Clarity for Teachers: Day 8
‘Whatever you are doing, strive for clarity.’
What’s all this clarity stuff about, anyway? Writing these notes each day, it strikes me that it could end up sounding mystical or esoteric — that’s a risk with any word that you ask to carry this much weight. (And don’t the Church of Scientology talk about going ‘Clear’? I’m sure I heard that in a Leonard Cohen song…)
So with today’s advice, I want to back up, to say something about this language and what I understand by it.
As far as I can see, what we’re talking about here is an everyday experience: sometimes I feel clear, sometimes I’m unclear, and this makes a difference to my ability to do good work, to handle the situations in which I find myself, and so on — and there are things I can do that affect my state of clarity.
If I had to define what it’s like when I’m clear, here’s how I’d put it:
- I know what I’m doing.
- I know why I’m doing it.
- I know what the next step is.
- I know that I’m doing this (and not something else).
Turn these around and they can become questions: do I know what I’m doing? Do I know why I’m doing it? And so on.
This isn’t the key to the universe, it’s not the only vocabulary available to talk about this stuff. One of the best teachers I ever had used to say, ‘The more the words matter, the less the words matter.’ If we get too attached to a particular model, a particular set of terminology, then it’s likely to betray us. It’s why I prefer to move around, to use multiple languages drawn from different sources, as a reminder that when it comes to the things that matter most, all language points beyond itself.
But having known Charlie a long time and worked with him in recent years as he’s brought together this framework for How To Be Clear, I’ve found these tools to be trustworthy. They help me when I’m stuck and they make sense to me.
Today’s advice lays such a weight on clarity — make it what you strive for in every situation! — that it sends me back to the basics of why that might be worth doing. But it strikes me, too, that this line needs to be read together with yesterday’s advice: Don’t try to do everything. Whatever you are doing, strive for clarity. Make sure you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what the next step is, and that you’re doing this, rather than something else.
Västerås, 12 March, 2020
This is the eighth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
