Revisiting and clarifying what I mean by ‘serious’ when I use it in conversation.
I’ve said before, that one should indulge in being serious in one or two areas of their life. The number of areas is material only to convey that the optimal amount of seriousness, to me, is not zero. But what do I mean by ‘serious’?
The concern I have, what inspired me to try and pick apart and carve lines in the sand, is the tension in my own life. I am naturally very particular, I am a critic at heart. My mother recalls me being the most persnickety of her children. I am difficult, even to myself.
I like to think about forms of art and media, in their own frames, as well as in meta-frames of meaning-making and Pirsigian quality. It has historically been so easy for me to fall into being judgmental and anti-socially sharp in my delivery. The tie-in to this problem, is that I am a human being, I love being around people and in community. So how do I balance this tension? I have to pick apart, for myself, what my principles are, and why. What’s worth keeping around? What is actually some form of an ego-defense maneuver?
This leads to clarifying that I believe egoic protections and other related things are deeply un-serious. Blind rigidity in my models is an expression of not-attending, of conscious/unconscious self-blinding to what is actually there. I want to look at my self and know that I am approaching the world as it is.
To me, seriousness is not about being stodgy. Seriousness is approaching the project of being in the world with integrity, attention, and care.
When many people hear the word ‘serious’, what comes to mind is stiffness, a man in a business suit with RBF, a woman with a thin line of mouth, eyes leveled at you with some mixture of disinterest and contempt.
I don’t see that in my own version of things. Being serious means approaching something with integrity, and with enough respect that you consider it in its own frame, you honor what that thing is. If I wanted to be serious about playing a game of baseball, my affect during it could be one of many places on a spectrum, but my attention to the system I am inhabiting, the game I am playing, would be rapt. In a serious mode, the underlying object of all action is towards a single point, revisited for re-alignment as needed.
To pick apart what I would not mean with ‘serious’, there are affects I would instead refer to as ‘solemn’.
John Cleese contrasted seriousness with solemnity, the behavior of being stony faced, of refusing lightness in approach.
John Cleese: “[…] a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand, I honestly don’t know what it’s for.[…] The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor and it freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. And the self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat.”
His words resonate. I can’t help but think, no one I know enjoys or works well with solemn folk. But we all appreciate and laud someone who can be serious, tightly engaged with what they’re doing. The act of living out concern for your actions is recognizable, both in-process and outcome. It’s intuitive that proper seriousness generates better outcomes for quality and time spent on tasks.
So like…how do I go about acting seriously?
I’ll say that concentrating on being serious about everything is an easy way to hurt yourself and those around you. There’s a judgy dourness that can seep in, and it leans easily into solemnity. The reality is that most things aren’t that heavy and, perhaps, a person’s attention can only be focused so much before it becomes forceful, a self-abuse. The exact degree of the latter may be dependent on internal factors like ability to concentrate, and overall wellspring of space-holding ability.
A better form of being serious is as a side-effect of improving my own concentration and internal regard for the world around me, that’s seriousness that has merit. Imposing guard rails on yourself all the time creates neuroses. What I’m instead considering is being more in the vein of wu-wei. To feel and sense when things are appropriate, because I’m actually paying attention to their shape, and have concern to help them be shaped in the process of Being. Making sure a guitar string is just-so taut, with my full attention. That’s the kind of serious I’d like to cultivate in myself.
I do not wish to be unserious, and the people I arrange around myself heavily influence who I am and who I can become. Topics that are utmost, like health, relationships, personal care, are often approached with a levity that reads as a self-disrespecting blindness. It hurts to see that the root of problems can often be a simple allergy to sitting down and being serious about one of these topics. Avoidance is the soupe du human condition, as are projecting instead of seeing, and speaking instead of listening. Each of these is a demonstrable lack of seriousness, they lack consideration, lack concern. These are not new phenomena. I do think that fundamentally unserious people are not the kinds of folk I want to have in my life.
Through seriousness, through this way of being in action, it seems obvious to me that life becomes richer, and the things I do capture a higher form of quality. They start to shine in a way that makes me feel deeply whole. Unreservedly, I want that for myself.
That’s what I’m pointing at when I use the word ‘serious’, a care and attention to what I engage with, that honors my engagement, and allows me to feel content with how I am in the world.