Delphic Maxim 58: Do what you mean to do

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

58. Do what you mean to do

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

“Exactly so,” said Alice.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least — at least I mean what say — that’s the same thing you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

Life, if it is anything, is riven with automatic routines and habits. The quotidian are those everyday things that get us through the grind, one day to the next. They give structure to our lives, and ritual itself is a powerful way to discipline and organise ourselves. But the question I think this maxim poses is whether or not these processes are giving us meaning. To what degree are the things we do automatic and unthinking — what Danny Kahneman might call ‘system one’ thinking — as opposed to deliberate, considered and intentional?

Our most exciting work takes place in that intentional domain, when we are focused and doing things that we find interesting or important. Whether that is in the form of a daily practice that becomes part of life’s compound interest, or in the mode of a big task at work that needs completing, the challenging things we do deliberately are deeply engaging and they add a dimension of significance to the things we do.

When Alice arrives at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she is adrift through Wonderland. In part, it’s because she is avoiding doing something — she’s afraid of having to perform. So she slips into this fantastic world — seemingly against her will, though my Freudian side argues that she is journeying through the intentions and desires that exist in her unconscious mind. Every individual that she encounters in Wonderland are representations not only of people from the ‘real’ world above (itself a symbolic fiction, a picture of Victorian manners), but also of a repressed side of Alice herself.

I love the Mad Hatter. And it’s not the Johnny Depp version that I love — creditable effort though it was (in the first Tim Burton film, the sequel was execrable). No, my favourite version of the Mad Hatter is Martin Short’s for the Hallmark miniseries — a forgotten, virtuoso performance. The Mad Hatter is manic, loud, capricious and excitable. Alongside the dormouse and the March Hare, the tea party rolls from moment to moment, seemingly without intention.

But the purpose, of course, is to teach Alice. Through his apparent madness, the Hatter does what he means to do: performs, sings, distracts, enjoys, and encourages Alice to have confidence to do the same. There is method to his madness — his abruptness, his rudeness. Even if these things are constructs within Alice’s unconscious, they function as a point against which Alice can train herself, she reacts with confidence and deliberateness. She is forced to mean what she says.

One of the habits that captures us every day is that of emotion, of repetition, of unthinking. I don’t think this maxim is asking that we overanalyse or overthink our lives, but it does invite us to be more deliberate about the things we do. The word deliberate is a fun one, because it can be interpreted both in the sense that to be ‘deliberate’ is to do something intentionally, but also in the sense that we might ‘deliberate’, to think about and debate a course of action, and come to a decision.

Doing what you mean to do involves being conscious of your choices and actions, and owning them. It might involve a dive into the unconscious wonderland, to explore how and why you come to do some of the automatic things you do — and to find ways to give the journeys we take in life, however short, a sense of meaning and purpose.