What if it’s true?

What if it’s true:
God loves you and holds you
in the palm of his hand?

What then of all this
worry and fear?
What of the terrible things
that really do happen?

What if it’s true:
what you are looking for
is right here in this
moment, in this place?

What then of the dull
ache in my head and
the children who are
cold and hungry?

What if it’s true:
‘The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want?’

What then of this endless longing
for beauty and peace–
for intimacy and connection?

Impossible. Unbelievable.
Incomprehensible. Fantastic.
Preposterous. Wondrous.

I can’t guarantee
or even come close
to understanding except
in those moments when some
thing interrupts my carefully
curated dream of separation
and I find my self once again
in the boundless particular
of what has been so freely given.

Therefore instructions to self:
Stop your wild searching.
Don’t run off and try
to be good. It’s not that
kind of thing. Slow down
and slow down, then
slow down some more.
Now, take a breath and
look around. Forget
everything you’ve been
told and you will find yourself
where you have always been:
at the very center of it all.

What if…

I read a book once that proposed the following thought experiment: imagine that everyone you encounter today is a fully awakened Buddha whose only intention is to help you wake up. It’s an interesting thing to consider because it both exposes our underlying assumptions and invites a shift in our perspective.

Most of us assume that we live within a world where we have to compete with others for limited resources. Our collective culture sanctifies the notion of private property and holds its highest accolades for those who accumulate the most. We worship ideas of self-effort and self-determination as if they were the main source of the shape of our lives.

In school we are constantly measured to see who is ahead and who is behind. We are encouraged to work hard and make it to the front of whatever line we are in. Not everyone can be at the top of the class so we learn to compete against each other. Success and praise are limited quantities so you had better work hard to make sure you get enough.

This mindset is terribly motivating. We learn we must rouse ourselves into action through activating our sense of lack and our desire for more. The problem is that since there is no end to desire, nothing actually soothes the deep sense of not being enough that is hard-wired into human experiences. The Buddha called this fundamental human discontent dukkha. He also said that the cause of our suffering is desire for more. The Buddha taught these two truths and taught a path that can lead us to a radically new way of living.

The thought experiment of imagining everyone you encounter is a Buddha whose only intention is to support your awakening is one way to explore both our own endless desire and the possibility of living in a different way. Imagining the wisdom and beneficial intention of those around us invites us to notice our constant competing and complaining and to even consider that the separation we take for granted might not be true.

I tried this yesterday. I was doing well until someone said something that upset me. I felt criticized and unappreciated. I felt unseen. ‘I work so hard and the only thing that counts is what I don’t do’ I thought. How could this person be a Buddha trying to wake me up when they were so critical?

But as I stayed with my reactivity, I could notice its power. Though I can sometimes get lost in uncertainty, when I am upset, I feel 100% certain that I am right and whatever is upsetting me is wrong. In Buddhism, we call this delusive certainty which is a particular kind of ignorance, one of the three poisons (along with greed and anger).

I also saw how easily I am distracted from my deeper intentions. I want to live a life of generosity and love, yet sometimes I am so reactive that I forget what is most important. I want to be the one who is right and good and blameless. No, I want to be the one who is seen as right and good and blameless. This is embarrassing to admit and mostly I try not to notice how tied I am to other peoples’ opinions of me.

Gradually, over a couple of hours, I was released from my realm of complaint and delusive certainty. I realized there was truth in the comments that had upset me and that perhaps some changes I could make to live a little slower and a little more aligned with my deepest values.

I suppose that these Buddhas that surround us will use any means possible to help us see where we are stuck and where we have tried to co-opt the world to support our small and deluded fantasies of perfection. Waking up is sometimes uncomfortable, as we are required to acknowledge our part in the suffering that seemed to be someone else’s fault.

So if you’re up for a challenge, imagine today that everyone you encounter is a Buddha whose only intention is to help you wake up—to help you break out of your delusive certainty into the wider possibility of life. But don’t expect it to be all hearts and flowers for you (and I) appear to be hard-bitten cases that sometimes require rather extreme interventions.

Supported and Surprised

Standing at the well-worn
crossroads like Bill
Murray in Groundhog
Day or John Kasich at
the DNC, I try to remember
once more what it is
I’m supposed to do.

How does this being
human thing work?
Something about
waiting and following.
Something about
just this one breath.

Nothing comes or
altogether too much
comes. I resist the rising
panic. ‘Slow down.’ I tell
myself, ‘There is
enough time and space
and love to fill even
the empty swirling
galaxies of your heart.’

‘Don’t wait or worry
or neglect any
thing—even the
smallest contains
the secrets you seek.’

(Who is the one who
speaks the words of
wisdom and encouragement?
Can I trust his shining
certainty and wild optimism?)

Beyond measure I live
blindly—constantly
supported and surprised
that even my incessant
complaint is woven
deeply into the sumptuous
brocade of this morning.

Working the Night Shift

I wake up this morning with a sinus headache. Last night was difficult. Early on I woke up terrified—some dream about war and being in a terrible situation of danger. It took me several moments to fight my way back to the surface of consciousness and realize I had been dreaming. I settled back into sleep making a note to myself to remember the dream to puzzle it out in the morning. Of course, now I have no memory of what it was about.

Then I woke at 3:30 ruminating about all the unfinished tasks of my life. Like monsters in a movie with low production values, usually I can see they are just plastic toys being pushed around by the fingers of the animators. But in the unfocused dark of the early morning, the hidden animators of my brain run the show and the monsters loom large. So I work helplessly on suspected botched delivery dates and work on potential schedule dis-coordinations. I am worried that there will be difficulty.

Difficulty is almost always worse in advance. I mean sometimes things can be really hard and challenging, but in the moment, hard and challenging is often not a problem. It’s just hard and challenging. We human beings are actually creative, resourceful and whole. There is a part of all of us that even enjoys a challenges and difficulties. Challenges reveal strengths we did not know we had and calls beyond our daydreams of incompetence and overwhelm to the dynamic and reciprocal world that contains both success and failure as part the path forward.

Somewhere along the way we internalized the idea that there is one right answer and we must find it—or else. Success is good. Failure is bad. Someone else is grading the exam and making the final judgment. Good luck. Study hard and don’t make any mistakes. It’s an exhausting perspective and actually not true. (Of course telling that to your mind at 3:30 a.m. probably won’t have much impact, but still…)

It turns out that there are many right answers to every question and decision. Not only that, but usually the question or choice being posed is only one perspective on a situation that has many perspectives. I suppose simplification is necessary to avoid endless paralysis by analysis, but it also dangerously reduces the amount of information and viewpoints available. I heard a politician on the radio yesterday and he had an astonishing knack for boiling situations down to a clear choice of two alternatives with one of them being so clearly superior to the other than action was almost inevitable. I enjoyed his air of certainty but was suspicious of his forced-choice methodology.

A friend of mine has come down with some complications from Lyme disease that are quite serious. It’s very likely that his symptoms will all clear up. But it’s not certain that they will and even if they do, it’s not certain when they will. Are we talking two weeks or six months? He doesn’t know but when I spoke to him, he reported that his life was going on quite well. He was appropriately concerned about his condition, but was also feeling that, in the moment, he’s just has the symptoms he has.

Life is just a series of problems. I recently heard of a psychologist who defines good mental health as ‘One problem after another.’ With the alternative being ‘The same problem over and over.’ This is catchy and insightful, but as a good Zen teacher I have to report that, when we get down to what is really going on, it is the same problem over and over. And this is not a problem.

We each have our particular issues and neuroses. Some of us suffer from loneliness, some from anxiety, some from anger, some from fear. Life can be unbearable at times. But I have come to believe that even these familiar and difficult companions are part of the path and meaning of our lives.

Emerson put it this way: There is a time in every man’s education when…he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. [of course this applies to women and gender queer folks of all pronoun choices]

So the things that come up again and again are the plot of ground which we are given to cultivate. And, as Emerson points out, we are required to do some work—to meet ourselves, to work with the challenges of our lives as best we can.

The good news is that failure is not a problem, in fact failure is the only way forward. Life offers a panoply of choices—some may work better than others, but there are infinite choices—all leading us forward into our life.

So, onward into the messy and rewarding busyness of life. Get it right. Get it wrong. Play in the mud then wash yourself off. It’s really OK.

Risk Exhaustion

The last day of August already. The new abnormal drags endlessly into the fall. Trump is now claiming to be compassionate and skillful leader, the only one who can save us from the violence and chaos he fosters. Biden hopes to be the next FDR and rescue us with compassion and policies that support racial, economic and environmental justice. Biden is still up in the polls, but so was Clinton at this point four years ago.

I now instinctively (mostly) take a mask with me wherever I go. I don’t even think about going to places with lots of people. (Are there still places like that anyway?) But I’m wearing myself out trying to keep myself, and the members of my bubble, safe. It turns out that living with conscious risk is much more tiring than living with unconscious risk.

Life has always been a risky business. We’re never really safe. Crossing the street. Driving the car. Going down stairs. I remember once riding my mountain bike through a stretch of rocks and mud and standing water. Negotiating the treacherous terrain upright and wonderfully wet and muddy, I said to my friend: ‘Just think, when we’re old men we can have this kind of balance and coordination challenge just going down the stairs.’ And so it will be. If disease and accidents don’t get us first, old age certainly will.

The hardest thing is that, in the new social experience of pandemic, our risk calculations have to be made individually and consciously. In the past, our daily risk calculations were unconscious cultural assumptions that we rarely considered. We didn’t look at the accident rate in our county every morning before we drove to work. We didn’t wonder about the safety protocols at the hotel where we were planning to stay.

The human brain seems to have been designed for discerning immediate visceral risk. From instinctually fleeing large animals with sharp teeth, our ancestors progressed to avoiding large four-wheeled vehicles roaring down busy streets. (And the ones who did not make correct risk assessments didn’t survive to become ancestors.) We teach our children to look both ways when they cross the street, to avoid taking candy from strangers and to stay away from the edge in high places. This is ‘common sense’ and these constant calculations fade from our consciousness and allowed us to consider the more important things like whether we’ll have cold cereal or eggs for breakfast.

But the dangers and risks of our actual lives are far beyond what can be perceived viscerally. It has been this way for decades. Industrialization, global communications and the internet have brought us to a place of unprecedented interconnection. But the COVID crisis has brought our interconnection into sharper focus. This virus that is invisible and we can catch from people with no visible symptoms has brought us face-to-face with daily and intangible danger.

In this new place, without a clear social consensus of what is safe and what is not, we’re all required to make decision after decision to modify our behavior to keep us, and the people around us, safe. Though I only know one person who has died from COVID and only three or four who have had even a mild case, I am continually on guard.

Especially as COVID cases are staying relatively low here in Massachusetts and we all begin to move at least a little back toward normal, it requires constant assessment. While part of me would like to stay fully cocooned, another part is fed up with restrictions and caution and just wants to see my friends, go out to dinner and forget about it all. Is it really safe to have dinner at a restaurant if I’m outdoors? If someone offers me a glass of water in their backyard, is it safe to say yes? If I wear my mask, is it OK to go to Home Depot? To church? Do I need to wear my mask when I pass someone on the sidewalk if the wind is blowing strongly?

It’s exhausting. But here we are. Living our new normal lives. Taking solace where we can. Making decisions and meeting whatever comes next.

It will not always be like this.

It will always be like this.