The Lily of the Field and the bird of the air
The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air is the title of a short book written by Søren Kierkegaard, who was a philosopher and theologian known as the Father of Existentialism. In this book, he examines a passage of scripture that talks about lilies and birds, and shares lessons we can learn from them. Along with the book itself, there is a great podcast called Philosophize This that talked about the book that I borrowed a lot of ideas from for this post, and in some cases even used the same language or quotes. Full credit of thought goes to that podcast. I liked the podcast so much, I consider this post in many ways just an exercise in remembering it better. I found Kierkegaards thoughts on the subject to be profound, and there are lessons we can apply to our lives whether the reader shares Kierkegaards beliefs or not. The book divides each lesson we can learn into three discourses.
1. Silence
There is an abstract reality we spend much of our time in that Kierkegaard calls “The realm of human concern”. This realm of human concern consists of all of our projects, plans, hopes, and dreams that we have connected to our values, and the way we live them out. This realm is an important part of our lives, and spending time in it should not be discouraged.
The realm of human concern exists entirely in our minds, yet it plays out in a very real way in our daily lives, and can become a huge part of our identity. Grinding to meet our goals, planning, dreaming, striving, working. One of the key tools we use to ground ourselves to reality and determine how well or poorly we are achieving against our goals is comparison. We compare ourselves to friends, family, classmates, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians and more. It helps us find our place, and make adjustments to our goals and plans as needed. I describe comparison as a tool because it is useful, but it comes with potential baggage such as discontentment, envy, striving, and over-thinking.
So this abstract realm of human concern that lives in our minds ends up orienting a considerable portion of the decisions and actions we take. That said, what proportion of our identity or being does this piece of our lives make up? Are we simply a set of projects to be carried out? Or is there some part of our existence that sits outside the realm of human concern?
“Consider the birds of the sky. Or look at the lilies and how they grow.”
The lily of the field doesn’t strive to be something that it’s not. It doesn’t compare itself to other lilies. Nor does it make plans to bloom in the spring. The birds and lilies don’t spend their days in anxious thoughts, planning for every future scenario. From the birds and lilies, we can catch a glimpse of what its like to live outside the realm of human concern.
Unlike birds, humans tend to gravitate towards noise. We make our plans, then doubt our plans. We worry about the things that could happen, or may not happen. Again, this planning and strategizing and concern for our futures are a big and important part of our life. But Kierkegaard would suggest that once we’ve set ourselves a system of values, we shouldn’t continue to live in our heads about it, lost in the noise of what-ifs and but-ifs.
To further illustrate this idea of noise, Kierkegaard describes his disdain for “the poet” of his time. He criticized the poets for saying things like: “In the ineffable realm where time dances with eternity, God’s essence radiates as the quintessence of boundless love and infinite wisdom. His presence, a celestial whisper, caresses the soul with the softest touch of grace, painting the cosmos with hues of divine mystery and cosmic wonder. In His transcendent nature, we find the gentle embrace of serenity, the whispers of galaxies echoing His name, and the enigma of existence unfolding in the symphony of His divine breath.”
These are no doubt beautiful words that I had our soon to be robot AI overlord write for me, but what are these words actually saying? Kierkegaards concern with the poets was that people would feel alienated by the embellished and un-relatable way they’d describe our relationship with God and life, and be turned off the subject completely.
The poet isn’t an irrelevant figure who only existed in Kierkegaards time either. Modern day poets are influencers and internet personalities who lecture us on how we should live, and tell us the five secrets of success. They post their grind videos, showing how we could be fulfilled and successful if we just wake up at 3am every morning, meditate, workout, drink a protein shake, write a LinkedIn post, then go for a jog and be grateful that we get to start our day that way. We’re inundated with pseudo-scientists telling us the hidden truths to find meaning in our unfulfilling jobs and life. Start With Why. Be vulnerable. Think again. Become Good to Great. Build Atomic Habits. Become Indistractible. Learn from the Stoics. Get to Yes!
How many times do we need to be told to work hard, or follow some five step program. None of us are really surprised by the advice that we need to work hard to achieve our goals. So at what point does it all just become noise?
This brings us to the first lesson we can learn from the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. That is silence.
Silence gets us out of the abstract, comparison filled world of the realm of human concern. It quiets our mind, and gives us space to be reminded of our values. Kierkegaard sees it as a form of prayer, with the intent of changing the heart of the person praying, or getting them out of their own heads. He felt that at some point, once we are done making our plans and setting our values, we need to stop going over and over them in our heads, as we’ll just talk ourselves out of them. Doubt creeps in. We say we’ll do it tomorrow. We worry too much and begin tweaking our plans. At some point, we need to step out of the realm of human concern, be quiet, and live out our values.
Here is an excerpt of Kierkegaards words on the matter:
Søren Kierkegaard
The ability to speak is the human being’s superiority over the animal, but in relation to God wanting to speak can easily become corrupting for the human being, who is able to speak. God is in heaven, the human being is on earth: therefore they cannot very well talk with one another. God is infinite wisdom, what the human being knows is idle chatter: therefore they cannot very well talk with one another. God is love; the human being is—as one says to a child—even a little fool with respect to his or her own well—being: therefore they cannot very well talk with one another. Only in much fear and trembling can a human being talk with God, in much fear and trembling. But to speak in much fear and trembling is difficult for another reason, for as anxiety causes the voice to falter in a physical sense, so also does great fear and trembling surely cause the voice to fall mute in silence. This is known by the person who prays rightly, and this is perhaps exactly what the person who did not pray rightly has learned in prayer. There was something that was very much on his mind, a matter that was so important for him to have God understand properly; he was afraid that he might have forgotten something in his prayer—alas, and if he had forgotten it, he was afraid that God would not have remembered it on his own: therefore, he wanted to gather his thoughts and pray truly fervently. And then, if he in fact prayed truly fervently, what happened to him? Something strange and wonderful happened to him: Gradually, as he became more and more fervent in prayer, he had less and less to say, and finally he became entirely silent. He became silent. Indeed, he became what is, if possible, even more the opposite of talking than silence: he became a listener. He had thought that to pray was to talk; he learned that to pray is not only to keep silent, but to listen. And that is how it is: to pray is not to listen to oneself speak, but is to come to keep silent, and to continue keeping silent, to wait, until the person who prays hears God.
2. Obedience
Obedience is one of those words that makes mine and younger generations a little uncomfortable. We are individualists after all, dancing to the beat of our own drums. So why is Kierkegaard suggesting that obedience is important? To illustrate his point, Kierkegaard would point us to our nature, and prove that it is often working against us. He would point to a verse from the Bible that says – “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.“
In modern terms. I do not understand why I sit on the couch for nine hours a day eating Funyuns and Cheetos, when what I want to do is exercise and become a 220 pound bulk of lean muscle. I want to be healthy and fit, but I do not do it, rather, I eat my Funyuns and complain that I am not a bulk of lean muscle.
We’re not exactly prone to committing to something, and then sticking to it. If sticking to our commitments was a natural trait for humans, we wouldn’t be so inspired by people who actually do it. Every January when we make our new years resolutions, we follow our goals with strict and rigid compliance for the first nine days. Then we introduce a slight compromise on day ten because “I’ve been good”, and by day fifteen we’ve already planned to just try again next year. The slight compromise made on day ten would have been a result of temptation. We were tempted to eat that cookie or hit the snooze button, and that temptation kicked off a progressive chain of events that lead us to a place we never imagined ourselves in when we were setting our values or goals. I like how the podcast I listened to on this book put it:
The point is: systems of values don’t crumble in a single day, or even a single week. It is a gradual, insidious process of micro-transgressions that add up, become habituated until one day you look yourself in the mirror and don’t like what you see anymore. When you commit yourself to a system of values, your nature as an ever-changing being constantly in a state of becoming will introduce temptation, and when it does, Kierkegaard says we would do well to learn from the lily and the bird the skill of obedience.
“Consider the birds of the sky. Or look at the lilies and how they grow.”
Lilies and Birds don’t resent or complain about the situations they end up in. Lilies don’t give into temptation and pivot to trying to live like a rose, or a deer it saw wandering the valley. They give no consideration to doing anything different than the values that make them who they are.
Kierkegaard has a lot to say about obedience and ones ability to follow their values and commitments. One of his most famous philosophical works is called “Either/Or”, To boil down his argument, he suggests that we have an either/or choice between God or Mammon. Mammon is a biblical term that is most often thought to mean material wealth, and is usually associated with greed or the unhealthy pursuit of gain. We could also apply Kierkegaards point more broadly, and say that we have an either/or choice between committing to our system of values, and anything that would distract or keep us from following them.
The point Kierkegaard is trying to make is that we can’t take half measures with our values, or “serve two masters”. We can’t split our time and attention on multiple systems of values because it introduces too much noise and opportunity for us to begin that process of compromise that results in us not ending up where we want to be. Marcus Aurelius would be shaking in his sandals if you told him you wanted to be a stoic, but that you also wanted to dabble in some more hedonistic philosophies on the side. It just doesn’t work very well.
The obvious next question that we should ask ourselves is, given the almost unimaginable amount of different “masters” out there that I could follow, how can I have any certainty that the decision I made is correct? Well, sorry if this is a bummer, but Kierkegaard would say you can’t. He’d tell you that the most rationale decision you could make, is actually to make a bold choice, based in uncertainty, to take a leap of faith. It sounds controversial, but I think he’s right.
To steal my own quote from another post on deconstruction that was also influenced by some of Kierkegaards writing:
What’s the alternative? Endlessly philosophizing, calculating, and planning? Following societies expectations and hoping that shapes us into our true self? No. There are countless reasons to hesitate. So much that we can’t be fully prepared for. But when will we be fully prepared? At some point, we have to courageously decide that in the absence of perfect information and planning, we are going to move forward anyway. Kierkegaard implores us to commit to a system of values, and then take a leap of faith. We should experience the dizziness of freedom. We should wrestle with our values and how we intend to live our lives. But let’s not build a house in the dizziness and live in it.
Let’s take an example of something a little less intimidating than a worldview or belief system. My mortgage. I could ponder and consider whether to have bought my house or not forever. And then when the question of variable rates or fixed came up, I could spend another forever deciding on that. I don’t know what rates will do in the future. I don’t know if my house will be destroyed by a freak accident that is not insurable. I don’t know if the person living next door is a psychopath who listens to country music at full blast all day. I don’t know how the rental market will change, and could mean renting is better long term than buying. I don’t know if there will be some politically destabilizing event that demolishes home prices. And on and on. But if I want to own a home, I’m going to have to take a leap of faith at some point and buy one.
Taking a leap of faith doesn’t mean we should blindly jump into the first idea or plan that crosses our mind. We shouldn’t just pick one randomly, or choose based on whats in the zeitgeist. Since we see the value in remaining obedient to our values, we’d better make sure we’re thoughtful about them.
So we commit to our values, take the leap of faith (because what else can we do?), remain obedient to the cause, and accept the fact that we will just have to make mistakes and learn as we go. We move into the darkness with the belief that our life will look better on the other side of living out our values. We’re inevitably going to have doubts and our nature will tempt us to act contrary to our values. We won’t always understand or see why its best to continue staying the course. But, if we learn from the lily and practice obedience, then eventually through living our values, those answers will begin to be revealed to us.
Just like Socrates searching for truth in the Athenian Agora, he had to believe that truth was possible to arrive at. He didn’t know if he would ever get there. He didn’t know what truth would look like even if he found it. But nonetheless everyday he engaged in the pursuit towards finding it, putting in the work, obedient to the cause.
Philosophize This
3. Joy
So we should practice silence and obedience. Fine. But you could imagine that a life focused on just those two elements could become pretty dreary, and we could experience a build up of discontentment. Take parenting as an example. Even though becoming a parent has been one of the greatest decisions I’ve made, and I find it rewarding and fulfilling, and fun, I don’t have to point out that its also hard, and there can be long periods of time where I don’t find contentment in it. So what’s the antidote? Kierkegaard again points us to the lily and the birds and says its joy. Here is how he defines joy.
What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this “today,” this to be today, truly to be today. And the truer it is that you are today, the more you are entirely present to yourself in being today, the less does tomorrow, the day of misfortune, exist for you. Joy is the present time, with the entire emphasis falling on the present time.
Søren Kierkegaard
“Consider the birds of the sky. Or look at the lilies and how they grow.”
Imagine a bird who has hatched from its egg and has just taken its first flight. Would you say the bird is at the end of its growth? Or maybe the beginning of its decay? Is the moment the bird learns to fly the pinnacle of its existence? Or is it a reminder that his youth is behind him? The answer to this question is that there is no answer. It turns out that birds don’t spend their time worrying about whether its begun its process of decay or growth, it just lives in the present, as a bird.
A lot of us spend our time thinking about the good old days. The fun we had in college, or when we were in our athletic prime, or had that job. Or we think about the future. How if we could just acquire that truck, find a wife, have a kid, get that scholarship, or job, or just be two inches taller, than we’d be happy.
All of this thinking is seeing ourselves through the lens of the realm of human concern. We live in this state when our life is oriented around our current project, and how that fits within the Russian nesting doll of the bigger project, and how that fits within the bigger project, and so on. But if we can live in the present as Kierkegaard says, and just be who we were designed to be, that feeling of discontent and striving starts to fade away.
Being who we are designed to be is an important point to note. Kierkegaard would call this seeing ourselves through Gods eyes. Though not everyone will connect with that language, he asks an important question on the subject that we can all consider. Why does a lily bloom? We know why a lily blooms from a biological perspective, but at the metaphysical level of the nature of being, biology doesn’t satisfy that question. A lily blooms because thats just what a lily does. It doesn’t bloom so it can earn a farmer $5 at a market. It doesn’t bloom to inspire other lilies with its Youtube channel, or so it can live in a mansion one day. It blooms because thats what it was designed to do. And Kierkegaard would say that there is joy to be found in that alone.
From the unlikeliest of teachers, we observe the value of silence, obedience, and joy. We aren’t just a project to be completed or a job to be done. We aren’t the sum of what we’re able to produce. The lilies of the field and birds of the air remind us of the undeniable piece of our lives that sits outside the realm of human concern.