Choosing Obligation

A joke that circulated among some progressive educators I knew in the day ran like this: The little boy comes to school on Monday and says: ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’ This is funny because progressive education is about allowing children to be active participants in shaping their education. The most radical experiments, like Summerhill School in the UK in the 70’s and the Grassroots Free School in Tallahassee allow the children to pretty much decide how they want to use their time. Adults are there to keep them reasonably safe and to support the natural process of learning.

For a number of years, my Zen teacher and I led week-long silent retreats in a small house that abutted the school property. The school was struggling to find enough families were willing to trust the natural curiosity of their children beyond the first five years. There were only about ten or so young people who would roam the fields and gardens during the mornings and the afternoons while we sat still in the living room on our black cushions.

What I remember most from the intimate mornings of meditative silence is how long these young people could scream and shriek together in joy and excitement. The delight and wildness of their social freedom was not lost on these young practitioners of progressive education.

But the joke, ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’, is also funny because it’s actually challenging to have nothing to do.

Also in the 70’s, I took a solo backpacking trip in the Beartooth Mountains in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. With my trusty orange backpack and tent, I hiked several miles in to a pristine lake up above the tree line. Crystal clear glacier melt water nestled below fields of mountain flowers—just like the Sierra Club calendar photos. I figured I’d stay there for several days and just ‘peace out.’ (It was the 70’s after all.)

After several hours of taking in the beauty, with no books to read and no projects to do and no drugs to take (I had already passed through that phase of the 70’s) I got astonishingly bored. My mind’s daydreams got weirder and weirder. I suddenly understood what a gift responsibility and even busyness is. Without the usual pressures of work or school or social expectations, I was utterly adrift—and not in a pleasant way.

I had enough sense about me to get out my map and make up something to do. I planned and then started out on an adventure through the mountains. Up and over, around and through. Making up a destination and walking, it turned out, was enough activity to keep my mind tethered to consensual reality and allow me to appreciate the gorgeous scenery.

But remembering the gift of having things we have to do can create new possibilities of appreciation in our lives. While it’s lovely, as I wrote yesterday, to follow some sweet aliveness that calls to us, it can also be lovely to feel like we have no choice.

But it’s not really true. Obligation is a social construct. Indeed you never have to do anything. You may choose to do things because you don’t like the potential consequences of the alternatives, but choice is the reality of our lives.

The freedom we speak of in Zen is not the freedom of sitting by the pristine lake in the mountains, though that is nice too in small doses, but the freedom to engage with what is right before us. The freedom to shovel the snow, to wash the dishes, to make sure the children are logged into school and not the video game with their friends.

So whether your day is the responsibility of choosing what you want to do or the freedom of meeting the responsibilities you have chosen, can we all appreciate whatever invitation the moment offers us?

Taking a Chance

Discipline is the courage to follow what we love.

I first heard this empowering definition many years ago and immediately adopted it. The words made intuitive sense and offered a whole new to approach discipline.   Instead of a necessary moral work that I should do, discipline might be about following an unfolding path or moving toward some mysterious aliveness that beacons.

Over the years, I have found this definition to be more complicated than it appears on the surface. The first problem is ‘What do I love?’   I love my partner, my daughter, my friends, my garden. I love connecting with people, being of use, sharing what I know, going for walks, sitting in meditation, being in nature, going on canoe trips with my sisters, playing trains with my grandson. I love watching TV in the evening with my partner, drinking a delicious craft beer, eating blue cheese, learning some new skill, using my body, making sculptures out of random rocks, finding the right words and rhythms as I’m writing, being surprised, talking to my mother on the phone, accomplishing things with other people, improvising.

So what does all this, and more, have to do with discipline? Discipline is the courage to follow what you love, sounds like some great romantic adventure toward a lofty goal. I imagine the music I might have played if I had practiced my alto saxophone in high school and beyond with discipline and intention. What gorgeous jazz I might have been a part of? What compositions and recordings might have emerged? What adventures would I have been part of?

But perhaps following what we love is easier and less heroic. Or maybe easier and still, in some way, heroic. What if the small things count? The little things that catch our attention and tickle our fancy? What if there is not some great love that we have to uncover and follow like the knight in a fairytale? What if we don’t have to be artistic geniuses or find our one true love? What if a full life has a thousand loves and each one is true?

Then where does the courage come in? How much courage does it take to do the little things that bring you alive? How much courage does it take to notice the little things that bring you joy and give yourself to them? In my experience—plenty. Though once we give ourselves permission and step over the line, the thing itself flows with its own rhythm, it is the stepping over the line that takes the courage.

We are the only ones who can allowing ourselves to love what we love, to be drawn to what we are drawn to and to move in that direction, if only for a few moments. It is not about waiting for someone else’s permission. Following even these little streams of life, even for short intervals of time requires us to trust our inner lives. To plant a few seeds inside in a pot of damp earth while the snow is still on the ground. To make a pot of tea and sit down with a magazine for twenty minutes in the middle of it all. To spend an hour arranging the objects on your mantle until they are just right. To call a friend to talk without any special need or purpose.

These are all acts of following—acts of courage. It’s not about the outcome but about the following. The point is not what happens next, the point is what’s happening now. When we head in this direction, toward what brings us alive, it’s not about the outcome. Of course we may hope that our seeds sprout and grow strong and end up in this summers garden. Or that Jill Lapore has written another article in this week’s New Yorker. Or that we find the perfect arrangement (for the moment) or that our friend is there when we call. But the real point is the following and in the following no measurement is possible.

So maybe discipline doesn’t have to involve a grand love and a huge amount of courage. But maybe it matters a whole lot just the same. So my prayer for today is to be awake to the many streams of life that call to me. May I practice saying yes, even briefly, to the love that touches me in a thousand ways.

Starting Nowhere

I sit down to write this morning and nothing comes. I try going in a couple different directions, but all the paths peter out. So how to enter into life from nowhere? For this is the point of my writing—to try to find some way to touch the aliveness of the moment—to enter into and appreciate the particular form in which life is appearing now—and in doing so to invite you, the reader, to do the same. I’m always trying to demonstrate and practice that which I’m trying to say.

While wise and true words may flow easily onto the page, they are indeed hard to live. Of course, this moment of no inspiration is equally part of life as every other moment. But some moments we would rather just pass over. ‘I’ll wait for this to pass so that I can live my real life.’ But we only ever live at this moment and it seems we might as well try to make the best of wherever we are—though going numb or avoiding or fixing are always options.

I suppose a reasonable person would just not write when nothing comes to write about. But I continue to refuse to be a reasonable person.

Which reminds me of the new wonderful book I’m reading at my daughter’s suggestion: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (And so a gust of wind fills my sails and the boat which was dead in the water begins to creep forward.) Barrett is a down-to-earth writer who reports on contemporary research (including hers) showing that emotions are not ‘things’ that are triggered, but ephemeral events arising from the ongoing and complex substrate of neural activity that we call life.

The model of the triune brain with the thinking section (neocortex) sitting safely on top of the feeling (limbic) section and presiding over the survival (reptilian) base, though reassuring, is not accurate. Feeling is involved in everything we think, say and do—and usually this engagement happens beneath the level of our awareness. So we are free to imagine that we are perfectly reasonable people making perfectly reasonable decisions based on the facts of the world we encounter.

But, it turns out, we human beings are not reasonable creatures. (Given the last four years, this should not be news to any of us.) Current brain research aligns with the teachings of the Buddha 2,600 years ago—that we are constantly experiencing some ‘feeling tone’ of like dislike or neutral (2^nd foundation of mindfulness) and that ‘reality’ is a participatory phenomena. Barrett puts it this way:

“you might think about your environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that’s a myth. You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment—your reality—by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects…”

She reports that it’s not just the selection of sensory input, but how we make meaning of the input that constructs the world we experience as ‘out there.’ It turns out that our sense perception involves much more input from what we remember and know from the past than what we are receiving from the outside at any moment. So our brains construct the world and then react to the world we construct as if it were real. In the actual brain, there is no inside or out, just the constant darkness within the skull that is illuminated by a constant wash of billions of neural circuits firing in an emerging web of dynamic complexity.

So, this morning, this constant wash of dynamic complexity first appeared as little energy and no inspiration. In claiming my intention (to participate and play in and with whatever is here) and refusing to be reasonable, space was created for something else to appear and be known.

This is what I believe in and want to stake my life on. Life is always happening here and that life is big enough to encompass everything: something and nothing, inspiration and dullness, excitement and discouragement. And the only way in is to hang around long enough, to pay enough attention, to be unreasonable enough to join in.

No Need to Panic

Sometimes meaning slips away
without prior arrangement and
I am left exposed once again.

The tattered clothes of habit
refuse to cover the nakedness
of my inner darker confusions.

Left alone to my own devices,
without access to the familiar
landscape of routine, my constructed

world reveals itself insubstantial.
I want to run for the hills or dash
for the door or cry for help—

but the terrain is jumbled
and my voice has already fled.
I am not very brave. I am prone

to faint at the sight of syringes
and blood. I have very little tolerance
for pain and always ask for extra Novocain

at the dentist’s office. But I’ve been
here before and I remember a thing
or two. So I lay low and give up hope

of anything else. Tossed and swirled by
my fears and sure that no good will ever re-emerge,
I go along for the ride as best I can. Only this.

Only this now. Maybe breathing is
the only true work we can ever know.
Maybe there is no need to panic.

Time With an Old Friend

Having run out of options,
I give myself permission
to be tired and unuseful.

I surrender to the brown
couch and repeatedly read
the many versions of Mary Oliver’s
one poem of appreciation.

I dreamily wonder if life
could possibly be
made as she claims—
for such easy delight.

If so, what about
the fierce intention that
brought these lovely
poems into the world?

Smiling at my
relentless complaint,
I dog-ear the best
for future remembering.