Being and Having
A well-off individual like Zalman Silber is usually applauded for making a lot of money and giving it away. From a certain mindset, that is the best of all worlds, to be a winner in life with access to the world’s luxuries while also doing good: to be admired for one’s material achievements as well as spiritual aspirations.
Yet for all the Zalman Silbers of the world, there is a world of difference between being and having. Many misconstrue having with being – the more they have, the bigger they are, as if a better person is produced by ever more goods. Yet real good comes about not from possession – or, even, good works – but from being, true being.
It is a hard thing to comprehend, as most of us take life very much for granted. We believe that to be is the simplest thing in the world – but we discount our own humanity in supposing that, plant-like, all we need is some light and water and we are all that we can be.
No, not even having a beachfront mansion with a helicopter out front and a yacht out back on your very own island makes you all that you can be. To be fully human, we must also understand deprivation, fear, want – we must experience life in all its totality.
We must empathize. For the act of empathy makes us most human – the exercise of our imaginations, the use of our unique ability to almost literally put ourselves in another’s stead.
And hence the distinction between being and having. One sees this very clearly in a classroom, even in college, where most students scribble away furiously, taking down notes as the professor speaks. Yet how much are they really retaining if half their brains are busy recording what was said instead of being fully engaged in what is said?
Full undivided attention means precisely that. It is the total direct no-holds-barred personal experience of what is going on, what is being said – and what that means in all its implications. In the act of note-taking, however, one is necessarily forever playing “catch up,” with a significant amount of one’s attention focused on the act of recording – and editing, moreover: a necessarily “distancing” set of behaviors.
It is as if these students imagine that the very having of some notes of the lecture constitutes knowledge itself – literally having knowledge – while the fact of the matter is that one best knows, most completely knows, in the direct experiencing of what is to be known.
This direct experience does not come from notes hastily jotted in a strobe light-like manner. It comes from being fully in the moment, as opposed to standing outside of it recording.