To do or not to do. That's the question.

This essay is under construction. So, read at your own risk. Okay. Go ahead. Not much of a risk here reading this now...

Nike slogan goes: Just do it! In many cases when we are tempted, it's much better if we would just don't do it!  Where is the boundary between the better angels of our nature on the one hand and the darker side we regret: the devil made me do it! Could it be like the Mandelbrot set?

The answer to the subjective question, or rather the question that is our subject here is also rather simple: do, of course, whatever it is you love to do, or love whatever it is you find yourself doing. But, do a bit of non-doing, too. That's the ancient Taoist (and Buddhist, and Muslim) teaching. Actually, the loving bit is kind of a non-doing, too, isn't it? Are you doing something when you are in love?

Was Hamlet wrong? Is the question really "to be or not to be?" Albert Camus, the novelist and existential philosopher famously claimed that the only philosophical question of any import is not the mind/body problem, not whether God exists or not, but whether we should kill ourselves or not. 

Camus was of course imitating Hamlet in his own way. Life in the post-war era -- away from his beloved Algiers where his brethren were about to lose their homes on the beautiful Mediterranean shore of North Africa and would have to migrate to the grieving and devastated Europe -- was too hard to contemplate even for a white Frenchman. 

Life gets busy, isn't it? It's almost like a pendulum between keeping busy and occupied on the one side getting bored or unhappy on the other: don't worry, stay busy! (Sorry, Bobby, your beautiful lyrics were off a bit. Don't worry, be happy? We don't know how to do that. So, we stay busy. 

Remember being a child? If you had a happy childhood like me, well mostly happy with only minor traumas, you would remember being bored as the worst possible thing ever. Well for my generation of kids in Turkey, there was not much of an entertainment on the TV. There was only one channel, a state-funded one, with only half an hour of children's programming on any weekday. What do you do to fill all that time before and after school, especially if it is raining outside and you couldn't join your friends and run after a ball, or play with marbles or skip a rope?

You ever heard someone urge you: don't just stand there, do something! They desperately need your help and they can't ask kindly, gently or calmly. They are panicking and they want you to come along. We human beings call ourselves the smart human: Homo Sapiens. Instead, we should have called ourselves Homo Industriens: we are industrious. We don't stop until we collapse and sleep off our exhaustion, or we get sick and have to call in sick. We are, clearly. No question about it. But, once we are here, we do things. We run around. Go, go, go. Never stop. We dare not stop. You heard the one who said: I dare not stop to think. Cause, I wouldn't know how to get started again! 

To be continued. (Oh, to be again! No, no, it's really about to do or not to do. But, wait, we'll get there soon.)