Coming, going,
the waterbirds
don’t leave a trace,
don’t follow a path.
Dogen, On Non-Dependence of Mind
Category: Be fully present
Eyes to See
The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new landscapes
but in having new eyes
Proust
Our Substitute Life
We all follow some strategy to escape feeling the fears that silently run our life. Yet even when we know all about these fears, most of the time we don’t want to have anything to do with them. For example, do you try to maintain a sense of order and control, to avoid feeling the fear of chaos, of things falling apart? Do you try to gain acceptance and approval, to avoid the fear of rejection, of not fitting in? Do you try to excel and attain success, to avoid the fear of feeling unworthy? Or do you seek busyness in adventure or pleasure, to avoid the deep holes of longing and loneliness? All of these strategies have one thing in common: they keep us encased in our artificial or substitute life.
Perhaps this sounds pessimistic and discouraging, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it’s only by realizing the extent to which we are asleep—the extent to which we are driven by the vanity of our endeavors, the smallness of our attachments or the urgency of avoiding our fears—that we can wake up, out of our state of sleep, out of our substitute way of living.The essence of the practice life involves cultivating awareness.
Ezra Bayda
Repeating patterns
We all have well-established habits
of thought, emotion, reaction and judgement,
and without the keen awareness of practice,
we’re just acting out these patterns.
When they arise, we’re not aware they’ve arisen.
We get lost in them,
identify with them,
act on them
— so much of our life is just acting out patterns.
Joseph Goldstein
Waiting
I went on a short work-related trip to Berlin recently. It was my first time visiting that city and my stay, albeit very short, was a lovely one, filled with the kindness of people. The flight took just one hour and twenty minutes, but to get on the plane required turning up much earlier and waiting. As always, the flight was delayed by the predictable “delay to the incoming flight”, so a short eighty-minute journey took five hours out of the day.
Airports are not the worst place to wait. It is easy to sit there, and pay attention, to what is going on inside us and to what is going on around. The truth of human life is that we must spend quite a bit of time waiting. Not just on the physical level. At a deeper level we are all waiting for something or someone. For a possibility of healing, of a real contact, of meeting without pretence or the need to hide behind masks. These possibilities, large and small, await us — at the end of a journey, in a new relationship, in a change in how we are dealing with our life in this world. Sure, we all are anxious to get to our arrivals. But often we are in an in-between place, still in our waiting, and we have to have the courage not to go anywhere except the places where our lives are now, places we occupy until real contentment comes.
While waiting it can be a temptation to fill our lives with whatever we can to rob time of its tediousness. We can be afraid of being just with ourselves, in-between. We rush to fill the gap by doing too much, by not staying still. But when stillness comes our way – we can find it in an airport, in the slow reading of a good novel, in a quiet walk or in our sitting practice – it allows us to stay and taste the richness of the present moment as it opens our hearts to the inner beauty of life. A beauty as simple as having a glass of strange-coloured local beer in a square under the trees, which gave a sense of connection; it eased and gave meaning to the larger waits of life.
When we are not aware
When we practice,
we get aware and acquainted with ourselves
how our lives work, what we are doing with them.
Anything of which we are unaware will have it’s fruits in our life, one way or another.
Charlotte Joko Beck
