” in one of his routines.  That is a call, even if meant to distract, to act within the moment.  Our cry today is “Pose, Batter, Batter, Pose.” And the camera roll.

Even though our more sophisticated way of portraying action, seamless movement, fluid grace, is done on a screen, framed, or captured on a cell phone suitable for sharing, the most dramatic representation of human action has always been the “still,” the capture of a moment. 

The most human, and the most courageous, of all action is being.