Ramblemuse Touch Points

My recent ejection out of the mainstream of LLNL projects has underscored the limits of personal professionalism. Last fall, with the management transition from the University of California (UC) to the new LLC, I had accepted the job with the new management, retired from UC two days after the transition, and then cut back to half-time. Partly this was fire-proofing myself against what I suspected would be an upcoming period of turbulence and instability. Partly I wanted to make a window of time to pursue more writing. But there was more.

Over the past decade, funding has become more and more marginal and more and more directed toward immediate implementation. In a research environment, this can become very counterproductive. Often, first implementations (or even second) don’t work as expected. Progress requires time to ponder, time to consider underlying causes and explore them, and colleagues willing and able to engage in creative discussion. Those conditions were less and less available. Increasingly, I and my colleagues were stretched thin over multiple and over-promised projects. The inevitable result, over years of this, was simply cumulative fatigue. I found myself, whether I liked it or not (and I didn’t), slipping on commitments. I found that the time to even read an issue of EOS or SIAM News had disappeared. When I had an opportunity to cut back on my time, I took it. I wanted to remain a productive physicist rather than continue my transition into a fog-headed zombie. This might have worked, but the turbulence got me first.

In the days preceding the layoff date, I took the precaution of transferring a number of sets of project files and collections of article PDF files to colleagues. If I were eliminated (which happened), at least some of the code development, simulations done, and information collected would remain. Yet there are limits to professional commitment; much simply will be left half-formed, half-done, and become lost. It is my professional responsibility to do what I can in the face of everything, not to protect an organization from itself; the lab will succeed or fail on its own merits or limitations. My commitment is not to the organization but to my colleagues; caught in the swirls of chaos a much as I am. It has been a week of reminding myself of and practicing the Zen philosophy of doing what needs to be done and remaining unattached to the results.

Being peace and bringing full awareness is the way for activists to develop the most effective strategies for making peace. Paradoxically, these strategies are most effective precisely because a Buddha does not try to control their outcome. A Buddha understands that, because all reality is interconnected, there is no way to step outside of the situation in this moment in order to get control of it. Every effort to get that kind of illusory control only exacerbates conflict and violence. Rather, a Buddha lives fully in the present, doing what needs to be done in the immediate moment to ease suffering. “If we do our best, in full awareness and with a heart free from anger, we cannot worry about results.” Giving full awareness to the present moment, and being peace in that moment, is the best way to bring peace for the future. There can be no peace in the future if people are not peaceful in the present. — Ira Chernus on Thich Nhat Hahn