“My neighbors tell me I waste time by pulling weeds in my yard when a chemical weed killer can do it with one stroke. I like sitting in the grass, listening to nature, pulling weeds one at a time!”
My friend’s remark reflects how many perceive the impractical nature of soulmaking. Persons who are into doing find it difficult to understand those who are more into being. Doing is goal oriented, task oriented, action driven. Being happens beneath the level of the skin, is more subtle, less measured.
Drinking in nature’s performance as it moves across the day, sensing a shift in our partner’s emotional presence, experiencing a sunset in the pores of our skin — this is about being. It’s a quality, a receptivity, an intuitive awareness, an inner going-on that is invisible to others. It serves no purpose but to enhance meaning. It has no tangible result but an enlarged soul.
A person into being honors their activities, not by trying to complete them, but by trying to be present to them, by remembering them while they are doing them. A person into doing enjoys their activities, but most of the enjoyment comes with the feeling of accomplishment, with delighting in the outcome.
It’s a difference of focus: one focuses on the process or experience of something, the other, on the end result. I often find that someone into doing finds it more difficult to be, whereas someone into being can certainly do, but needs time for being in order to be more active. It’s more difficult for a doer to understand or appreiciate a person more into being, whereas both preferences are necessary for a balanced life or a satisfying relationship.
It’s the imbalance or neglect of either that brings an individual or a couple scrambling into my office. It may surface as loneliness or as dissatisfaction or as a conflict in priorities. Dialogue has to happen, whether it’s between the two sides of an individual’s personality or between two individuals in a relationship.
Within the personality, the dialogue is between the complementary aspects of our doing and our being energies: our capacity to focus and activate our dreams and plans, but, also, to enjoy the experience we have just activated. It’s the play between knowledge and wisdom, between our focused and our softer energies, between causing things to happen and experiencing them happen, while they are happening. When the personality is tilted or lopsided in favor of one over the other, an individual is not in touch with his or her full capacity for wholeness and creativity.
Within a relationship between two persons, the dialogue is between the needs, expectations and preferences of each. The partner who favors the being energy may frame it as a loneliness felt when the other remains solely in the doing mode. They long for the doer to slow down, to appreciate the reflective moments of life, to spend emotional time together, to be still together.
The partner who is more into doing energy may express anger with the be-er for not taking more initiative with daily chores, for not taking charge of planning activities or setting common goals. They often feel unappreciated for all the doing, responsible things they contribute to the relationship, thinking the partner who functions more out of a being mode to be less committed.
Both partners, both energies need to be reframed positively as serving to nudge each other toward wholeness. Both energies are vital, one aspect of the whole journey, seen from different vantage points. Learning to appreciate and deal with the differences, experiencing life from the other’s perspective, joining forces rather than judging and discounting one another — these efforts strengthen relationships, not threaten them.
As soul is the pull between spirit and matter, soul pulls between doing and being. The divine longing, the discontent at our core, rouses us into doing, then reflects and relaxes in our being side. Soul wants to experience both the being and the doing, to be caught up in the action and the reflection, to experience every feeling, then sit back and delight in the accomplishment of it.
Our doing keeps us grounded in matter, in the physical world; our being keeps us in touch with the invisible world of wholeness. Both release light in the other. Toiling in the invisible world and in the visible world come together in more insight in what it means to be a human person. Doing and being are starting points from differernt perspectives. One journey, different energies.
Most of the people close to me that have always been into doing seem to come around in later life to appreciate and enjoy the being side of themsevles. It’s part of their spiritual evolvement. Those who have preferred being all along seem to exhibit, in later years, a desire to develop skills they never attempted in their youth. Perhaps this is the pull of soul, the push toward wholeness and completeness.
The sacred is roused in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. That is the doing. The finding, the moment of intimacy is the being. Soul delights in both.