10 Good Reasons to Practice Zen: #1

       Maru demonstrates things you can do in a bucket

Reason #1:  You will seldom be bored.

Today we ate lunch at the healthy-food cafe in our health club, partly because my doctor warned me that my cholesterol has inched up these last six months over that magic number, 200.  Furthermore, he explained, my "bad" cholesterol was up, too.  I did not feel I needed to confess about my primary addiction, Lay's potato chips and Heluva French Onion dip.  But it did make me rethink my cavalier attitude about that and bacon and cheese and eggs - you get the idea.  I will work on this; I hate the idea of a statin drug, not without reason.

A lot of people wanted today's hot lunch, a turkey Reuben (which ended up bearing no resemblance to a real Reuben, of course), so I waited in line to pay.  Right ahead of me was a fire-type woman who just could hardly stand the five-minute wait.  She bounced away to get napkin and fork, came back, and then was pretty much bouncing on her toes with impatience, like your teenage boy, though she was well into her fifties, I thought.

The cafe's credit card machine is old-fashioned, so a credit transaction takes oh, maybe two minutes start to finish.  As the woman waited for hers to process, she said to anyone, "This is so boring!  I am so bored!" 

Later I told Tom, "The thing about Zen is you are never bored standing in line."  Now, this is true, and it is also true for sincere practitioners of other disciplines, I imagine.  My tai chi teacher talked to us more than once about using time waiting in the checkout line to stand in wu wei, balance, and breathe.  What I was doing in this line was practicing being there.

That's actually what we do when we meditate:  we are practicing being with the reality of the present moment, which is to say, reality.  During the early years of Zen practice we are taught to follow our breath, in and out, a way of focusing on the basic mechanism of the body.  Later in Zen you can take up shikantaza, just sit there watching not only your breath but also your sensations and thoughts.  You have many profound thoughts, like Ring the damn bell! or Nobody ever died from not scratching an itch.  

Nevertheless, there are times in sitting meditation when you are bored.  I suspect many people give up meditation for exactly that reason.  We Americans are the worst, I imagine, so addicted to speed and exploration and entertainment and getting somewhere and having fun.  We actually list our desires, the things we want to see and do before we die, which is called "the bucket list" after some movie. 

Maybe because of these bad habits, one of our cultural icons is a man who built a little cabin in the woods and made a big point of simplifying his life.  Henry David Thoreau.  Google him and you get over 4 million results.  I'm happy to say Buddha gets even more.  He should - the Buddha didn't get bored and give it up after two years.

1001 Ways to Get in Touch with Reality

[photo: monkey fists]

A Poet doesn't have to walk very far to trip over a metaphor. This morning, as I was thinking about the hard, tangled mass of delusions that has a friend in a lot of trouble, the knot called "monkey fist" came to mind. Tom made one of these for use as a doorstop after reading The Shipping News. (In the photo, the monkey fists are the knots on both sides. The dime in the picture shows scale.)

Actually, Buddhist teachers consider feeling hopelessly knotted up to be a "promising"condition. It means your trip isn't working. As long as we can tolerate what we're doing, we won't change. Even though a constructed life isn't really satisfying, it's what we know. It takes a major quake to shake us up. You can go through what Christianity calls despair and Zen calls Great Doubt with or without a religious tradition; and you can go through it and stubbornly continue acting the way you do. But sometimes when everything stops working, we are able to change.

Where was I going with this? I got to thinking this morning that I am significantly more at ease with my "problems" than I would have been thirty or forty years ago, and today's problems are much bigger than the ones that preoccupied me back then. I know that taking my spiritual path seriously had a great deal to do with it. But healing doesn't just start when we adopt a practice. It takes earlier growth to even get to that point. It takes persistence, and the suspicion that life can be better to get us to try new things. It seems to me I tried 1001 things, actually, and benefited a little from all of them. One was the list of Things that Make me Feel Better.

I don't know what inspired me to make that list. It was at a time in my life before cancer or kidney failure, before Tom's post-polio syndrome appeared, a time of economic stability in which I was pursuing my career dreams; yet my life was joyless. I called it "depression." I recall that my list of comforts included vanilla and a hot bath. Obviously, such a list was not a route to awareness, though a little self-cherishing certainly couldn't hurt me.

It interests me now that I didn't make a list of things that made me feel worse. It was like eating chocolates in hopes of forgetting that a rhinoceros is standing on your foot. Looking back, I know why I didn't want to touch on some deep and complicated received ideas, like "My family loves me and if I think they make me feel wretched there's something wrong with me and I'll be happy when I get with the program." Penetrating to these intimate monkey fists of delusion was still down the road. When I did, I would be forced to change. So maybe my little exercise in cause and effect - What makes me feel better? - was an essential paving stone.

What do you need in your life? It's not found on a "bucket list" of experiences you want to acquire. I'd like to go to Paris, myself, but I'm sure It is not only to be found at the Eiffel Tower. It is also in the snowdrops in the back yard.