Earlier this year, our family doctor departed for pastures new. Like many other members of the Alfred, New York community, I found myself looking for a suitable replacement. Last week, I finally met with my new primary-care physician. Shortly thereafter, I remarked to my wife that this doctor might well become my caregiver “for the duration.” When she glanced at me as if I’d newly arrived from another era, I realized that I was showing my age. On further reflection, however, I also noted that this evocative expression, however dated, sorts well with three of the main tenets of Zen Buddhism.
“For the duration” originated in England during the First World War. Volunteers enlisted in the “New Army” for two years, three years, or “for the duration of the war.” Those who did so were known as “duration men” and were sometimes looked down upon by career soldiers. By 1917, “for the duration,” the abbreviated form of the original phrase, had passed into the common language. By 1920, it had begun to appear in the newspapers, as in the headline “Interned for the Duration” (The Shields Daily News, January, 1920). Almost from the start, the phrase carried negative connotations. Cognate with “endure,” its operative word echoed Samuel Johnson’s characterization of human life as a “state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.” And as the phrase gained ground in peacetime usage, it sometimes took on an ironic tone, as when a married man or woman spoke of being “in it for the duration.”
Zen teachings do not explicitly refer to “the duration,” but the stark realism conjured by the term has much in common with that of the Zen tradition. In his new book Enlightenment is an Accident (Shambhala, 2023), Zen teacher and author Tim Burkett speaks of “surrendering to what is,” reprising a familiar theme in Zen literature. Elsewhere, he defines Zen practice as being “about accepting reality as it is”—a reality that includes not only “birds and the sky and thestars . . . but also the backwaters and the swamps.” With this acceptance of reality comes an acknowledgement of limitations as well as possibilities, as when the Zen priest Zoketsu Norman Fischer, referring to a temporary illness, speaks of “living within [his] condition.”
“Your cup is already broken,” an old Zen saying reminds us, pointing to a second tenet of Zen practice, namely the recognition of the impermanence of all conditioned things. In classical Buddhist teachings, anicca, or the law of impermanence, is one of the three “marks of existence.” To speak of something lasting “for the duration” is implicitly to acknowledge its temporary nature. However painful or felicitous present conditions may be, they will eventually change, to be replaced by other conditions. Implicit in this reminder is the admonition to take the long view and cultivate a patient attitude. Less oracular in tone than such phrases as “This, too, will pass,” “for the duration” quietly asserts that even the most unhappy circumstances are, like the best of times, subject to change.
“All my teaching,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “is about suffering and the end of suffering.” Although that suffering may be mild or extreme, depending on circumstances, it is not solely an individual matter. Suffering is a part of the human condition. In this respect, “for the duration” calls to mind a third tenet of Zen teaching: that of radical interdependence, known in Buddhism as “dependent origination.” Whatever our individual preferences, we are all in the same boat. We are in this together, whether “this” be the now-receding pandemic or the ever-rising incidence of mass shootings in our culture. Though neither as specific nor as fatalistic as the French phrase “C’est la guerre” (“It’s the war”), “for the duration” acknowledges shared external conditions over which most of us have little or no control. Whether we elect to deny, resist, or accept those conditions, “for the duration” bows to their continuing existence, even as it elevates our personal suffering to a collective level.
Zen teachers speak often of the Great Matter, by which they mean the transience of life and the certainty of death. At the end of the day in Zen monasteries around the world, monastics and lay practitioners chant these resonant lines:
Life and death are of supreme importance –
Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.
Let us strive to awaken—awaken.
Take heed. Do not squander your life.
Intoned in a darkened zendo at the close of a long day, this chant may or may not be welcome. “Did you really need to remind us?” we might silently inquire, having spent the previous twelve hours engaged in mindful work and intensive meditation. But, welcome or not, the Night Chant enjoins us once again to honor and appreciate, for the duration, each fleeting moment of our finite existence: what the poet Mary Oliver memorably called our “one wild and precious life.”