Action & Contemplation - Part 2

I’ll try to illustrate my point further with an example. I lead groups of people on short-term mission trips. If I were leaving every Saturday for a mission trip and coming home every Friday, only to leave again the next morning, I would lead a very active life (don't worry, this is not my practice). Parker Palmer seems to be an action oriented guy, and good makes defense of the contemplation that can and should take place in action. I agree that something needs to be said to both move the heavy-footed contemplatives toward action and move the light-footed activists toward slowing down. If I kept the schedule above (even if I took a posture of contemplation-in-action) I would not have adequate space to develop, adjust, modify, and properly critique my own work. I would also quickly burn myself out. And the incompatibility comes in that phrase “adequate space.” Space yes, but not adequate space. Palmer seems to invite us to drag the boundary lines over a bit, and increase our percentages, but I don’t think we can entirely merge these two concepts. They are incompatible in that they can not maintain union. We can stir them together but they naturally separate without continuous conscious effort. I believe that is ok, and do not wish to move myself to some middle place where I am constantly doing both.

Palmer, in The Active Life, speaks of the tension between the two and that is what led me to think of the perpetual motion illustration. The balls move/rest/move/rest with a tension that is perpetual. I thought also of a gyroscope and how that as the rotor spins, the two gimbals (here we could call one “contemplation” and the other “action”) help maintain the stability of the rotor. In this illustration, the fact that they are separate “things” actually preserves both themselves and the rotor from into destruction.

The opposite of my above personal illustration is also true. If I stayed home all year and just thought about missions work I may come up with the best “model for missions” ever created but I would grow stagnant. Instead, (and this is what I feel Palmer is essentially suggesting) my action is balanced by my contemplation and my contemplation is done with action in mind. There is a force, or a gravity in my illustrations because that is what I feel in reality. I feel a pull to become active in the poverty and injustice that I see, and I feel a pull to reflect on all that I experience. Action and contemplation are oil and water, high tide and low tide, cats and dogs, but I love them both and need them both because of the unique aspects that they both bring to my life. Something mixed in the middle misses the full joy that comes with living the extremes.