That Little Voice

Thoughts During a Pandemic

I know by experience that sitting zazen enriches my life.  I enjoy sitting with my brother-in-law[1] at noon, as we get his day started, and I sometimes sit also in the late afternoon, after I’ve done yoga, but my favorite time to sit, a habit I’ve had for almost thirty years, is first thing in the morning, around the time that the sun comes up.  Here in Asheville, that can be quite dramatic, as light comes over the mountain and the birds start to sing.  The world comes alive.  It’s dead quiet when I begin, then the birds tune up and the symphony begins.   It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s my favorite hour of the day, and I often look forward to it the evening before.  I go to bed thinking, I might be tired now, but tomorrow morning I do zazen.

Then when I wake up, there’s this little voice that says, do I really want to do that?  Wouldn’t I rather just stay in bed?  Or, wouldn’t it be nice to sit some other time?  I could have breakfast first, and read the paper, and then think about sitting.

I know, I absolutely know, that zazen makes my life better, and whether it’s “good” or “bad” (totally meaningless words) I always feel better after I do it.  And I never skip that morning sitting, no matter how I feel.

So what’s that little voice?  Is it laziness, or inertia, or what some people call habit energy (though I’ve had the habit of sitting for 30 years)?

I think it’s fear.

I have spoken elsewhere about my ambivalent relationship to the present moment.  On the one hand, uniting with the present moment is the greatest joy of my life.  I would in fact define the word joy as being at one with the physical experience of the present moment.  On the other hand, a fear of that moment, that eternal present that is always here, has been one of the torments of my life.  It’s by facing fear that I’ve discovered joy.  It’s one of those Zen paradoxes.

Even after all these years, seeing time and again that the only true happiness is uniting with the present moment, however it is, I still feel that fear.  It’s baffling.  It’s more than a little annoying.

There it is, like it or not.

Sometimes I think that, when we sleep, we go to a far-off place.  I’m not one to think we leave our bodies, though it sometimes seems that way.  (My wife says that when we go to sleep we go back to the Mother Ship, which is also the place we go when we die.  “Enjoy your trip to the Mother Ship,” she sometimes says, as we’re settling into bed.)  So that when we wake up, and have to come back into our bodies, there’s a certain reluctance.  Not this again.  After I’ve just been to a luxury hotel.

Waking life is where we are.  Being in life is being in a body.

I dream of an enlightened life, I dream of being content all the time (is that what an enlightened life is?), I dream of never feeling that fear again, never feeling reluctance, waking up every morning and saying This is the Day that the Lord hath Made.  Rejoice in it and be glad!

But I don’t.  And if I ignore that feeling, that reluctant little voice, I do so at my peril.  The task of the morning sitting is to sit with that, and let it express itself.  I emerge from the sitting ready to face things.  But not if I tamp that voice down.

Our teacher, Josho Pat Phelan, once went to one of her teachers and said, What do I do about the part of me that doesn’t want to sit?  And he said, There’s no part of you that doesn’t want to sit.

Hmm.

On the other hand, at the start of a retreat,[2] my first teacher, Larry Rosenberg, once said, “The schedule is your greatest teacher.  If you only sit when you want to sit, you’ll only know the part of your mind that wants to sit.”  The implication was that there was another part.  And that might be the part you needed to know.

I still think that, in that feeling of fear, that feeling of reluctance, there is a kernel of wisdom.  The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, a famous teaching says.  That fear is connected with that joy—joy is the act of feeling that fear—and it’s all connected with the fact of what we don’t know.  Human beings have a wish to know that can never ultimately be satisfied.

We need to leave it unsatisfied.

[1] My brother-in-law is autistic, and it is primarily because of him that we are staying at our cabin in Asheville for self-isolation, though it turns out this is a wonderful place to be.  He has had to give up his job bringing in carts at the supermarket, and it takes him a long time to get started in the morning, so we have him report here at 11:00, and he begins his day by doing some walking on our property, since he’s no longer walking at work.  Then he and I get together and talk, and I read from a Buddhist teaching, and then we sit for 20 minutes.

[2] At the IMS retreats—in contrast to Zen sesshins–there was a schedule for the day, but you weren’t required to follow it.  You could sit in the dining hall and drink tea all day if you wanted.