One Time, One Meeting

If you have a hundred steps to climb, an ancient Chan (Zen) saying advises, “Watch what’s under your feet.” Focus on the step you are taking. If you think too much about the remaining steps, you are likely to be discouraged. You may decide not to climb the steps at all.

Commenting on this saying and the principle behind it, the contemporary Chan teacher Guo Gu observes that when we dwell on the future, “everything slows down and the process [of climbing the hundred steps] takes a long time. Every step becomes a burden because the weight of the future is in the present.” It is as if we are carrying a backpack full of rocks or wearing a belt laden with unnecessary equipment.

And of what does the “weight of the future” actually consist? According to Zen teachings, its primary content is conceptual thought. All too often, thoughts of the future engender apprehension. Fearing deprivation, we stockpile supplies. Fearing loss, we cling to what we have. The presence of those fears weighs heavily on our hearts and minds.

“Fear,” writes the Zen teacher Norman Fischer, “is always future based. We fear what might happen later. The past is gone, so there’s no point in being afraid of it. If past traumas cause fear in us, it is only because we fear that the traumatic event will reoccur.” Having fallen down on an icy sidewalk and wound up in physical therapy, we may not only walk more cautiously. We may also walk more fearfully, looking down—even when our path is no longer icy or uneven.

If you doubt the truth of these propositions or underestimate the power of future-based thought to govern attitudes and behavior, I would invite you to try the following exercise. You will need to have a clock or timer nearby.

1. Sit in a comfortable, upright position on a cushion or chair.
2. Observe your breathing. Watch and feel the movement of breath into and out of your body. Do not interfere with your breathing or attempt to control it. Merely monitor, closely and intimately, the natural and mysterious process of respiration.
3. Now, as you remain in touch with your breathing, observe your thoughts arriving, enduring, and disappearing. Do not pursue them. Merely watch them, as if they were boxcars in a passing train.
4. Set the timer for three minutes. Once again observe your thoughts, this time counting them. At the end of the three-minute period, note the number of thoughts that arose, stayed for a while, and passed away.
5. Now repeat the previous step, this time noticing how many of your thoughts concern the future. Note whether those future-based thoughts engender fear, however subtle. Note also how they feel: whether they cause physical changes of any kind.

Practicing this exercise, you may find that, happily, few if any of your thoughts concern the near or distant future, and even if they do, they do not prompt apprehension. Perhaps your future-based thoughts are infused by hope, or grounded in past success, or rooted in long-term aspirations. But should you discover otherwise—that many of your thoughts do indeed concern the future, and that many of those thoughts are fear-based and fear-laden—you will have gained a valuable insight and established a basis for further inquiry and exploration.

Over time, the capacity to be aware of future-based, fearful thoughts, even as they are arising, can be cultivated and brought to bear on your actions and decisions. Having developed this “mindfulness of thoughts,” as it is called in Zen, you are less likely to be governed by such thoughts and the scenarios they so readily generate. Seeing your transitory notions for what they are, and recognizing the emotional atmosphere in which they’ve arisen, you can decide whether to embrace and act upon them—or respectfully bid them farewell.

Beyond this freedom of from distracting and corrosive thinking, the Way of Zen offers a deeper aspiration to its disciplined practitioners. As Fischer explains, what the Buddha realized was that “[i]f you could be in the radical present moment, not lost in the past, not anxious about the future, you could be fearless.” The state of mind Fischer is describing is often called enlightenment or, more humbly, awakening—the aim of Zen practitioners everywhere. And paradoxically, this time-honored practice, though firmly and conspicuously based in the “radical present moment,” also envisions a future state vouchsafed to the dedicated few but available to all: a way of being free of fear and unburdened by the weight of the future.

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Guo Gu, Silent Illumination (Shambhala, 2021), 112.

Norman Fischer, When You Greet Me I Bow (Shambhala, 2021), 293-94.