Survival is the only career in the wilderness; awareness, the task that centers it. With each new breath comes a requirement of vigilance. It’s relentless, but it also has its rewards. It explains why the greatest richness in our own lives is found not by attainment, but by deep awareness of what we already have, and what we experience.

If enlightenment is a state of perfect awareness and no interfering mind, then the enlightenment so many have sought is essentially a return to the wild state of perception. Enlightenment is what the wild animals already have.

What does this say about our concept of work? Clearly that our own career is awareness, too. We just have a shifted context in which to apply those latent skills—to release the enlightenment we already have, buried in our animal instincts.

What we define as “work” is only an added surface layer. Work, as we know it, is a unique luxury. It’s also an exceptional burden.

Work is a luxury because, with less daily worry than most species about what other creature might eat us, we’re freer to learn chosen skills from carpentry to science to art; to create, explore, and apply our discoveries. Our choices are numerous, if not limitless. It’s an opportunity of experience no earthly species before us has ever had, and its joyful extravagance is not to be taken lightly.

Yet the paths and patterns along which we’ve chosen to direct this luxury have lacked sufficient awareness of their effects on ourselves, each other and the world. We’ve created and assigned importance to tasks disconnected from our needs and the planet’s—tasks requiring or permitting great suffering.

Questing to fill the heart in the working world, we challenge the mind and test the body—harder, faster, with intellect more than perception. If the heart becomes fulfilled along a path so indirect, it’s more
accidental than not. And if the world is somehow improved, it’s only narrowly so—as narrow as our focus.

Our methods of survival are indirect compared to hunting prey and sleeping under a tree: we study books, learn a trade, get hired by someone else to apply it (often as they see fit), be given paper in exchange for it, and give that paper to others in exchange for food, shelter and other basics, most of which have been obtained by our suppliers through another long indirect chain. These methods are so inefficient that we end up spending huge amounts of time to get basic needs of food and shelter met—often doing very unnatural, unpleasant things in the process.

Most people work far more, in fact, than hunters and gatherers and other so-called primitive people did. And the overwhelming domination of these artificial, overwhelming work structures has made it difficult to exist beyond them. Work is, indeed, a burden of which no wild animal could conceive.

So, what does nature ask us to do, in our new context? Beyond the cultivation of constant awareness, I believe it asks us to be conscious of the effects of work on our souls and the earth’s. It asks us to choose simple work, do what we need to, and then spend our remaining time sitting on tree branches singing, or sunning ourselves on the rocks, or mating with our partners. That’s not laziness; that’s nature. Some lions are reputed to sleep up to nineteen hours a day; sloths twenty; koalas twenty-two. All have sex in mind. Now there’s a version of enlightenment most people could live with!

Also, nature silently expresses the dignity of service work. Wild animals build no monuments, write no operas, discover no new principles of physics or medicine. Yet, in their work of feeding their young, of building homes out of the barest available material, or otherwise creatively living to see another day, they are the very model of grace and beauty. It’s in the way they work, as well as in the simplicity of their tasks. They work with focus, attentiveness to detail, and without question of self-worth. They don’t need external validation of their lives, their choices. We’re capable of the same dignity in whatever tasks await us, if we are aware.