Spring comes with ten thousand flowers,
Autumn with the moon,
Summer with the cool breeze,
Winter with snow.
When your mind is not filled with unnecessary concerns,
that’s your best season.
Wu-Men, Chinese Chan Master, 1183–1260
Tag: Life
Forgetting and remembering
One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. Awareness begins with remembering what we tend to forget. Drifting through life on a cushioned surge of impulses is just one of many strategies of forgetting. Not only do we forget to remember, we forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. Worrying about what a friend said can preoccupy us so completely that it isolates us from the rest of our experience. The world of colours and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations becomes dull and remote…… To stop and pay attention to what is happening in the moment is one way of snapping out of such fixations. It is also a reasonable definition of meditation.
Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs.
Focusing just on the now
The past is a memory of a former now; the future is a mental projection of an expected now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and now are one. Eckhard Tolle
As this quote reminds us, there is a value in staying in the immediacy of the present moment. However, this can be quite difficult. We frequently carry into the present habits and roots from the past, which can be tied up with fearful emotions and inhibit our freedom. Or we find ourselves scanning for danger, warning ourselves about the dangers in proceeding based on past experiences. We find ourselves always moving away from the present moment into an imagined future that we give more importance and credence to, or creating possible scenarios based on how our mood is in this moment. This worrying about the past or living already in the future frequently puts one at odds with the actuality of the present moment.
We all wish to enter fully into life, to live as if our lives can make a difference. However, so many of these mental habits lead us away from fully being here. We often see this moment as a means towards some other end, rather than complete in itself. To work with what is in front of us, in this moment, and then let go and start again, is the way to making the most of our life, not waiting for something dramatic to come along in the future.
Doing the ordinary
Stanley Hauerwas, the American theologian, said that God “takes time for the trivial.” And yet most of the messages we receive today suggest that ordinary life, with its predictable routines, and not-so-dramatic activities, demonstrate that our life has lost its direction. Exciting comparisons are held up in advertising, film and the media, which the mind likes to use to convince us that there is something lacking in our life, that we are somehow not doing “well enough”. This can give rise to a feeling within us that without some diversion and drama the ordinary can weigh us down, and we need to continually be on the look out – normally somewhere else – for a life with more passion, greater creativity, and celebration. The trivial is not where we expect to find God or anything miraculous. So we have a tendency to get it out-of-the-way as quickly as we can in order to make time for our “real” life. However, we often hear from people who have had an enforced period away from their normal life – for example, hostages who have come back home from their ordeal, or a prisoner released from prison after a wrongful conviction, or someone recovering from an illness – that they look forward to simply sitting in their garden, or walking the dog, or having a cup of tea or coffee in the kitchen. For them, because it was taken away from them, the possibility to do simple daily things is the ultimate treasure. It shows us that the attitude we take, and the story we tell ourselves about, say, peeling the vegetables or doing grocery shopping, is the key towards finding a happiness hidden not only in special moments.
Walking by
I think it pisses God off
if you walk by the color purple in a field
and don’t notice it.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Sometimes we can get caught up in the rush of every day or the familiarity of our routines. We can fail to notice the beauty in ordinary experience. When we travel or are starting something new, we are struck by the experiences, noticing, for example, the energy and the qualities of people or the way they do things differently. Everything registers in a heightened way. In these moments things seems more real, more alive. The brain cannot always function like that, so it creates schemas to allow it quickly locate everyday experiences into familiar categories – cars, buses, flowers, trees and so on. So in order to really see we have to go against an established habit. We have to slow down in order to really notice; focus in order to really attend. Today let us try to look at one or two things we encounter as if for the first time: Open our eyes, pause, wonder, notice the details, celebrate life.
Why we keep ourselves busy
Our blocks of pain, sorrow, anger and despair always want to come up into our mind consciousness, into our living room, because they have grown big and need our attention. They want to emerge but we do not want them to come up because they are too painful to look at. So we try to block their way. We want them to stay asleep in the basement. Because we do not want to face them our habit is to fill the living room with other guests. But whenever we have ten or fifteen minutes of free time these internal guests will come up and make a mess of the living room. To avoid this we pick up a book, we turn on the television, go for a drive, we do anything to keep our living room occupied. When the living room is occupied, these unpleasant internal formations will not come up.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Anger
