More Instructions to Self

The first challenge is finding a place to start. The second is trusting that starting place enough to take the first step. From there on, it’s just a matter of following through.

Easier said than done.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE—perhaps that’s the title of my new book. One teacher said that these teaching on how to wake up are so simple that an eight-year-old child can say them but so difficult that even an eighty-year-old person can’t live them.

We’re all trying to close the gap between what we know and what we live—between what we love and what we do. The first step in this approach is, as they say on the London Tube, to Mind the Gap. Becoming aware of the distance between our intentions and our actions is full of possibility and potential—a good place to begin.

I am lost and discouraged much more than I would like to admit. As many times as I include my daily struggles and investigations in what I write and talk about, there is another level that remains hidden. I write about a particular morning and in the writing, I am committed to finding a way through. The writing is true and, at the same time, a fabrication—a story based on a true story Perhaps a true story can never be told, for in the telling it separates from the thing it was and becomes something new. Perhaps something in the story resonates with the experiences of others, but the thing itself, the thing that is being written about never happened before the writing.

Bodhidharma didn’t come from India to China, didn’t meet with the Emperor and tell him the essential teaching of Buddhism is ‘Vast emptiness with nothing holy’ and wasn’t the first ancestor in the Zen school in a lineage that has descended unbroken through my teacher to me.

But easier said than done is also another story. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not true. Sometimes just walking down the street with a very young friend in the late winter and noticing the buds on the trees swelling and explaining to him about spring and warmth and green leaves is fully enough and there is no difficulty to be found anywhere. Sometimes we catch a current of energy and are saved from our endless struggle. Or is it more accurate to say we are caught by a current of energy?

I’m reminded of my brief career as a trapeze artist. It lasted all of one afternoon and it was again in Costa Rica, at a resort where my wife was teaching and I was playing consort for the week—just invited along for entertainment and distraction. (Note to self: look into this as potential next career.) It was just an afternoon lesson but it was on the high trapeze. I still vividly remember climbing the tiny rope ladder up and up and how much smaller and higher the platform appeared from standing on it than from the ground.

It was a simple trick they were teaching us: to be caught. All you had to do was step off the tiny platform high in the air. Holding (tightly) onto a metal bar, you swung down and down, then finally began to swing up. At the top of the out-swing ‘all you had to do’ is to put your knees where your head was, bring them under the bar, then back through over the bar to catch the bar with the back of your knees as you released your hands and swung back toward where you started—upside down.

And if you had managed to do all this, the next part was to swing backward and upside-down through space holding on with your knees with your arms and hands extended. When you reached the apex of the second out-swing, the muscular and good-looking young man (who actually did this for a living), would ‘catch you’—would grab your forearms with his hands as you grabbed his forearms with your hands. You released your knees and flew through the air, held in his grasp.

And what I really remember are the instructions I was given as I stepped off the little platform. ‘Don’t try to find the hands that will catch you. LET YOURSELF BE CAUGHT.’ Let yourself be caught. Flying backward, upside down through the air, extend your arms and hands and let yourself be caught. I did reach out into the vast moving space and I was caught and for a small moment, was caught and swung free. It was truly astonishing.

So…putting this mornings lesson all together we’re left with:
1) Easier Said Than Done – remember that this life of being human requires a life of learning,
2) Mind the Gap – it’s actually in paying attention to where we fall short that is where the true journey begins, and
3) Let Yourself Be Caught – maybe God is a handsome young man (or woman or non-binary person) who is swinging upside down like you and is ready to catch you if only you will reach out and allow yourself to be caught.

Maybe enough instruction for one morning.