Downward Mobility

This essay first appeared in the newsletter of Seven Thunders, an organization affiliated with Robert Aitken’s Diamond Sangha, which offers Christian retreats and Zen sesshins.

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A year ago I started to volunteer in construction with Habitat for Humanity. On Fridays I pulled on a pair of tattered jeans, laced up my boots, and walked to the build site where I spent the day with a toolbelt tight around my waist. I hauled lumber, brandished a nail gun, and ripped plywood into sheets with a skillsaw. The tasks and team couldn’t have been more different than those of my first career.

After graduating from college, I joined Bain & Company as a management consultant. My first client was the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus. One day while developing a statistical model for a customer marketing strategy, I discovered deep in the sales transaction database a customer spending millions of dollars a year on merchandise like jewelry, handbags, and shoes (hi, Oprah!).

This kind of work gnawed at me. CEOs hired our firm to help them outmaneuver the competition and increase the bottom line. It didn’t matter that we didn’t use their products or know their customers or live where the company was located.

The culture of working there added to my angst. I traveled nearly every week. Colleagues tracked their credit card points and frequent flier miles. Expensive team meals were billed to our clients. And trainings happened on Cape Cod and the beach in Puerto Vallarta. For all the flavor it promised, the lifestyle left a bad taste in my mouth.

So I left for a journalism startup in New York City. My risk-taking eventually landed me in a corner office at Forbes Magazine overlooking Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, and then onto the executive team of a venture-backed software company that chartered private jets to its board meetings in Silicon Valley. These developments, as interesting as they were, fanned the flames of my disenchantment. Ten years ago I walked out of that world and didn’t look back.

This year I found myself on my hands and knees in a hard hat and orange vest with a crew of disheveled volunteers installing flooring for a single mother of three. I realized that something felt right about it. I had wanted to work more with my hands and give back to my local community, but I didn’t foresee where Habitat was leading me.

“There is one timeless way of building,” architect Christopher Alexander says. “It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.”

The Japanese temple carpenters, known as miyadaiku, exemplify this timeless way. Master artisans, they design, build, and repair sacred wooden structures using ancient knowledge passed down across 1,400 years. These structures are held together without nails or screws or glue, relying on intricate interlocking joints, which allow them to flex and survive earthquakes.

For these carpenters, possessed by shokunin kishitsu, or the craftsman’s spirit, every chisel stroke is a moment of pure concentration. Sharpening a plane blade or carving a joint is a meditation. They study the “face” of the wood to match the grain and orientation to the local climate, working with the wood’s nature rather than imposing their will on the material.

The mind we cultivate in zazen is what the miyadaiku know through devotion to their craft, and it is the gate to all wisdom.

“To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name,” Alexander asserts. “There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.”

I was raised a Latter-day Saint, and to us Mormons (as we’re known), building Zion is a physical act in the here and now. But in one of many LDS scripture verses I memorized as a high school student, I learned that Zion—no matter its outer form—is also a state of the heart-mind: “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind.” (Moses 7:18)

Thus, the quality of our attention shapes what we build, and what we build shapes us in return.

I wouldn’t be able to stay with what’s unfolding were it not for the example of Christ. Henri Nouwen, the Catholic priest and theologian, says, “The story of our salvation stands radically over and against the philosophy of upward mobility.”

Having nosedived off the corporate ladder, my résumé torn to shreds, I rest knowing that Jesus, who “moved from power to powerlessness, from greatness to smallness, from success to failure,” was a carpenter.