How Do You Do "Being?"

A friend of mine recently lamented she had been a "do-er" all her life, but she was being advised that she should shift from doing to being.  She just isn't sure how to go about it.  Lots of people feel her pain, it seems.  I googled "being vs. doing" and, I am not making this up, it yielded 930 million entries.  I spent an evening dabbling in the entries and it was an experience I won't soon forget (I hope).  It helps to clarify a few things for me and offers a glimpse ahead I think i will like.  Just for a moment, look at defining your life not by what you do for a living, but by who you are.  When you strip away all the doing, there is an inner power of some sort that makes you keep ticking.  Who is that?  I know it is there, and that I don't let it out nearly enough, but I think it says more accurately who I am than what I do does.   

But back to the problem, how do you get in touch with that which remains when the doing is stripped away?  It's been said we cannot "be," to the exclusion of "doing" in its entirety. It's a contradiction in terms.  if we cease to do EVERYTHING, we cease to be.  Therefore, this being has to be a way of doing, doesn't it?  If I cease to do breathing, I will cease to be.    Another obvious point is that you cannot "do" if you don't continue to "be."  Therefore, doing remains a way of being.  The "being" I am talking about seems (to me at least) to arise from awareness.  If you are so caught up in the doing that you are unaware, you have lost the being side of it.

It's been said that being means to take life as it comes, and that doing is making things happen.  Sometimes life seems to be a tug of war between making it happen all the time and taking it as it comes.  You simply cannot control everything, so some part of life has to be taken as it comes.  On the other hand, is it possible to take everything just as it comes?  I suppose it might be, but the quality of a life where, for example, one never steps up and lets his actions tell his/her loved ones how he feels doesn't sound like one to which we should aspire.  In his goodbye letter written near the end of his life, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the famous Latin American author found a profound way to say "do it today" when he said:

Tomorrow is never guaranteed to anyone, young or old. Today could be

the last time to see your loved ones, which is why you mustn't wait;

do it today, in case tomorrow never arrives. I am sure you will be

sorry you wasted the opportunity today to give a smile, a hug, a kiss,

and that you were too busy to grant them their last wish.

(Let me stop for a brief commercial.  If you haven't already, google "A Genius Says Goodbye" and read/watch a slide presentation of Marquez' message, you won't regret it.)

That is just one example of how we must "do" some things.  Taking things in an entirely passive way is unsatisfactory, it is not a life.  It's been said that "life takes place in the balance between making it happen and taking it as it comes."

So what is it that is calling out to my friend?  She has concluded that the balance in her life needs to be tilted away from doing and toward being.  This is hard to get a grip on, of course, but we see an occasional example.  We sometimes see people in their best moments, when they are genuinely calm, peaceful, loving and caring.  They seem to have gotten in touch with who they are, not simply what they do.  They have ceased to work on filling their time with things to do, and are more focused on becoming more caring, compassionate, generous, etc.  

No, they are not perfect, this is a moment, after all.  But more of that awareness of how they are going about their lives seems to show through in those moments, and they are not in a hurry.  It brings to mind another quote I ran across.  "Standing still, you overtake those who run"--the Upanishads (Ancient Indian philosophical discourses).  My sense is you need more standing still to get there, but in this hectic world, we have all learned that we rarely have time to stand still.  If you want to do this standing still, you have to put it on your schedule.  Oops, there I go again, "doing."  

So, the question remains--how in the world do you do "Being?"