No Time Like the Present

I have been living in a delusion, a fairly common one, but one to which I had thought myself immune. I suppose it is in the nature of delusion for me to believe this: others may be prone to this false belief, but not me. Heaven forbid.

The delusion is this: eventually things will even out at work and I will finally be able to just work my 40 hours. Everything will henceforth go smoothly, none of my employees will resign, or get sick, or become pregnant, or move to Denver. The way to ensure that this evening out happens (so goes the delusion) is for me to work 50 or 60 hours a week now. I will reap the benefits of all that peace later.

This is bullshit.

The realization of just how far down this particular rabbit hole I had gone arose from the recognition of the many mornings I have been skipping my meditation to go in early to work. This is just nuts. One of the pillars of my system of belief and my regimen of self-care is a steady diet of daily meditation, but I have not been getting that. And I have been feeling its lack.

The reason why this fantasy equilibrium can never come to pass (I just had an epiphany about this today) is that I am confusing situational chaos with constitutional and institutional chaos. Up until this moment (I can just barely admit, even to myself, how long it took) I have been operating on the belief that if I can just handle the current situation adequately, smooth sailing is inevitable. The basic problem with this way of thinking (it seems obvious now) is that the problem is not the situation. First of all, it is in the nature of my work (it's constitution) that there will always be chaos. I work in a bureaucracy, in health care, with many moving parts, and even more egos to clash together. Not to mention the basic fact in any workplace with greater than one employee--there will always be inequities in the way people work, how hard they work, whether or not they come to work consistently, their propensity to illness (and "illness"), the likelihood of a move to Denver, and on and on. It is also in the nature of most institutions to ask of their employees just a bit more than each has the ability to give, and when they succeed in supplying that little bit more, to ask for a little bit more yet. With the increased emphasis on "productivity" (which, thankfully, we do not yet have to contend, at least not in any measurable form), I have seen many workers devote hundreds of unpaid hours a year to fulfill these unrealistic requirements, which are then steadily ratcheted up.

I am now, it becomes clear, a practitioner of presenteeism, a fascinating word I heard for the first time just the other day, the definition of which is "the practice of coming to work when ill or tired, or remaining at work for extended hours unnecessarily". Because of where I work, I do not go

to work sick, but the other parts of the definition fit me to a tee. Of course, one could argue about the definition of "unnecessary", but to trust that delineation to me would be like trusting an addict with just how much heroin is a good idea. Thus, the 40 hour limit, the built-in definition of a sane work week.

So, here is my public vow: in June I turn 60. For years I had been saying that at 60 I was going to take a 50% position, work only half time. When I took my current supervisory job, this became unrealistic, but I vow this instead: when I turn 60, I will no longer work any more than an average of 40 hours a week. (I say "average" not as a hedge, but because my plan is to work eight nine-hour shifts and one eight-hour shift every two weeks, taking the tenth day off). As part of this vow, I am going to inform my employers and employees of this. And now I am telling you. And my wife. And everyone who will listen. And I ask that you all hold me to it.

What I can get done in 40 hours, I will get done. What I cannot, I will not. In all likelihood, it will remain undone. And it probably (sadly) won't make all that much difference. That, too, is part of the delusion, isn't it, that my work is so extraordinarily valuable that the place would FALL APART if I worked less than 50 hours a week. How grandiose is that?

Maybe I'll see you in the park. Or the coffee shop. The movie theater. A museum. Anywhere, anywhere, ANYWHERE other than work. I promise.

The Limits of Compassion and Its Limitless Nature

It is foolish for me to believe that I can understand what it is to be black in America today. As one commentator put it, there is Team Black and Team White, but if you are on Team White, you don't even realize you are on a team, it's just Normal. The only slight taste I get of the constant fear and loathing black people experience, the reflexive sense of caution and suspicion that Team White most often imposes on them, is the feeling of tension I sense in the parents of children I don't know but speak to in public. Because I am a man, the assumption is that I could possibly be a pedophile. Even in those I love, when I comment on how cute a little girl is, I can feel just a hint of the assumption that it might be a bit creepy for me to say that. They know me, they know I have no such predilections, but there is the blanket assumption that Male=Potential Creep that sneaks into every interaction, no matter how innocent. If asked, these people would say they are not sexist or prejudiced, they are just being cautious. Uh huh.

I can only imagine (I can truly only imagine) how dreadful this same sort of suspicion must be for Team Black in America. People cross the street. They wonder what you are doing in their neighborhood. It crosses the white mind to wonder if you truly belong in this place or that, or if you might have some nefarious purpose. I have never had the experience (literally never) of being stopped by a police officer unjustly, nor have the majority of my pale companions. But it is the rare person of color who has not had this experience (just ask them).

My point is this: I wish to consider myself a compassionate person. Compassion quite literally means "feeling with", what we might also call empathy. But because I really don't know how it feels to be a black American, there are limits to how deeply my compassion can run.

I celebrated the victory in the Supreme Court for gay marriage, but I realize that there, too, I have a very limited ability to understand the depth of meaning this has for those whose lives and loves have been further validated and enshrined in law by the highest court in the land. I can rejoice, but I can't join in. I have, after all, been able to marry for the past 41 years, and have availed myself of this privilege three times (to two people with only one divorce—it's a long story).

I can't know what it is like to be a woman. A woman who has never given birth to a child can't know what it is like to do so. We can do our best to "feel with", but there are limits. We can imagine what it is like to be another gender, but can't really know. If we have felt pain or sorrow or sadness, we can imagine what it is to be in chronic pain or deep grief or intractable depression, but this will miss the mark by light years because the very chronicity of the experience is its most salient feature. By its very nature, the pain most of us feel is short-lived and that is what makes it both tolerable and an entirely different experience from those states that seems as if they may never cease, which in fact they may not, except (one would hope) in death.

In Buddhist terms, compassion is one of the translations of the word "bodhicitta". To define things further, there are two types of bodhicitta, the relative and the absolute. It is relative bodhicitta which is sometimes spoken of as compassion. But absolute bodhicitta is emptiness or openness, and it is in this concept that we can see the truly limitless nature of compassion. While it is true that I cannot appreciate the specifics of your experience (unless you happen to be a middle-class, middle-aged, straight, white, married, male nurse), nor you mine, what I can do is strive to break down the barriers between us that make this so impossible. To put it another way, if I am so hung up on the specifics of my experience and how it is different (and therefore better, worse, superior, or more painful) from yours, then I make it impossible for us to find the common ground of feeling that opens the whole world for us to experience and share.

I understand, at least to the best of my ability, the need many people feel to separate their experience from that of the rest of the world. To do otherwise must seem like a betrayal of that experience and those who share it, whether that be the experience of color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, politics, profession, religion, disability, parental status, education, ability, preferences, choices, needs, or what have you. But to deny the possibility of the transcendence of these categories of experience is to also deny the possibility of the end of suffering. We must never forget that the Buddha did not preach a higher moral order or a religious understanding of the world. What he taught was the definition of suffering and the real possibility of its end. By striving for the greater goal of absolute bodhicitta, we open the gate to the road of such a complete openness that we cannot divide our experience from the experience of all beings. Such divisions are artificial in any case and the reinforcement of them is the precise cause of all suffering in our lives and in the world.

In the conventional sense, compassion has nothing but limitations. But in the larger sense, the absolute nature of compassion is not a mere feeling with, but a being at One with all that is. If we can get there (if only somewhat, for it is a continuum), how can we do other than love all that is and all that can be? To live our lives there is what Joy would feel like.

Consciousness conundrum

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

Life is but a dream. This is one of the core teachings in Buddhist thought. Life is as a dream, an illusion that imitates reality. The truth of things is that each millisecond is different from the one that came before. No matter how minutely we subdivide time, we will still never find a segment that is identical to that which came before or that which comes after. And the only moment (or fraction thereof) in which we are truly living is this one.

Yet we live slathered in the illusion of solidity, in the dream of our moments being contiguous and change happening gradually, in the delusion that we are essentially the same persons until a crisis comes along to change us. Much of unhappiness can be laid at the door of this mistaken perception—we recall (or believe we do) a time when all was serene and perfect and if we can only recapture that time.... Or perhaps we have not experienced such an event, but have seen it in others, or in the reality-bending delusion machines of literature, television, and movies, wherein people live simple lives (bad or good) and resolution occurs on schedule. We crave such certainty and grieve that we cannot achieve it. When, in fact, it is not achievable. The illusion of certainty is an inherently uncertain world means that the more certain we are of anything, the more deluded.

The irony here is that only that which makes us uniquely human stands in the way of our enlightenment, yet only that which makes us uniquely human makes enlightenment possible at all. And this uniquely human trait is that of consciousness, of having the self-awareness to realize that such a thing as enlightenment exists, is desirable, and a path exists to achieve it. Yet all of this self-aware thought is precisely what causes us to seek for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Nearly all of us spend our lives in this puzzling state and die ungratified and confused.

But there is good news. First of all, for most of us enlightenment occurs gradually. Yes, there are all those delightful stories of someone hearing the teachings, the light dawns, and suddenly an Arhat stands where a mere mortal was a moment ago. But these are meant to inspire us, not show us how it's done. Every day, in every moment, we can reach for either surrender or resistance. The choice is ours. The first leads to peace. The second leads to suffering. It is not more complicated than that unless we choose to make it so.

Norman Fischer (in "Training In Compassion") has this to say:

If you and everyone else you know are unfathomable, then why do you persist in imagining that you know who you and everyone else are and, based on these fixed ideas, that you can predict your behavior and that of others? Freshness and openness and a capacity for surprise are hallmarks of mind training, which is one reason why it is so much fun....We view with bemused curiosity our various responses and habits, even when it is clear that they are not too wholesome or even sane. [We must] cultivate beginner's mind in relation to ourselves and our own experiences. To stop being such an expert on ourselves.

In other words, lighten up. Life is but a dream. But few things are more wonderful than floating gently down the stream of life. There is joy there, even in the midst of sorrow. Oh, yes, there is.

Expectations

A confession: until recently I wasn't sitting in meditation very often. Since I was promoted, I have been spending much longer hours at work and what got sacrificed (for a while) was meditation. These things happen in the life of someone devoted to this practice, so it doesn't concern me much. At the beginning of this month I committed myself to sitting every day, went back to the habits I had until not that long ago.

Here's the thing, though: when I began sitting again, one of the reasons I did so was to seek a feeling of ease. This is what's known as a rookie mistake. I should know better. Why? Because one of the surest ways to make a mash of meditation is to place expectations on it. Meditation is only truly effective if I drop all hope for an outcome and relax into the experience of it. This was the central message the Buddha had to impart: it is not circumstances that cause us to suffer, but the idea that somehow things should be other than they are. I took up meditation again for all the right reasons and a couple of wrong ones.

And I found myself falling into the same trap that most beginning (and many experienced) meditators fall into: the belief that because I did not feel immediate relief, it was the meditation that was failing me and not my expectations that set me up for a false feeling of failure.

I have the great good fortune, though, to have studied enough of the Dharma and to have had wonderful teachers. So I know that this is irresponsible nonsense. It is true that meditation leads to a sense of freedom and greater happiness, but it is a process, not a recipe. And it only comes to pass when all hope of achieving freedom or happiness or pretty much anything else have been abandoned. Because it is the abandoning itself that yields these fruits.

Big assignment, I know. That's one of the reasons retreats are so valuable. The wonderful thing about retreat is that it accelerates this process. The outcome is not permanent peace and serenity (though at the very end of a retreat—before you re-enter the real world—it can feel like it might). The outcome is that you have touched peace and serenity, so you know it is possible to get there. Then you never want to give up seeking it (by not seeking it at all—see, it's tricky!)

It sounds contradictory, I know. There is a certain kind of magical thinking in the world that truly believes good can come to us by wishing for it rather than working for it. Does that sound curmudgeonly? It's not, really. It is, as I said, the core of what the Buddha taught. There is no fairy godmother to make your dreams come true. Knocking on wood will not protect you from calamity. And meditation will only bring you desirable things if you pursue it without expectation and with the willingness to continue putting butt to cushion day in and day out even if what arises is unpleasant.

Think of it this way: jumping out an airplane can be a wonderful experience, but only in very narrowly defined circumstances. Doing so with the expectation of soaring on your own without equipment or preparation is unlikely to end well. Being thrown out, no matter how well-equipped you might be, will also likely end in disaster. But armed with information, a good teacher, and the requisite stuff, it might just be one of the most wonderful things you can do.

Reflecting on expectation this past month also caused me to take a look at the world and see what evil can be brought upon us by this dangerous force. There is an expectation of comfort, of plenty, of being able to impose your beliefs on others, of untouchability when one is in power. There is the expectation that we can continue to do as we do while the world heats up. That we can solve the world's problems with bombs and guns (ain't worked yet).

It's not that I don't understand the world is a complicated place; I know it is. I live in the midst of contradiction and competing goods that can't all be fulfilled. I work in an environment where the challenges facing everyone (not just clients) are complex and where there is not sufficient time, ever, to fufill the many demands placed upon us.

All the more reason to break down the corrosive concept of expectation. All the more reason to sit down at least once a day and let go of all that. All the more reason to surrender to the void, open our hearts, let ourselves soar. The world is not a hopeless place and we are not inherently destructive beings. But seeking to be always satisfied makes us into that. Let's not.

Deserving

I work very hard. I deserve to have time to myself. I deserve for the work flow to stop long enough for me to catch my breath. What did I do to deserve being worked so hard? At the very least, I deserve to be recognized for the work I am doing.

Wait a minute. I found out last week that I have been nominated for an award to recognize the work I am doing. I don't deserve that. I can tell there are people who resent the fact that I have been nominated and know I don't deserve it. And they are right. I mean, it wasn't my idea, guys! Hey, you don't have to convince me I'm undeserving.

But, you know, now that I think of it, it's about time someone recognized how deserving I am of praise. I deserve it more than anyone I can think of. Bring it on. You're right, I am pretty damn wonderful!

I feel at the same time pleased and guilty about being nominated for this award. It's as if I have done something illicit, gotten away with something. I don't deserve it and, "if you only knew!" (what a rebel I am in my heart). I really deserve this and, "if only you knew!" (how hard I really work). In my small mind, it's all about my deserving, when in fact awards and honors are almost entirely about the need to celebrate or recognize and are, in the final analysis, also almost entirely impersonal. But it sure is difficult to look at it that way.

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I went to a concert last night and when I went to the bathroom, the guy standing next to me was irate (I mean really irate) because they weren't piping the concert into the bathroom. He obviously deserved to hear the whole thing, even while peeing.

I live in Seattle, which is where the most recent mass shootings happened. What did these young people do to deserve being shot? What did the shooter do to deserve being so beset by demons?

What could God be thinking? What does the universe want?

The person who cut my hair yesterday told me the story of a family friend who died suddenly of cancer at the age of 42. He was healthy and strong and nice and did nothing to deserve an early death.

I live near Mount Rainier. Every year, for years on end, people have climbed the mountain safely. Last week, six of them fell to their deaths. Why them? They did nothing wrong; they did not deserve to die.

I know many people, including very close family members, who are struggling mightily, some with physical health, some with mental health, some with money problems, some with alcohol and drug problems, and all manner of problems in between and otherwise. They don't deserve this. It's deeply unfair that they must go through this.

I worked for 10 years in intensive care units. Some people died and some people survived. Some of those who lived would rather have died; nearly all who died would rather have lived. Five-year-olds with 20% burns died and 80-year-olds with 60% burns lived. Who deserved more life?

How is it possible that good people die young and murderers live to a ripe old age? How can I have behaved so badly in my life and still thrive?

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But here's the thing: where did we ever get the idea that we get what we deserve? Where is it written that life is fair? Is there a misconception here? The whole idea that there is a God who predetermines what happens and allows for all this is deeply offensive to me. This is a portrait of God as asshole, and I don't buy it. Of course, I don't buy any kind of traditional concept of God, but this one just can't be right.

Closer to home spiritually is the idea of karma. I once told a friend who was going through a rough patch that she must have done something at some point for her karma to be screwed up like this. She took great offense at this, thinking I was implying that she deserved what was coming to her, when I meant exactly the opposite: how could it be logically correct that such a wonderful person was having to undergo such trials?

Yes, there is a misunderstanding, and I share in it. We think there is some sense to the way the universe doles out its deserving, but there really isn't. Yes, I believe in karma, but it doesn't mean what most people think it means. I have long thought of karma as being at the same time the most and the least important concept in all of Buddhism.

Karma is unimportant because if we are behaving well in order to avoid punishment or gain good experiences, we are in the wrong religious tradition and doing things for entirely the wrong reason. If we are seeking a particular goal by practicing the Dharma, we are not practicing the Dharma. Because the teachings of the Buddha seek to free us from striving, these imagined rules of behavior are a new enslavement.

Karma is vitally important because when we act in accord with moral and ethical principles, it changes everything for the better; in fact, the well-being of the whole world is improved. One little act of unkindness multiplied by millions of people is a huge unkindness. As one teacher put it, "you can't get away with nothin'" In my personal system of belief there is no cosmic scorekeeper, yet the universe responds to our slightest action. The response a single individual might induce may be infinitesimal, but these small impulses add up to a wave of goodness (or badness, if we choose to go that way) that can overwhelm the world. But the goodness might not come to you in particular, not in the way you wish it would, and probably not in any kind of proportion to the goodness of your deeds. The lazy jerk down the street will still probably win the lottery while you struggle to pay your mortgage.

Global warming is a great metaphor for this. We all think it's a problem (well, those of us who are still sane and awake), but we also feel that our actions are too small a part of the whole to make a difference. (Not my SUV!) Yet, it is precisely these individual actions that add up to the big problem. Thus it is with our karmic actions. When I am impatient, this ripples out to others and if they in turn are impatient and the whole world exhibits no patience, eventually we wind up with a harried world where patience has no hope of thriving. Our actions matter. On a smaller scale, we have all experienced the job where one person—sometimes not even the boss—can make for a toxic place to work. No matter what efforts we undertake to counteract this toxicity, we can't make any headway when a person with a strong will to negativity holds sway. On the other hand, one truly positive person can make the workplace a joy to inhabit.

But the idea of deserving is hard to give up. This idea that if I live well I will die well, that if I behave myself I can avoid the vicissitudes of life, or, contrarily, that if I behave badly I will be punished for it, is deeply ingrained in our world view, especially in the Judeo-Christian culture in which most of us were raised. But it just ain't so. On the other hand, it's not totally random, either. We can invite into our lives more joy or more sorrow, more peace or more chaos, more acceptance or more resistance. But in the end, we must recognize that the universe is mostly impersonal in how it acts—it's not about me, not even close. And how could it be? I may feel as if I am the center of the universe, but in fact I am a tiny mote in a brief moment of time. When I can relax into the reality of what is without trying fiercely to justify or change it, then I am free. And freedom is what we truly deserve.

Cutting the cake

A carpenter spent the morning cutting planks with his circular saw. In the afternoon he was called into the house to celebrate a birthday. Someone asked him to cut the cake. His first thought was of the morning's task of cutting, so he ran to the shop and got his saw.

The mind is a power tool. It is very useful. One could not cut the planks of a daily life without it. But it does rather make a mess of cake. And here's the thing: most of life is cake. Which is to say, most of life is not subject to being helped or influenced by the mind. But the mind is seductive. Because it is very effective in solving the mundane, we can end up living in the nearly universal hallucination that it is useful in every situation, when in fact most of the time it is either useless or makes an entire muddle of things, destroys the very cake it had intended to make more palatable.

If you are deciding what to have for dinner or driving a car or planning a wedding, the mind is essential. But if you are contemplating what your life means, the mind is almost entirely useless. One of the primary ways in which meditation is useful is as a reminder that there is more than one tool in your shed.

I had a bit of a crisis last week, and fortunately I had already arranged to speak with a spiritual adviser who has been helping me for several years. She reminded me of the many tools I have available to me, but her most important nudge was to realize that I need not stay in the Small Mind, that a broader perspective, a bigger container, is always available to me. The mind tries to solve problems it cannot solve, tries to use it's power to overwhelm that which is not responsive to this bullish approach. The mind seems to reason that, since it can solve a quadratic equation, it really ought to be able to solve a human life, to resolve the problems of others, and make sense of everything in the world. It blindly thrashes about in these swamps and (most amazing of all) never concludes that it is incapable of doing anything constructive there, despite the fact that it never does.

The essence of the Buddha's teaching is that we live in misery as long as we subject ourselves to the deluded reign of the Small Mind, but that we can be free in any moment. This amazes me. We can actually choose in any moment to be entirely free. We can reach Nirvana right now, if only we are willing to give up our addiction to that small sense of self. But, oh, how powerful the hold of that wily monster! If only I can figure this out just so, if only I persist in seeking my goals, if only I make one more push to make life perfect, I will get over the wall, come out on top, be the man I want to be and then and only then will I begin the work that will lead to freedom. But that day never comes. There is always another day of striving and then another and then we die. And in the Buddhist cosmology (whether we choose to believe in this or not), when we die we get up and do it all over again, until we finally, finally have enough experience of the futility of dependence on the Small Mind that we give it up and reach for the only thing that can give us true freedom, which is immersion in the larger consciousness that does not need to control outcomes or reactions, that can accept this moment as the only time there is, as it is.

Easier said than done, of course. I understand all of this intellectually, yet here I am. There are very few contemporary people who claim to have reached enlightenment, yet there are millions who have a profound understanding of what it would take to get there. Though I believe with all my heart that it is simply a matter of making a decision to live entirely within the here and now that leads to complete freedom, this decision is analogous to leaping off a cliff because you have been told by trusted teachers and have thoroughly come to believe you will fly when you do. It's one thing to believe it with all your heart; it's quite another to jump.

Because to make this leap is to leave this life behind. Not in the flesh, but in the mundane way I live day to day. I would never be the same. I would feel a joy beyond measure and would know no fear. I would have everything I require and want for nothing. I would be free in a way I have never known, or known only fleetingly.

But it's a lot to give up, to no longer believe I can solve the world like a crossword puzzle, to stop believing I can build a successful life on a foundation of profound thought. It can't be done, though. We can't think our way into freedom. Even the wry commentary going on in my head right now about how the Small Mind rushes in to fill every void is the Small Mind rushing in to fill a void. This is why meditation is so important. There is a mistaken impression among many people (some of them quite experienced meditators) that the purpose of meditation is to tame thought or keep it at bay, that thoughts are the enemy of lasting peace. Nothing could be further from the truth. What meditation teaches us about thought is simply that there is something other than thought. We can go entire days, weeks, months, or years—an entire lifetime, even—living in nothing but thought, to the point where we come to believe that thought and the products of thought are all there is. Meditation tells us otherwise. If we can contemplate the fact of thought and allow it to pass, there must be a consciousness that is capable of viewing thought without being thought. This is a profound and necessary realization. This way freedom lies.

Who Are You?

I had a dream in which someone imperiously asked, "Who are you?" He was not satisfied with the ordinary answers: I am a man, a father, a husband, a nurse, an alcoholic, a son, a brother. "But WHO are you?" he kept insisting (and, of course, being a dream, I felt compelled to answer). More out of frustration than conviction, I finally said, "I don't know!" This seemed to finally satisfy him.

But it didn't satisfy me. I know this is a question that has been kicked around for centuries by all of the greatest minds to think about such things. Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Freud, Descartes (Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am) have all struggled with this and none have come up with answers that are viscerally satisfying, even when they are intellectually sating.

Descartes

So, who am I? It seems to me that we exist as if we were scattered pieces of identity that we coalesce around a temporary sense of self that is no more real than a story we tell ourselves. In my mind this is a very literal vision, far-flung fragments of consciousness floating in a vast void. When I have need of an identity, I pull toward me (with the gravitation of a heavenly body) the pieces that will best serve me for this moment in time, only to release them back into the void when they cease to have utility.

But in this model, there must still be a central consciousness which chooses to draw the fragments together, some controlling sensibility that makes all this work worthwhile. What is this core of being?

I think it would come as little surprise to most of us that we live different lives and are different people depending on our circumstances. I know that I am regarded quite differently at work than I am at home and quite differently with my birth family than with my wife. I am not sure the Reid of work would even recognize the Reid my mother knows. I'm not even certain they would like each other much (though each would no doubt appreciate the other's sense of humor). Yet, to me there is a seeming continuity of my being from one moment to the next.

Of course, this could just all be philosophical twaddle, just a mental twiddling of my thumbs, but for one thing. This desire to make of ourselves a solid, substantial, lasting being is the very source of the suffering in our lives. And it is this suffering that stands in the way of our freedom. Mathematically speaking, then (if A=B and B=C, then A=C), it is the "selfing" in which we engage that imprisons us in modes of being inimical to our best interests, to our release from the bondage of Self.

What did the man in the dream want from me? I'm not sure I know, but his satisfaction with my final answer suggests to me that perhaps he was asking me to recognize not just that I did not know the answer but that it was unknowable. The Buddha would suggest that the answer (and the seeking of the answer) is useless and harmful, much the same as needing to know the nature of combustion before acknowledging you are on fire.

You are on fire.

Because there is such love

A girl sings and I cry. I suspect that many of you have seen this already, but it is worth taking another look. I was blown away. (Ignore the judges, if you can; they are speaking in Dutch, for one thing).

I admit to feeling a bit of skepticism lately about the essential goodness of our species. I am not really a pessimist at heart, nor am I a cynic. When I was younger, I thought cynicism was a form of intellectual sophistication, but have since come to understand that it is actually cowardice and dishonesty in disguise. I say this because a little girl can make me cry, because there truly is so much beauty in us. What species but humans are capable of such love, generosity, compassion, and grace? Well, none, of course.

But we are also the only one capable of such destruction and devastation. We war and build and burn and kill and dig and use and pollute. How can I not be disillusioned?

Because there are little girls who can sing with such feeling. Because Puccini could write such a song (it's called "O Mio Babbino Caro", by the way, and the girl's name is Amira Willighagen). Because when disaster strikes, we come together to help one another. Because every day I work with people who come to the clinic to serve those who are less fortunate and struggling. Because we can create a painting like this:

this structure:

and a building like this:

Because we give our love to each other with so much of our hearts, with all of our souls, even though we know it is risky.

Because we have faith in each other and in Powers we don't understand.

Because there are more people like me, who believe in the basic goodness of my fellows, than there are those who do not, despite all the evidence that can be ranged against such a belief.

Because the human heart and mind are capable of writing this, as John O'Donohue did:

Bennacht

(Blessing)

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets into you,

may a flock of colors,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours.

And so may a low

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

The Beginning of the Path

The beginning of the Buddha's road to enlightenment was when he was removed from the cocoon of his sheltered life as a prince of the realm and taken out into the world, where he saw three things from which he had been protected his whole life. First, he saw a person who was ill. Second, he saw a person who was old. Third, he saw a person who was dead.

It may be somewhat beyond belief to think that a young man (he was married and a father when this happened) could be sheltered to such an extent that he would never have encountered any of these things, but of course the life of the Buddha is more metaphor than fact. (We know the person existed, but the literal truth of who he was is shrouded in the mystery of thousands of years of intervening history). What we can understand from this story, though, is that all of us attempt to shelter ourselves from the reality of our lives. Rather than pretend they do not exist, though, as the Buddha's protectors asked him to do, we pretend that they should not exist.

I acknowledge that this is a subtle distinction, but only on the surface. It we were to pretend that illness, old age, and death did not exist, we would be certifiably delusional. If we pretend that these should not exist, however, we are within the mainstream of Western thought. It's not just the blatant desire to stave off aging that we see in every ad for cosmetics, not just the diets, exercise programs, and surgeries we contemplate. It's also the wish-fulfillment fantasies of "reality" television and advertising for products from colas to vacations to Viagra that will turn back the hands of time.

I know a couple who are struggling and whose marriage may not survive. I know many people who are dying from alcoholism and drug addiction. I have a friend whose son was recently diagnosed with autism. I am witnessing my parents' dissolution through the slow-motion landslide of aging and dying. Several friends have cancer. My work is with those who have one or more of the most devastating physical, emotional, and/or psychological diseases known. I myself am feeling the gravitational pull of my age, and have been for some time. I live near where the Oso landslide happened. Ferries sink, floods happen, tornadoes hit, typhoons inundate, malaria decimates, hunger eliminates, lack of clean water destroys. There is grief all around.

But here is what the Buddha discovered: it is not the events that cause harm to our souls. It is not even our reaction to these events. It is the belief that only good things should happen to us and that bad never should. It is the belief that when bad things happen we are being punished and when good happens we are being rewarded. It is the mistaken belief that any event that is not occurring right this moment has any reality at all.

It seems to me that I spend far too much time in the "Oh, no!" mode. I have things all set up to work in a certain way and then they don't. Oh, no! It's a tragedy! Or they work just great and my response is, "Yay, me!" The other, associated problem is the anticipation of the fulfillment of the expectation, what might be termed "Any minute now..." thinking. I vacillate with mind-numbing rapidity from "Any minute now..." to "Oh, no!" to "Yay, me!" to "Any minute now..." to "Yay, me!" to "Oh, no!" If I am not aware, this is how I spend my life.

As I mentioned above, the biggest problem with all this is what is lost. What is lost is this very moment. "Yay" and "Oh, no" are focused on the past (and future thinking about how I can get more of the former and avoid the latter), while "Any minute now" is entirely about the future. Nowhere in this scheme is there any room for the present moment, which is the only time there is.

Of course, I am not saying we should all go blithely through life ignoring what happens, nor was the Buddha saying this. The first of his Noble Truths is, There Is Suffering. His own definition of what he came to teach was Suffering and The End of Suffering. So, he knew, we know, that suffering is out there. But what the Buddha went on to say was truly revolutionary: that every time we push against the bad or cling to the good, we add to the suffering, that the only way to truly be free is to thoroughly and unconditionally accept the reality of each moment of our lives without any opinion whatsoever about whether it is good or bad. This sounds like oblivion, but truly isn't. Rather than ignoring the reality of what is, the Dharma encourages us to immerse ourselves in it without fear or hope.

We are all Buddhas-in-waiting. Freedom is around the corner, when we live in the moment that is in front of us, when we embrace the adder with the bride, the evil with the good, the rain with the sun, illness, old age, and death with health, youth, and life, ignorance with wisdom, faith with doubt. This is possible, in this very life. It is ours for the taking.

Tidal Wave

My, hasn't life gotten interesting, though?

I have been very busy the past month, which is why I haven't been blogging as much. My job is becoming more intricate and demanding by the day. I still visit my California family every other month (I went last weekend) and of course there are all of the other demands life places on one. I used to have every Friday off (never knew how good I had it!) but don't any longer. Not that I'm complaining; this is all good stuff. The job is demanding, yes, but it is a new challenge and one I am enjoying. I love my family and feel comfortable and loved when I see them. Life is grand, really. Just busy.

********************************************************************

I try to follow the news of the world fairly closely while taking care not to become too involved in the emotional content of it. This is, as most of us understand, a very difficult balancing act. I don't want to hide my head in the sand, but also believe that engaging my emotions in every tragedy that comes along (and there are so many, aren't there?) is the road to burnout and ineffectiveness.

One thing I have begun to notice, though, is the capacity we as humans have to compartmentalize and in some cases wholly reject what have been adroitly called "inconvenient truths". I am amazed at our ability to keep calm and carry on no matter what the horrifying reality around us. One of the reasons I so enjoy dystopian fiction and film is the vision the artists behind these works have of humans moving forward to the best of their ability, surviving even in the starkest emotional and physical landscape. Books such as Riddley Walker, The Postman, and The Road, to name but a few, have impressed me with their portrayal of our species as both survivors and the perpetrators of horrors, including those horrors that brought about the apocalypse to begin with. We are both the wisest and most foolish of animals.

When reading the news, what stands out with great clarity for me is that the environmental situation could not be worse. It is hard to believe that my grandchildren's grandchildren will even have a world in which to live. I am very hesitant to even bring this up. I know this is not a topic most people want to consider, which is, of course, my every point. I have no desire to use this blog to grind any political axes. Rather, I am fascinated with what makes it possible for us to keep going in the face of such imminent catastrophe.

If there were a tidal wave coming, most of us would turn and run. This might well be a futile act, considering the speed and power of such phenomena, but we would make the attempt. The effects of environmental degradation are no less certain or powerful, they just move more slowly. Yet we continue to care deeply about things. We do not panic. Are we merely deferring consideration of the facts, or is there something deeper at work?

I read the New York Times every day. I scan the headlines and dip into any article that interests me. In this way I can stay abreast of what's going on without becoming overwhelmed. And with an eye to how much of an emergency our environmental situation is, every day I am amazed by how much we can continue to care about things, about cars and food and sports and books and plays and films and politics and family and friends and bikes and running and fun and each other. We do not despair. Many of us become depressed, of course, but it seems to me we are a species of optimists. We are not built for giving up or giving in.

I find great hope in this. True, much of our doggedness might in fact be denial. We may be assuming that human ingenuity will once again come to our rescue. Or we may have the fatalistic perspective of "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die". But it seems to me much more likely that we are beings who have hardwired into us the need to get on with the business of living our day-to-day lives, love those close to us, eat good food, continue to learn and to grow, have a bit of fun, have a good night's sleep, then get up and do it all over again.

We don't seem to have the power, for the most part, to think in grand terms, to consider the larger context for any appreciable length of time. After all, there are dishes to be done, clothes to wash, sons and daughters to love, lovers to embrace, gardens to sow. How the great world spins is the purview of the philosopher and the saint. What energy I have I will devote to those things in my immediate world over which I have some control or to which I am devoted. Of course, I will reduce my car trips and recycle my newspapers. I will vote for those who have the best interest of the planet at heart. But then I need a nap.

Far from any of this causing me despair, I find in it the seeds of hope. We love, we live, we move forward, we laugh and carry on. Perhaps the end is near. Perhaps not. We will hold our loved ones near and hope for the best. Really, what else can we do?

I am not I

I recently read a very good book about Israel. I won't go into that whole mess here, but if you are interested in what I have to say about the book, you can see my review here.

I have not been meditating as much as I would like recently. Life has become very busy.

Our bodies are entirely dependent on the health of our microbiome. There is a very good article in the New York Times about this, and about how antibiotics—those we take and perhaps those in our food—might be at least part of the cause of the obesity epidemic in the United States.

I had to fast for 12 hours Thursday night and Friday morning so I could have my blood drawn Friday morning.

I have become more and more amazed how much time, thought, and effort must go into the maintenance of a single human life.

What in the world do all these things have to do with one another? Well you might ask.

The Buddha spoke of interdependence as being the core of all his teachings. I remember when one of my teachers first introduced this topic by saying flatly, "You don't exist". I can easily challenge this statement, naturally. I can hit you in the head and then ask you why your head hurts if I don't exist. But that, of course, is not what my teacher meant. The Buddha's philosophy is unique and challenging in many ways, but this may be where it is most difficult and by far the most elegant. Because it's true: we don't exist. Not in any substantial or lasting way. And we cannot exist alone.

The odd thing is not the assertion that we do not exist as discrete beings but that we have ever thought we did. From the very start of our earliest precursors to this very day we are entirely dependent on plants to supply the atmosphere with oxygen, to take just one example. We would never have evolved as these particular beings had there not been plants. Period. We might have become some sort of nitrogen-processing organisms, but the nature of the beings we are is predicated on our ability to use oxygen and the presence of that oxygen is predicated on the existence of other beings. So, too, with every other constituent of our bodies. We are the product of stars, comets, bacteria, slime mold, flowers, and dinosaurs. The blood of emperors and slaves flows through me.

When we war with each other, when we claim territory as "ours" and not "theirs", we have entirely lost sight of our interdependence. Entirely aside from my opinion about the disposition of Palestine and the right of existence for Israel, not to mention the Russian claim to hegemony over Ukraine, when I have sufficient perspective to do so, I find myself astonished that we are still in such bellicose relation to one another. These days, it is amply evident that what will remove us from this earth is most likely either climate change or nuclear war, yet we focus on territorial disputes and health insurance. Never has it been so evident that we are interdependent than right now. If we do not take concerted and unified action to solve both of these problems, we won't last another generation.

My meditation practice is limited by the time I have available to sleep, which is impacted by the new position I have at work, which came to pass because of an injury to a co-worker. A relationship that ended years ago caused enough disruption in a girl's life that her mother, another of my co-workers, had to quit her job to spend more time with her daughter. The cruelty of a father, the coldness of a mother, rejection by a lover, failures in third grade and successes in high school—all of these influence the people who come to work where I work and limit how effectively they can work and therefore how much time I must spend there and therefore how much sleep I get and therefore how much I can meditate. Interdependence. In this context, I am interdependent with people who died before I was born and others I will never meet.

Need I say more about our microbiome (the internal microbiotic environment of our bodies, our gut in particular)? We are entirely interdependent with these billions of beasties. We would not have evolved to this state without them and would die overnight if they ceased to exist.

I take for granted how easily I am able to maintain this body's health. I also assume that my nice, healthy mind can function independent of what else goes on. Nothing like a 12-hour fast to put the lie to assumptions like these. I was irritable, could not think well, was fumbling and clumsy. It is astonishing how quickly we begin to fall apart without food. And from whence does this food come? I didn't grow it, harvest it, process it, ship it, stock it, or sell it. Literally hundreds of interlocking actions go into my breakfast. And if you consider that each being in the chain of my breakfast (cow, farmers, soil organisms, harvesters, processors, packagers, truckers, stockers, clerks, managers, executives, maintenance crews to keep all the machines and processes running, mechanics, oil rig workers, fuel processors and sellers, water engineers, research chemists, flatware and bowl manufacturers, and on and on) has its own interlocking chains of interdependence, then literally millions—billions, perhaps—of beings provide me with my breakfast, without which I am am mess before I get my blood drawn at 8:00 A.M.

But the Buddha's message, you will recall, was not one of chastisement; he was not trying to remind us where we come up short. His was and is a philosophy of freedom. He taught first of all about suffering, but only to teach the end of suffering. And the end of suffering is the end of delusion. All we must do is cease believing that which isn't so. And why not? Our believing in untruths does not make them exist—they still don't. So why not give them up?

That's the amazing thing about the Buddha's teachings: we have the choice to be entirely free today, right now, in this moment, and forever. We can choose that right now. Why do we not? Because we have so thoroughly incorporated into our consciousness the lies: that we are independent, free-standing, individual human beings with no need of anything or anyone else, nonetheless the whole of existence. We believe the lie that the problems of the world are not our problems because they are not currently on our doorsteps (they will be). We believe that the suffering of others is separate from our suffering. We believe that we deserve only good things and that when bad things happen something has gone wrong. And we believe that biggest lie of all—that we exist. But freedom awaits those of us who know that our molecules are only ours for the briefest of time, that we constantly interchange who we are with the rest of the world and they with us. We have no choice in the matter; it is who we are. But we do have the choice of whether or not we suffer.

We think we know

My wife almost stepped out in front of a speeding car this week.

 
We think we know what will happen, that from day to day we will continue, that those around us will too, that life as we know it will carry on. But we don't know. Accidents, divorces, finding out something that entirely changes your way of thinking of someone you thought you knew--any of these can seem to explode the world we know.

Telling me about this near miss, Kathy said, "The whole day would have looked entirely different." Yes, for so many people. For the driver of the car, for his family, for me, for Mitchell, for her sisters, niece, nephews, my parents, all of their children and their children's children, concentric circles of relationships with people we have never met and will never know. Our lives would have changed forever because of one moment of negligence on the part of a driver, one second of inattention on Kathy's.

We try to make everything that happens fit into a predetermined frame of reference. I think perhaps this is what people are doing when they say that a tragic event is "God's will". There has to be, so the logic goes, a frame of reference in which all of this can be encompassed. What is beyond bearing is bearable if there is a box big enough to hold it in, and that box can be God. (Though if God wills some of what is going on in this world, I frankly want nothing to do with the guy). Life is more like "The Matrix" than we care to admit. Not that literal kind of explanation for what goes on behind the scenes, but something much more mundane. Life is an uncertain and constantly shifting kaleidoscope. Our impression of a solid reality must be vigorously maintained; this requires a great deal of energy, and if we let our concentration on this task waver for even a moment, it can feel like we are insane, that the whole world is falling apart.

One night I was sitting alone in our house and felt what I assumed was someone coming up the back stairs. The house vibrates just a little when someone comes up those stairs, so that's what I thought I was feeling. Then the vibration became a little more intense, and I thought, "Huh, that's a bit much for anyone I know". Then, as it became yet more vigorous, rather than move on to other possibilities, rather than admitting the possibility that it was an earthquake (which it was), I thought, "Man, that must be some enormous guy coming up those steps". It's not that I was in denial or afraid (I rather like earthquakes). It's just that I had a reality I was not going to let go of easily, no matter what the evidence.

Language is part of the problem. It delineates, measures, defines, limits. We think we agree on what it is being said, but even that is an illusion. What you envision when I say "Buddha" is not what I envision, nor what the next ten people you meet would. We project on to that being whatever we need for him to be. Even with a word less fraught, say the word "apple", there is no agreement. There is a story of a young boy in an elementary school class who, when asked what color apples were replied, "white". At which (so the story goes) his teacher scoffed (though one would hope she would be more skillful than to actually do this). But the little boy insisted. When asked to explain, he asked the teacher to cut the apple open. An apple is, after all, far more white than it is anything else, but that is not what most of us see when we speak of one.

So, every word I put down here has a panoply of meanings, some of which are easy to agree upon ("upon" is not very controversial), others of which might cause us no end of problems (what if I were to bring up "faith", for instance?). And each step away from impression to idea to concept to picture to description obscures rather than clarifies what it is we mean.

As a species, we also have a tendency to recognize only what is present. Our ability to project with any accuracy into the future is extremely limited. This is not just denial (though that certainly is part of it); it is a practical way of dealing with the world. We see what is in front of us, for the most part, and that is plenty for us to deal with. Take global climate change, for instance. We know that humans are largely responsible for this phenomenon, at least the preventable part, and we know further that limiting our use of fossil fuels will go some way toward ameliorating the problem. We are also aware that the urgency of the situation is, as one scientist put it, much as if a meteor was hurtling toward the earth on a collision course. Yet in the day-to-day of our lives, we need to drive to the store. We want electricity when we flip the switch. We want the grocery shelves to be stocked with goods that can only get there with the expenditure of enormous amounts of fossil fuel to process and deliver it, to keep it cold or hot or warm. We want to visit our distant families, no matter the cost in airplane fuel. This is not a criticism of us, but a recognition of our limited ability to do something different today that will have an effect in decades or centuries. We are mammals in survival mode and, to our reptilian brains, tomorrow only matters if we survive today. Thinking into the future, as an integral part of our reality, is not a skill with which we are well-supplied.

Believe it or not, this is all good news.

Noting the intricacies of the web of what truly makes up our lives is the end of suffering. Suffering is trying to close the curtain that shields us from that reality. Not that we can afford to check out of the real world; we do have to shop and drive and cross the street, make love and die and grieve and persist. But there is a substantial difference between living in the world and believing that this is all there is. You have only to begin with yourself. What of you is you? What piece of you makes you who you are? How much could be cut away and have the remainder still contain your essential "youness"? Could a brain, kept alive and thinking in a jar, ever be you? The heart alone? Your finger? Your foot? And even if you could identify what makes you uniquely you, what would happen in the following moment, when that had changed, no matter how minutely? Then who would you be?

What if Kathy had stepped in front of that car?

One of the reasons that films like "The Matrix" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Abre Los Ojos" hold such appeal for us is that we know somewhere deep in our souls that this is the truth of things, that no matter how substantial we believe our day-to-day lives to be, we still from time to time feel as if we are living a fraud, that the other shoe will drop anytime now.

The Buddha holds the other shoe (though many spiritual traditions speak to these truths). And the great news is that all we have to do is stop trying so damn hard to do the impossible.

Delight in the Difficult

While walking home from the grocery store today I dropped a gallon of milk. The plastic split and all of the milk spilled on the sidewalk and into the street. I was grumpy about this as I walked back to the store until, fully formed and without my volition came into my head, "Don't cry over spilt milk," which made me laugh.

This is a minor unpleasantness, of course. It is just milk. I have enough money to buy more. It's a hassle and a waste, but it's no big deal. But we all have experienced much more bitter disappointments, failures, and disasters. The challenge of delighting (a subject I began last week) is much greater with the difficult things we must face than those that are wonderful or neutral. This is where the grist for the mill of mindfulness resides.

It is easy to say that one should merely accept all things as being as they are. While this is true as far as it goes, the problem is that some things really do feel very odious. Pain is by definition unpleasant. The death of a loved one feels as if it will rip us apart. Loss of our dreams, hopes, aspirations or good fortune digs a deep pit of despair. To say we should accept these things with equanimity seems more than just a bit facile, the breezy recommendation of one who has never experienced them. (I wrote a post a few months ago about The Happy Bird, who asked that everyone "sing a little happy song when every little thing goes wrong". The point of this story is that everyone wants to strangle the little shit).

A good friend of ours has a young friend (only 20 years old) who was in a terrible car accident a few weeks ago and may not have much of a recovery. When my friend went to a coworker and said, "This just isn't good", her friend immediately said, "Oh, we don't know it's not a good thing!" Well...yes, we do.

Acceptance is not denial. Acceptance is the idea that everything is as it is. There is no judgment of good or bad in acceptance. Everything must be as it is because if it could be otherwise, it would be. Wishing it were different cannot make it so. Wishing it were different, inveighing against how bad things are, how those who don't deserve such suffering should not have to go through such things, and how those who are evil sometimes get much more of the good than they should, does not tip the scale one way or the other.

What such thinking does is increase the suffering in the world. The Buddha spoke of two darts; the first dart is the original injury, which he acknowledged is not a pleasant experience. But the second dart is this insistence that the first dart should never have injured us, that it's not fair that we should be hurt by a dart when so many go unhurt, our demand for justice. We read all the time about families who carry bitterness and a desire for revenge for years after a loved one has been hurt. I see them as bristling with darts, weighed down by the poison of them. And only the first of those darts was put there by someone else.

How much more wonderful would it be if we could find it in our hearts to accept what is, not to believe that all things are "as they are meant to be" or "part of God's plan", but merely that they are as they are. We can delight in the difficult because it gives us the opportunity to practice what we know of the Dharma, to look to the Buddha and ask how this can be the road to enlightenment. There is an answer in who he was, in what his teachings are, if we open our hearts to them.

Delight

I think I missed the point of my own post last week. I knew what I wanted to say when I started, but then lost sight of it. It goes something like this:

What we need to work toward is taking delight in the everyday. This is the very nature of nirvana. When we think of the mundane as a drag, as things to be gotten through so the Real Living can begin, we miss out on the treasure hidden within every moment.

There is a story of a man who went all over the world seeking riches, yet when he came home, broken and old, he was told by a deity to dig beneath his house, where he found a box full of the greatest treasure he could imagine. At which (so the story goes) he promptly died. A little heavy-handed, perhaps, this tale, but you get what it's saying. When we ignore the treasure in our midst we live our lives in the grasp of greed, the constant seeking for something other than what we have. The treasure of meditative awareness is contained in every minute detail of our lives; it is always and forever available to us.

Nothing could be more mundane than the breath, yet this is what many of us choose as the focus of our meditation. It is prosaic and boring, ever-present and mostly unvarying (at least we hope so!) Yet think of where we would be without it (well, we wouldn't be without it, of course). Another story: a young Zen monk sitting by the shore of a river with his master was complaining that the breath was boring, that he couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life contemplating something so unbearably common. Without a word, the master grasped the young man and thrust his head under water (in these stories, Zen masters are always incredibly strong), holding him there just long enough to make his point, then asking, "Now, my brother, what do you think of the breath?" Which also reminds me of the comic in which a young monk is sitting next to an old monk and the latter is saying, "What do you mean, 'what next?' This is it."

Which is not to say we should set out to glorify the breath. It truly is simply a part of being, with us from birth to death, constant as a metronome and about as interesting. What we need to do, though, it take this as our cue to elevate everything we experience to the level of valued teacher. Every meal we eat, every heartbeat, every step we take, each tick of a clock, every horn honking in the street; sitting, standing, lying down, toileting, bathing, brushing our teeth, walking down stairs, taking out the garbage—all are grist for the meditative mill, if we allow them to be. I have seen this shift occur in me in the middle of doing something I consider boring or merely necessary—when I wake up to the meditative possibilities, it transforms the event into something holy. Pretty neat trick to play when picking up trash or washing the dishes. Suddenly my every motion becomes a dance, where every step is known, not just taken.

Instead, what we most often do is dismiss these as the bridge between meaningful activities, missing the value of the breath, the treasure under our floor, right under our noses. While we wait for the gift to be delivered, we fail to unwrap the hundreds we already have. But how does one do this? In any moment, we can stop. Unless the house is literally on fire, we can stop, just for the moment it takes to bring awareness into what we are doing. It changes everything.

This is, I think, what I was trying to say about meditation in my last post. When I think of myself as too busy (or too tired, bored, or important; what have you) to sit in meditation, I am exhibiting this very dismissal of the gifts in front of me. It's not that meditation is a brief foray into the spiritual; rather, it is a training ground for all of life, a reminder that the normal, the everyday, is where enlightenment lies. The most significant moment in my meditation is the moment I decide I will sit, for in that moment I have come to a recognition of the value of the practice and have shaken off the imperious voice of my mind telling me I have more important things to do.

This does not mean that all of  life must be mundane in order to find awareness; on the contrary, few things could be more meditative than those that are exciting or daring. The concept of "flow" teaches us that some of the most clearly concentrated moments of our lives are when we are thoroughly engaged with an activity, and nothing demands this of us quite so clearly as the extremes. You had damn well better be thoroughly concentrated when rock climbing or hang-gliding, or you might not survive the experience! But to seek these adrenaline rushes as the be-all of our lives is also to miss the point. All of life has the mundane in it, and all of the mundane has the Buddha in it. It really is no more complicated than that. We would like it to be more complex, because that would make us Important, but, truly, one may find ultimate peace and harmony while dusting the furniture. It's up to us.