Between Grace and Works, a piece of thought about inner duality.
I don't really know where I'm going with this one, just wanted to write about the topic. Wrote it in one go, thought it could resonate with a few of you here. So here's a little part of my soul, written at 5AM :)
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Have you ever been touched by grace? Beauty striking you, passing through your senses to tingle your brain.
But if you ever had a glimpse of beauty, did you ever feel the call of works as well? Blood rushing through your veins, adrenaline keeping you awake, the urge to build and leave a part of you in the world.
I - The old words
Grace and works, contemplation and action.
This is the duality I’ve been through for years. Two parts of my person I’ve tried to explore and explain. Should one fuel the other ? Should one take over the other ? Can the two co-exist ?
Over a duality, it used to be a tension.
One is about slowness. The other about speed.
One is immaterial. The other purely material.
One is about writing slowly, letting the world infuse through your mind and feelings that themselves dictate your hand which guides tip of your pen on an ivory notebook. The other is about typing frenetically on a mechanical keyboard, filling a CRM database in a notion workspace.
I finally found words for it in Thomas d’Aquin (Summa Theologica) and Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition). They handed me the old terms: vita contemplativa and vita activa.
Vita contemplativa is the contemplative life: thoughts, prayer, philosophy, withdrawal from practical urgency.
Vita activa is the active life: work, actions, politics, transforming the world.
Those terms take their root in Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. For whom contemplation was above action since contemplation touches what’s eternal while action is temporary. This hierarchy lived through eras: Thomas d’Aquin still acknowledges contemplation over action: action has to be rooted in contemplation or it becomes ego or noise. But we start seeing a switch during Renaissance, where we see a hybrid ideal: the cultivated mind that acts. Contemplation as a preparation for action. Finally, the tables turn in the modern era. Action becomes superior. Action used to serve truth, now truth serves action.
II - The war
I was born in this action-first world. Work on yourself so you can produce more. And surprisingly, it’s probably through action that I was introduced to contemplation. Self-growth books led me to philosophy, philosophy led me to literature. The search for answers and solutions helped me find questions and problems.
Hermann Hesse’s books walked me through this tension and I grew by reading them multiple times, at different times of my life, with a different understanding. The duality displayed in the books: Steppenwolf: the wolf and the bourgeois, Narcisse and Goldmund: the thinker and the artist, Demian: light and dark. Probably shaped my young brain that read them very simply. Maybe I was a duality myself ? When humans can’t grasp the complexity of the world, they try to simplify it. So I did.
On one side, I put the thinker: Slow life, philosophy, poetry, aimless walks and cigarettes
On the other side, the merchant: Fast life, business, self-growth, discipline and e-cigs.
The two were leading a war. How could the thinker waste time thinking about life, reading books and taking time finding its meaning while he should be building a business, growing his network and fixing his sleep schedule ? How could the merchant sacrifice humanity for fixed habits, time-blocked calendars and SaaS ?
So I lived through cycles. The thinker bloomed when the body was exhausted and the mind needed alignement. The merchant was productive when the body was replenished and the mind aligned thanks to the thinker’s work and he pushes it until the body can’t follow anymore and the mind doesn’t remember why he’s doing all this. I lived three years that way. Three years thinking the conflict would never stop, that excellence meant sacrifice and that I needed to kill one of my sides to let the other live.
That’s when I re-read Steppenwolf and understood I was wrong from the beginning. Harry’s tragedy was to try reducing himself to his duality. The goal was never to kill the wolf or the man, it was to embrace inner multiplicity.
You can work hard and live softly, discipline yourself and keep your chaos, celebrate the beauty of life and celebrate a deal.
Those are not contradictions, they are your whole. Stop making one fight the other, let them dance together.
There are two ways to be rare: to go deeper than anyone into a single life, or to hold together lives that were never meant to meet.
III - Notes from the battlefield
Problem: while expertise is widely documented, how the hell am I supposed to hold together multiple lives at once ?
So I did what the merchant does with undocumented problems: learn, build, measure and run experiments, and what the thinker does with any life: I kept the journal.
Eight years of dated entries, one summer of life scoring spreadsheets, a mathematical model of my energy cycles, a personal AI coach.
Here are a few things I learnt along the way:
- The body is the shared infrastructure: Merchant or thinker, they both share the same body. The body dictates who show up. If I master the body, I choose who show up and when.
- Separate their hours, not their importance: The merchant lives the day when the coffee’s hot and the phone’s ringing, the thinker mostly the night when the lights are dim and the streets are quiet.
- Give each one his own tools: The merchant gets the notion and the databases, the thinker gets Apple notes and the paper notebook. I tried forcing one into the other’s tool, it never worked for me.
- Let the thinker live when happiness is at its peak: The happier I was, the less I was asking myself questions, that’s when I let work take over, and push reflection aside as there are no problems to treat. That’s precisely when I need to schedule the thinker.
- Learn the signals of death from both: Each side dies differently. Too much building and work turns to noise: I lose the why. Too much contemplating and the days go hollow: I lose the drive. The fix is always to pay the other man: when it's noise, take a walk and think. When it's hollow, build something small to get back on track.
- Find bridges between them: Build around your soul with an engineering approach, an essay like this one.
I opened this short piece of writing with two questions: « Have you ever been touched by grace ? » and « Have you ever felt the call of works ? »
It took me years to hear them as one question: What makes you live ?
This text is part of my answer.
contemplata aliis tradere
