I am starting this post with the end message. This is a combination of Who Are You & Your ‘Aha’ Moment. When I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Cancer in 2012, it was a time when I reflected on my life, how I had lived it up to the diagnosis, and what I committed to changing.
I experienced the diagnosis as a "gift" or a "wake-up call." Being treated for cancer gave me plenty of time to reflect. This was the beginning of my meditation journey. What follows is, in part, how I came to terms with "Who I Am."
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We are called **human beings**, not human doings.
Yet the first question we ask one another is seldom “How are you being?”
It is always “How are you doing?” or “What are you doing?”
This small linguistic habit reveals a vast metaphysical inversion: modern existence has quietly replaced being with doing as the ground of identity.
On Being
Being is the naked fact of presence.
It is the silent “I am” that precedes every predicate.
Before I am a parent, worker, artist, sufferer, or seeker—before any role, achievement, or failure—I simply am.
This “am-ness” is not earned; it is given. It is the ontological root from which all doing flows, yet it needs no justification. A newborn child, a person in deep coma, an elder with dementia—none of them may be “doing” anything of note, yet their being retains an irreducible dignity.
In the great contemplative traditions, this is acknowledged.
The mystic does not ask “What should I do next?” but “Who am I when I do nothing?” The answer is not a list of accomplishments but a plunge into presence itself.
Meister Eckhart: “The being of God is God’s doing, but our doing is not our being.”
To rest in being is to touch the eternal; to identify with doing is to live in time’s anxious current.
On Doing
Doing, by contrast, is the movement of being into the world.
It is necessary, beautiful, and tragic all at once.
- Necessary because pure being, untouched by action, would be static and solipsistic.
- Beautiful because through doing we create, love, serve, and express the abundance of being.
- Tragic because doing is finite, measurable, and perishable. When we mistake it for the essence of who we are, we become prisoners of performance.
The moment doing becomes the measure of worth, anxiety appears.
- If I am what I do, then when I do nothing, I am nothing.
- If I am what I produce, then when production stops—through illness, age, failure, or simply rest—I vanish.
- The modern world amplifies this confusion relentlessly: résumés, metrics, likes, output, hustle culture.
- We are praised for busyness and pitied for stillness.
- The question “What do you do?” is not innocent; it is an identity probe that reduces a mystery to a job title.
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Why We Do Not Ask “How Are You Being?"
Because to ask “How are you being?” would demand an answer that cannot be quantified. It would invite silence, depth, vulnerability.
It might elicit:
- “I am restless beneath my accomplishments.”
- “I am afraid of the emptiness when the tasks stop.”
- “I am grateful simply to exist today.”
Such responses unsettle the social script.
They threaten the shared fiction that constant activity equals meaning.
- “How are you doing?” keeps the conversation safely on the surface of projects and moods.
- It allows us to remain human doings together, colluding in the avoidance of the deeper question: Are you at peace with your own existence, independent of everything you achieve?
Toward Reclamation
Perhaps the quiet revolution begins in small acts of linguistic rebellion.
To occasionally ask someone—not as small talk, but with genuine curiosity—“How are you being these days?”
And to allow ourselves the terrifying freedom of sometimes answering:
- “I am learning to be still.”
- “I am resting in the fact that I am, even when I do little.”
- “I am here.”
When being is restored as the ground, doing is liberated.
Actions then flow not from the desperation to prove existence, but from the overflow of an existence already affirmed.
We become capable of true generosity, creativity, and rest—because none of these are required to justify our presence.
We are human beings.
May we learn to inhabit that name again, in the depths where doing arises and returns, like waves upon the unchanging sea of being.
I am a Doing Human Being, Content with Doing and Being, Doing Nothing.
This is an entry to: Who Are You & Your ‘Aha’ Moment - Self-discovery and Personal Growth #ActiveRainChallenge hosted by Lew Corcoran and Patricia Feager.
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