Dreaming of the Good Old Days

The Temple is quiet this morning. These stairways and halls that have been the site of so many Zen retreats stand empty. I rise early, take a shower and walk down two flights of stairs to put my laundry in the washing machine. If we were in retreat and if we were not in the middle of a pandemic, this place would be filled with the silent sounds, smells and the bodies of dozens of people—bleary and quiet in the early morning. The wooden block would have just sounded its drawn out rhythmic pattern to call us to the first meditation session of the day.

Usually, in the early morning, a few days into retreat, I’m wondering how I’ll be able to keep going. I’m bleary and discouraged. I am quite familiar with this landscape. I don’t like it, but it doesn’t scare me like it used to. On retreat, we get a little less sleep than usual and Zen meditation is actually an incredibly tiring activity. Though in our tradition we only sit for 25 minutes and then walk for 10, we do it pretty much throughout the day. Silence and stillness is a wonderful thing, but in the seemingly endless ongoing nature of retreat—in the silence and structure—a space is created for everything to come forward.

The first time I remember having to deal with being alone with myself for an extended period of time was on a solo hiking trip in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, just above Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. I had hiked above the tree-line to a gorgeous lake filled by glacial melt higher up. I pitched my tent, slept the night and decided to spend the day doing nothing. At first it seemed a spacious luxury. But by the afternoon I was bored out of my mind. I had no problems, no one to disturb me, nothing to do and I was very agitated.

It was then that I realized why we all keep so busy. We often feel so harried, rushing from one thing to the next, but in the end our busyness is a protection to keep us from having to confront the deeper fears and unknowns of our lives. The busyness and the pressures and the worrying are great distractions and even protections from our larger existential issues. We are, most of us, quite attached to our busyness.

Fundamentally, we human beings are uncertain about our existence. The Buddha observed that at the center of our lives is a sense of dis-ease—a sense that things are not right. The word he used to describe this, the Pali word dukha, is often translated as suffering, but also means unsatisfactoriness and difficulty.

On the one hand, this feels like a pretty obvious observation—that pain and discomfort are an unavoidable part of life. But to actually acknowledge this sense that things aren’t right can be a huge shift in perspective. Usually, when we are feeling bad, we try to do something about it. This is normal and healthy behavior. Many problems that arise in our lives provide the opportunity to do something—to make a change, to have a conversation, to find some new way forward.

But there are some problems that don’t go away. Among these problems I would include the fact that everything is continually changing, that the people we love do not stay with us forever and that the person we imagine ourselves to be is not nearly as solid or reliable as we would like. These are the conditions of human life. We can like them or not like them. We can admit them or pretend otherwise. But, in the end, we cannot avoid change, loss, sickness and death.

The value of the Buddha’s teaching is that when we acknowledge the unavoidable nature of unsatisfactoriness, we can abandon our endless patterns of running away and fixing and continually trying to make things different. We don’t have to take everything so personally. Life is continually shape-shifting, one moment we are at ease, the next moment we are anxious. One moment signs for a peaceful transition of the Presidency are obvious, the next moment I am caught in fears and struggling once again against lies and half-truths.

But at some point, each of us come face-to-face with the uncertainty and the pain that are part of being human. Even surrounded by beauty in the Beartooth Mountains, or in the warm protection of fellow Zen practitioners on retreat, these vast and fearful states arise.

The good news is that there’s nothing to do. When boredom, anxiety, fear—or any other difficult emotional states arise—the instruction is to let them be. Of course, if there’s something that can be done, do it. But when you’ve run out of things to do to feel better, perhaps you can settle by the lake of yourself and just feel whatever is present in the moment.

I miss the hustle and bustle of Zen retreats here in the Temple. I miss the bells, the exhaustion and the wild energy of human beings sitting together in silence and stillness. We still come together on Zoom and even do retreats together in our own homes. I suspect that one day we will be together in person again. These halls and stairs will once again resound with the padding of slippers and sox and I will once again be bleary and discouraged as I walk into a meditation hall filled with my brothers and sisters.

But for now, I remember the good old days and smile.