One Time, One Meeting

Waiting room in the Eye, Ear, Nose, & Throat Hospital, New Orleans, 1907

Imagine, if you will, that you have just arrived at your local hospital for a routine test. Anticipating a wait, you have brought a book. After checking in at the reception desk, you seat yourself in a plastic chair and open your book.

Very soon, however, you discover that you are unable to concentrate, because you are being bombarded by the sounds of daytime TV. Muzak you could handle, but not the dialogue of a soap opera, which is keeping you from reading the words on the page. You can’t enjoy your book, but you can’t leave either. For a while you contain your frustration, but when it becomes intolerable, you go to the reception desk to complain. There you learn that the hospital keeps the TV on because most patients want it on. A survey indicated as much. So you return to your seat, humbled and disgruntled.

Most of us, I suspect, have had an experience of that kind. Whether it be the aural abrasion of someone yakking on a cell phone, or, in today’s airports, the drone of CNN transforming human pain into entertainment, the ambient racket in public spaces grows louder and more continuous by the day. Quiet spaces, even in formerly quiet places, are becoming ever more difficult to find. Apparently many people prefer—or are willing to tolerate–a cacophonous environment. But what, if anything, are the rest of us to do?

One obvious solution is to shut the distractions out. Earplugs can sometimes do the trick, as can the earphones of an iPod. If that doesn’t work, it may be possible to stop the noise, or have it reduced, by complaining to the appropriate authority. Those measures failing, we can occupy ourselves with our BlackBerries or some other electronic device, if we have one. Or we can hunker down and wait it out, nursing our sense of separation, our fantasies of moral superiority, our low opinion of those who are disturbing our peace.

There is, however, another option, which on first hearing might sound counter-intuitive. That option, simply put, is to be present for the sounds we so abhor: to listen to the noise with openness and full attention, as one might listen to a string quartet by Mozart. For some that task might be challenge, and a pointless one at that.  But for those who can manage it, the exercise can illuminate the nature of suffering and foster some useful discoveries.

Three years ago, the writer and Zen teacher Roshi Joan Halifax slipped and fell on a bathroom floor, shattering her upper femur. Transported to Toronto Western Hospital, she learned that her injury would require immediate surgery. As it happened, however, her surgery was delayed, and for the next thirty hours Roshi Joan lay in the Emergency Room, tied to a gurney. Although she was in pain and had lost a great deal of blood, she engaged in a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as tonglen, in which the practitioner breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out a healing calm. Aware, as she put it, of the “numberless beings who streamed through the doors on a busy Friday the thirteenth weekend,”* she practiced tonglen in their behalf. Rather than resist her surroundings, she opened herself to the suffering of those around her.

Roshi Joan Halifax has been practicing Zen meditation and working with the dying for more than forty years. Not all of us can follow her example. But with a little effort any one of us can anchor ourselves in conscious breathing and resolve to take in what the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen called the totality of our experience. If we happen to be sitting in a hospital waiting room, that totality might include the presence of daytime TV. But it will almost certainly include the presence of anxiety—the anxiety of people who are there because their health or that of their loved ones is in question, if not in jeopardy. Daytime TV can be an anodyne, distracting the anxious mind by giving it something to do. Viewed in that way, its presence becomes understandable and even benign, if not uniformly desirable.

And should we turn our awareness inward, we might also examine our own habits of mind, particularly the propensity to extract, or attempt to extract, the good and the pleasant from the whole of our experience. As Alan Watts observes in The Way of Zen, one of the aims of Zen practice is to “see through the universal illusion that what is pleasant or good may be wrested from what is painful or evil.” ** Opening ourselves, at once, to the bad and the good, the pleasant and the painful, we may at last divest ourselves of that illusion, while also cultivating a more compassionate heart. “Hospitals are houses of great suffering,” observed Roshi Joan a few days after her surgery. “They are also places where acts of kindness and patience are boundless.”***

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*Roshi Joan Halifax, Upaya Zen Center Newsletter, June 18, 2008.

** Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, Kindle edition, 115.

***Upaya Zen Center Newsletter, June 23, 2008.