One Time, One Meeting

About ten years ago, I wrote a check for $ 57.00 to the Village of Water. At the time, I was attempting to pay my water bill. Oblivious of my oversight, I mailed the check, and somehow the Village of Alfred managed to cash it. When the bank returned the canceled check, as banks used to do, I discovered my blunder.

What was I thinking? I asked myself. Or as my mother would have said, Whatever possessed you? The script was neat, the handwriting definitely mine. The check bore my signature. But whoever wrote the “Village of Water” was miles away at the time.

However extreme, my error was not uncommon. Nor was it peculiar to professors. Quite possibly, the chickadees at our feeder and the deer who eat our dogwoods live continuously in the present. They have to. But we human beings have the option of being elsewhere, and that elsewhere is often the future or the past. And when we are not revisiting the past or rehearsing the future, we are often absorbed in abstract thought.

To return us to the present moment is the first purpose of Zen meditation. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes the practice in this way:

Meditation means you have to be present in the present moment. If the body is here but the mind is wandering elsewhere, in that moment you’re not present—you’re not present for yourself, and you’re not present for your husband, your children, your brothers or sisters, your nation, or your people. That is the opposite of meditation. Being present in the present moment means you are not being imprisoned by the past or sucked up by the future.

As Thich Nhat Hanh further explains, being present in the present moment does not preclude reflection, planning, or visionary thought. Rather, it returns the wandering mind, which doesn’t know it is wandering, to an awareness of whatever it is up to.

In Zen teachings, this capacity for being present is known as mindfulness, and it is an essential component of Zen discipline. Mindfulness may be cultivated in many ways, but at the beginning we can best develop it by sitting still, with our spines straight and the rest of our bodies relaxed. Maintaining that posture for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, we bring a gentle, non-judgmental attention to our breath, our feelings, our passing thoughts, our changing states of mind. We become present for ourselves.

But can we also become present for other people? Beneficial though it is, the mindfulness cultivated in seated meditation is of limited value if it does not extend into our daily lives, where our presence—and often, our absence—profoundly affects others around us. “When you walk,” Zen teachers tell us, “just walk.” That admonishment directs us to give undivided attention to the one thing we are doing, be it cooking dinner, or writing a check, or listening to a friend. Mindfulness of this kind grows naturally from the habit of daily sitting, but it it may also be practiced by anyone at any time.

By way of demonstration, may I suggest that if you are drinking a cup of coffee while you are reading this column, put down your coffee and give full attention to the column. Or better yet, put down the column and give full attention to your coffee. Hold the cup in both hands, as Zen monks do, and inhale the aroma. Contemplate the origins, the history, and the nature of the drink you are about to ingest. Then drink your coffee, giving full attention to its taste. Continue this practice for a week or more, and see what you discover.

Twelve years ago, some friends and I formed a sitting group in the community of Alfred, New York. Our intent was to provide a place of stillness and silence and  to cultivate the practices of sitting and walking meditation, as taught by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of us brought prior experience in Eastern meditation. All of us brought our Western conditioning.

So it was with one of our number, an anxious former New Yorker, who arrived one Sunday evening looking unusually impatient, even for him.

“Well,” said he, rubbing his hands and bouncing from one foot to the other, “let’s get meditating.”

As we later learned, Barbara Walters was interviewing Monica Lewinsky at nine o’clock that evening, and he didn’t want to miss a word.

In his general outlook if not his specific motive, our friend was not alone. On the contrary, American culture has been described as always en route to somewhere else, always busy and always in a hurry. And with the advent of e-mail, Twitter, and other forms of advanced technology, our habitual rush into the future has grown more furious than ever. Meditation is supposed to be about “stopping and looking”—or at least about slowing down. But to those attached to ceaseless forward movement, even an hour devoted to stopping and looking can become one more step on the way to somewhere else.

The desire to be in some other place, and to get there as soon as possible, is both a symptom and a cause of a general anxiety, driving us into the future even as we fear it. Over the past decade a wide variety of people, including students, faculty, social workers, police, and clergy, have attended our Sunday-evening sessions. Some have come out of boredom, curiosity, loneliness, or a desire to find a deeper meaning in their lives.  But the root motive is often anxiety, which Thich Nhat Hanh has called the endemic illness of Western culture. Better get moving, its voices tell us. Better get meditating.

Zen meditation is not a panacea for anxiety, as sometimes thought, nor is it a drug-free cure. But the practice can provide an antidote, a countervailing force in our busy-busy lives. In the simplest form of Zen meditation, we sit as still and upright as we can manage, doing nothing but following the flow of our breath and paying attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us. We note the tensions in our bodies, the eruption of a voice down the hall. We note a passing thought—where are my car keys?—or a remembered image. And we observe those impulses that urge us to keep moving—to get meditating—and hurl us into the future. When we have sat for awhile, our bodies begin to settle, and our thoughts arrive at a slower pace. And as we stop trying to control our environment, our immediate surroundings present themselves with greater clarity and vivacity. We feel more alive as well as more relaxed.

Such are the immediate benefits of Zen meditation, which may be felt in a matter of weeks. But it would be a mistake to think of Zen practice as merely a stress-reduction technique, or a mode of self-improvement, or a way of escaping from the world. The reduction of stress might better be viewed as a point of entry–a portal into an ancient contemplative practice. Over time, that practice teaches us to appreciate our lives, however hurried or fragmented their present state, and to align our anxious minds with things as they are, not as we would have them be. And rather than isolate us, the practice deepens our connection with other people.

I intend to say more about these matters in future essays. In the meantime, let’s get meditating.