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Dear Friends,
I’ve been reading Erich Fromm on my couch, on the Kindle app on my iPad, with Oliver stretched out on the rug at my feet.
There’s a small irony in reading a book about possession on an iPad. I noticed it and kept reading.
The book is To Have or To Be?, published in 1976. It’s the second book in the reading practice I started with Tolstoy in September.
Fromm opens with three poets and a flower.
Tennyson finds a flower growing in a crack in a wall. He pulls it out, roots and all, and holds it in his hand so he can understand it. “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies.” To know it, he has to kill it.
Basho, the Japanese poet, finds a small flower blooming by a hedge. He looks at it closely. He doesn’t touch it. Seeing it is enough.
Goethe, the German poet, finds a flower in the woods and feels the same urge Tennyson did. He wants to pick it. Then he realizes picking it would kill it. So he digs it up with all its roots, carries it home, and plants it again in his garden, where it keeps growing.
Fromm uses the three to draw the line his whole book is built on. Tennyson is in the having mode: possession, even when what you possess is knowledge. Basho and Goethe are in the being mode, where, in Fromm’s phrase, a person is “oned to the world.”
I agree with the distinction. It’s close to the center of my work. When a title or a company goes away, the people who struggle most are usually the ones whose sense of self was something they had.
When I first read it, I took it as East versus West. Basho on one side, Tennyson on the other. That matched something I feel. I live in a culture built around having, and being, in Fromm’s sense, has always felt a little foreign to me. I understand it. I think I aspire to it more as I get older.
Fromm says I read it wrong. The difference, he writes, isn’t essentially between East and West. It’s between a society centered on people and one centered on things. Goethe was German. Fromm’s other great example of being is Master Eckhart, a German mystic from the 1300s.
Fair enough. But here’s where I push back.
Fromm’s heart is with Basho. Basho is the ideal: no grasping, no impulse to own, just attention.
I’m not Basho. I suspect most of you aren’t either.
Most of us spent our careers being rewarded for Tennyson’s move. See something valuable, take hold of it, figure out how it works, make it yours. A company. A title. A reputation. That impulse isn’t a character flaw. It built a lot of what we have.
Telling someone like that to become Basho is telling them to become a different person. It isn’t going to happen, and the attempt usually turns into one more thing to master.
Goethe is different. Goethe has the urge. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. He notices it, and then he chooses something better than either holding on or walking away.
That’s the model I can believe in. And I think it’s the most honest picture of a transition done well.
When the role ends, the having instinct says pluck it. Hold on to the title, the identity, the version of yourself that bloomed in that spot, even if it withers in your hand.
The Basho response isn’t really available to most of us. We can’t pretend we never wanted it.
Goethe offers a third way. Dig carefully. Take the roots with you: the judgment, the curiosity, the relationships, the way you work. Carry the living thing somewhere it can keep growing.
The bloom is what you had. The roots are what you are.
I don’t expect to become Basho. What I’d like to get better at is being Goethe: noticing the urge to hold on, and choosing to replant instead.
That feels like a kind of being I can actually reach.
Warmly,
Cara
Future Identity Strategist
founder, Good Morning Freedom
P.S. If you’re not sure what’s in your roots, the Future Identity Snapshot is a good place to start. It’s a reflective assessment that helps you see what you’d carry forward into a next chapter: https://www.goodmorningfreedom.com/future-identity-snapshot