> CD #67: The next and most necessary thing
Greetings from deep time. I’m a bit underwater these days, so this week we’ll keep it simple with another relevant passage from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V., responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life, and his answer is a good one with which to end this book. “Dear Frau V.,” Jung began, “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way… If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.” By contrast, the individual path “is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other.” His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” A modified version of this insight, “Do the next right thing,” has since become a slogan favored among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely through moments of acute crisis. But really, the “next and most necessary thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.
And so here I am, doing the next and most necessary thing.
Right now I’m wearing shoes that remind me a little of Jung’s concept because they were a next-most-necessary purchase I made on a business trip to San Francisco in 2018.
I had brought one pair of semi-dressy heeled boots—it was January—on the trip, thinking they would be versatile, not realizing that wearing heels in SF is a hazard. Also, January looks like summertime there. After one day of killing my knees and feet trekking up and down the steep hills of the city, I knew I needed different footwear.
My coworkers suggested the DSW around the corner from our hotel, so I popped in after our meetings were done. When I showed up at the group dinner empty-handed, they asked why I hadn’t bought anything. I said the store didn’t have much selection, just a few rows of dress shoes, really. They looked at me like I was insane. Turns out I hadn’t noticed the escalator, and the store was actually FIVE storeys high, with one whole level devoted to sneakers. 🤦🏻♀️
Doing the next most necessary thing doesn’t always mean you’ll do it perfectly. But it will get done, and you will move forward. Just put one foot in front the other.
:) Teresa
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I just started listening to Four Thousand Weeks yesterday and so far am liking it. Thanks for the rec!