The Timeless Way of Living

Without a self-concept to defend, we are free to be nobody and do extraordinary things.

Violinist Ronnie Bauch is a long-time member and managing director emeritus of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Orpheus is considered one of the finest chamber ensembles in the world, and their conductorless approach is uncommon in the classical music world. In the book Leadership Ensemble, Bauch explains that the absence of an autocratic conductor doesn’t mean a leaderless orchestra:

No orchestra exists without direction, and the absence of a conductor as central authority figure doesn’t mean that power doesn’t exist. Power needs to exist. The unique thing about Orpheus is that power is divided up… Empowering individual musicians allows Orpheus to draw on the leadership potential of everyone in the organization.

Bauch is also one of the founding members of the North Country Chamber Players, a group of chamber musicians who each summer are in residence in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. These are world-class musicians drawn from orchestras and ensembles such as Orpheus. For 47 summers, they have been playing together in hotels, parks, and community venues in New Hampshire’s White Mountains for minimal financial reward. Dress for the audience is informal. If you arrive early enough, your seat is only a few feet away from the players.

My wife and I have been attending these performances for 30 years. Unlike when we attend Boston Symphony concerts, the audience doesn’t restlessly shuffle through programs. There are no bored people attending to be part of the local cultural scene. The individuals in the audience are glad to be nobodies listening to music. An audience made up of nobodies is indeed extraordinary.

We all know individuals who cannot walk into a room without drawing attention to themselves in some way or another. They must be a somebody in every situation.

These North Country players have rich friendships and palpable ease with each other. They are world-class musicians who love each other and, indeed, have grown into their senior years together. Now, a second and third generation of players have joined, and guest artists appear throughout the summer.

They are a band of brothers and sisters in the truest sense of the word. If you think of the turmoil that revolves around many “teams,” this too is unusual. However famous they are, only nobodies could play as one harmonious voice and participate in the joy of making beautiful music.

This photo was taken this past Sunday during their 47^th season finale. The guest pianist was EJ Hwang, a classical fusion artist blending Western and Korean influences. Although she has her own jazz ensemble, she played with the North Country Chamber Players as if they were long-time collaborators.

What is extraordinary in this story is the absence of all the barriers that could interfere with good music-making. When nobodies play music and when nobodies listen to the music, what is left is the joint participation in the expression of the sublime. It’s not about them; it’s about the music.

At this point, Part 1 on David Hume should come to mind. Without a self-concept to defend, we are free to be nobody and do extraordinary things.

David Hume, Session 1: How David Hume Can Change Your Life

In some of our sessions at Mindset Shifts U, the Stoics and other philosophers have helped us understand that everything is transitory, ourselves included. Accepting this reality opens the way to a meaningful life.

In recent years, for many performances at the North Country Chamber Players, Bauch has given up his long-held chair as first violin. When the needs of mentoring the next generation of players warrant, he steps into the second chair without a bit of ego. Remember that Bauch is still a world-class player at Orpheus and most often the superior player. Yet, no one is keeping score, and that’s the point.

Christopher Alexander, in his classic book on architecture, The Timeless Way of Building, faces this reality: “To make a thing which … is true to all the forces in it, to remove yourself, to let it be, without interference with your image-making self—all this requires that we become aware that all of it is transitory; that all of it is going to pass.”

No skill is required to enter the state of mind that comes from removing your ego self. Instead, as Alexander reminds us, “It is only a question of whether you will allow yourself to be ordinary, and to do what comes naturally to you, and what seems most sensible, to your heart, always to your heart, not to the images which false learning has coated on your mind.”

It is not common to value the simple, ordinary life that Alexander points us to. It is not common because we value our ego identity, for we do not see how it creates barriers that prevent us from discovering our genius.

What we are being asked to do is to get out of our own way. Writing about buildings, Alexander points out, “When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature.” Alexander offers this advice to those architects who try to take their ego out of a building design: “You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen.”

The heart of a less ego-identified life is allowing innate, creative forces to run through us. Although Alexander’s work is to help architects design buildings having “the quality without a name,” his ideas have universal applicability. This quality, he tells us, “cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of people, just as a flower cannot be made but only generated from the seed.”

Continuing his gardening metaphor, Alexander instructs, “If you want to make a living flower, you don’t build it physically, with tweezers, cell by cell. You grow it from the seed … No process of construction can ever create this kind of complexity directly.” In other words, no amount of effort or willpower can replace the generative potential of simply being open to the creative powers that lie beyond the ego.

Alexander tells a story of watching a Danish friend as she cut strawberries into very, very thin slices. When he asked her why she cut the berries that way, she explained that the taste of strawberries comes from the open surfaces. Alexander goes on to explain,

Her life was like that. It is so ordinary that it is hard to explain what is so deep about it … nothing superfluous, each thing that is done, done totally. To live like that, it is the easiest thing in the world; but for a man whose head is full of images, it is the hardest. I learned more about building in that one moment than in ten years of building.

We can feel the release of human potential in Alexander’s description. Be ordinary. Enjoy food. Design a building. Innovate. Lead without controlling. Play music. Be a loving partner and parent. All that stops us is barriers in our mind, and we can choose to change our mind.

Alexander writes, “To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness.”

We will see in Saturday’s Part 2 on Hume that the central quality, the timeless way of living, cannot be found through reason. A timeless way cannot be commanded, but it can be welcomed. David Hume will continue to teach us how.

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