my time?

From stories that have been passed down through the Buddhist tradition, we know that the Buddha had to face many threats and hardships during his lifetime: his experimentation with extreme asceticism during his quest for enlightenment, assassination attempts, charging elephants, accusations of fathering an illegitimate child, unruly and undisciplined monks, and encounters with thieves and murderers along the roads he traveled during his ministry, just to name a few. But nowhere in the Buddhist canon have I found an example of the Buddha having to deal with a screaming five-year-old child who isn’t getting his way. Trying to be a Buddhist and a parent at the same time seems irreconcilable most days. One trick I use is to divide the day up into little chunks of time that for simplicity’s sake I’ll call my time and everyone else’s time. I keep an imaginary balance sheet in my head. When my inner accountant informs me that I haven’t had enough me time for one day, I immediately get grumpy. But what if all time could be viewed the same way? I have been rereading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, a book I haven’t looked at in many, many years, and probably the book that comes the closest, in my opinion, to The Only Book on Buddhism That You’ll Ever Need. Listen to this passage from a student of Hanh’s who is also a parent:  “I’ve discovered a way to have a lot more time. In the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for my son, another part was for my wife, another part to help with my new baby girl, another part for household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide time into parts anymore. I consider my time with my son and my wife my own time. When I help my son with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself!” I noticed this feeling last night when I spent time with my five-year-old son as he practiced writing his letters. Bathed in the light coming from the desk lamp, my head was bowed towards him as we both worked together, at one with the letters and sentences we were creating on the page. And my time became his time became our time became just time.

the walker

The New York Times has been running an excellent series on their web page entitled One in 8 Million. One of their recent posts really spoke to me, suggesting a type of existence that I long for. It tells the story of a 30-year-old waitress named Maggie Nesciur, who walks  up to 90 miles per week around the neighborhoods of New York City. She has never owned a pair of sneakers, and instead does all her walking in either cowboy or motorcycle boots. She says, “I don’t walk fast; I don’t walk slow; I walk at my own speed. I have to keep moving. If I’m not moving, my mind isn’t moving much either.” Well said. You can watch and listen to her story here.

empty your inbox

It’s Friday afternoon and my Outlook inbox at work is empty. Much like Master Dogen’s advice to prepare the rice today for tomorrow’s gruel, or Joshu’s advice to wash your bowl, I would recommend this practice whenever possible. I would also advise you empty out your mental inbox each day as well. Start each new day from scratch if you can. Wake up like your bed is on fire goes the Zen wisdom. Become reborn every morning. Don’t hold onto the past if you can help it. I had to yell at my five-year-old son last night because he wouldn’t come to the dinner table. He cried and I felt like an ogre. This morning, he hugged me and said he loved me. I hugged him back. All was forgotten. Don’t hold onto passing emotions and turn them into legends that inform your current behavior. In one hundred years, who will remember the point of your anger? Each day, empty out your physical and mental inbox. Wash your dishes tonight so that tomorrow your bowl will be clean.

networks of affection

I wish I could write like Rebecca Solnit, but I can’t so I’m just going to quote a few lines from the opening pages of her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. To me, this is what true citizenship is all about, not about shouting people down and threatening “we surround them.” Listen:

“When Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he is raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?…Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one’s brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others…but if I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”

When I see what happened yesterday in Maine, when equality was defeated by bigotry and intolerance, and when I see the talking heads on cable TV shouting at us and one another, I wonder: Where are the networks of affection and affinity that are supposed to bind us as a society?

waiting for nothing

When I was at Syracuse University, I knew a budding writer named John.  He let me borrow a book called Waiting For Nothing by Tom Kromer. Kromer wrote about the homeless during the Great Depression, desperate for food and shelter. I never gave the book back, and can’t seem to put my hands on it today, but the title alone is evocative of a mood these days. More recently in the New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that if unemployed people are just sitting around waiting for work, waiting for the jobs to come back, they are essentially waiting for nothing. These days, you can’t just wait and hope that your luck will change. You have to create something new. The landscape has changed forever. But what if what you are creating means nothing to no one? What if the world seems like one giant echo chamber? The Genius Grant isn’t coming, the check’s not in the mail. You might be brilliant, but no one cares. Too many voices in the wilderness right now. Too many blogs. Too many opinions. Too many experts. People are too busy surviving. Sometimes it just might be better to drop out for a while.

disaster utopia

Last night I attended a lecture by the writer Rebecca Solnit, whose latest book is entitled A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. I haven’t read the book yet, although I have read some of her others. Her premise is that far from human beings acting cowardly or panicking in times of natural and man-made disasters,  people instead end up acting incredibly courageous and compassionate, working together to form ad-hoc communities, and expressing their basic human goodness. Solnit suggests that in disaster, we can almost glimpse a kind of utopia, a place where we treat each other as we should. Our daily life makes it almost impossible to sustain this type of behavior, however. We remember the post-9/11 United We Stand mantra, and how quickly it faded when our president told us to go shopping. It is our identification of ourselves as primarily consumers first, and citizens second, that is at the heart of the tragedy of our current American public life. We’ve been told that we need to be selfish because everyone else is and the more I think about this, the more I understand that this is the driving force behind the current ultraconservative, right-wing talk show blather. The talking heads of the world would have us believe that they love this country, but instead they really just love themselves. If you start from the premise that it’s every man and woman for themselves and that we don’t owe each other anything as fellow citizens then you can’t even begin to approach public life in any meaningful way. Solnit suggests there are other lives than the private. Did we evolve this far as Americans just to demand our right to be left alone? She also said something that stuck with me: in disasters perhaps we discover our Buddha-nature. We all have Buddha-nature, but have trouble finding it or expressing it. We are already enlightened beings, compassionate and wise. If we would forget the self, as Master Dogen suggests, then the barriers between us would drop away and we could treat each other as the fully human beings we are rather than as the means to our own personal ends.

one thing well

It would seem that my recent posts are getting shorter and shorter. Maybe I’m distilling some collected wisdom down to its essence. I don’t know. In any case, here’s another quote I found stashed away in one of my document folders. I suppose it can apply to any creative endeavor, or just plain life:

“Do your best at each and everything.  That is the key to success.  Learn one thing well and you will learn how to understand the ten thousand things.  Ten thousand things are one; this is the secret place of understanding you must find.  Then everything is mysterious and wonderful.”

-Archery Master Awa Kenzo