One Time, One Meeting

Picture, if you will, a horse and rider. The horse is galloping down a road, and the rider is hanging on for dear life.

“Where are you going?”calls a man from the side of the road.

“I don’t know,” answers the rider. “Ask the horse.”

According to Zen teachings, the horse in this story represents the force of habit, or what Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “habit energies.” Whether we’re aware of them or not, those energies drive our lives, even when we’re sleeping. They rush us into the future, and we may feel powerless to stop them. In his poem “Habits” the American poet W.S. Merwin acknowledges as much. “Even in the middle of the night,” he writes of his habits, “They go on handing me around.”*

I suspect that most of us are familiar with that experience. In my own case, I recall a Saturday afternoon when I found myself heading toward Wegman’s, though I was supposed to be driving to the Valu Home Center to buy some paint. My horse was a Honda Accord, but the pattern was much the same.

Habits may be pleasant, healthful, and productive. They may also protect us, or comfort us during a crisis. But habits of mind can dull our sensibilities and distort our perceptions of other people. And in the arts, they can harden into stylistic tics and conceptual cliches, impeding the creative spirit. Perhaps that is why Nadia Boulanger, the legendary teacher and composer, once declared that she loved tradition but despised habit.

In Zen practice we do not despise habit or consign it to a mental perdition. We do not try to transcend it. Rather, we sit still, cultivating an awareness of our breath, our bodies, our changing mental states. Over time, we may notice that certain patterns of thought and feeling arise again and again. We acknowledge their presence, as we might acknowledge bits of songs that come and go.”Hello, habit energies,” says Thich Nhat Hanh to his own.

This is a simple but potent practice, and as it deepens, we may find that the force of our habits diminishes proportionately. Where before there was only the habit, now there is both the habit and our awareness. And as we become ever more mindful, we empower ourselves to form new and more wholesome habits—and to drop those that do us harm.

If we continue to cultivate such awareness, we may discover that our habits have roots deeper and broader than the personal. They are grounded in our histories, familial and social, and they are fed by contemporary culture. In totalitarian countries, people live with the habit of suspicion. In our own, we are living with the habit of fear, whether its object be sickness, aging, a destitute retirement, or a terrorist attack. Every night, the news and the Big Pharma ads nourish that habit of feeling.