on (not) wasting time

I awoke at about 3:45 this morning and lay awake.

Without going into detail, there are things bothering me. It happens especially at night. While I might have some qualms about my life situation and decisions during the day, the habitual flow of activity distracts the mind and I'm not troubled. Ah, but at night...

If I look closely at what is bothersome about certain kinds of thoughts, I think it boils down to this: fear of wasting time.

This is not a concern about efficiency. Rather, when I was pressed once to come up with my idea of wisdom, I said this: "A wise person does not waste his time."

What did I mean?

One image that stays pressed in my mind is from watching an interview on CBC television. Evan Solomon was interviewing a former hit-man for the American mob, now living under an assumed identity in an undisclosed location. The hit-man, possibly in his 60s, was matter-of-fact and not shy about talking about his life of crime. He described a few of the murders he had committed--things like shooting someone in the back of the head from the back seat of a car. Once, when shooting someone on his doorstep, he also shot a woman who lived in the same house and who turned out to be a nun.

"Do you regret that one?" said Evan.

"Oh yeah. That's the only one I regret."

By that he meant that all the other victims were also mobsters: guys on the inside who had assumed the risk of getting whacked if they stepped out of line in certain ways. But it turned out he also had regrets over all. Toward the end of the interview, Evan asked him how he would sum up his career.

"A wasted life," the man said.

He said it in the same matter-of-fact way, but I sensed his pain and regret. With those three words he had passed the most damning judgment possible on himself.

I'm not a hit-man, not a mobster. I've done bad things, and from time to time continue to do bad things. But I think the issue of wasting life is not purely a matter of ethics. It arises from a sense that life matters, and that how we spend it matters. Ethics is part of that, but it's not the whole issue. Our mission is not simply to keep our souls pure, but to engage with life in a way that makes full use of our faculties and our uniqueness. Time slips by, and every moment counts. Somehow, it's the very unforced nature of our decisions that puts a heavy responsibility on us.

When I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey in 2002, I slept the deep, peaceful, restful sleep of one who had no second thoughts about what he was doing with his life. I knew I was not wasting my time; I was using it to the max.

Now I'm not sure. I'm not plugged in to a structure that has already been given meaning by someone else, so to speak. I'm completely responsible for the meaning of my own life now, and sometimes, well, it keeps me up at night.

enjoy your life

Here I was puttering through my morning, puzzling a little over how there seemed not much to do. Then I remembered my blog. Oh yeah--I'm supposed to do a blog-post!

I'm in semi-vacation mode (the mode I go into when Kimmie is in actual vacation mode). No alarm-clock, no fixed requirements on my day. To be sure, I'm lying awake in the night for long stretches, more than I usually do during regular "working" times. I put that down to particular circumstances in my life at the moment rather than anything to do specifically with being on "vacation". Jesus counseled us to be carefree--as have other spiritual teachers. At Gampo Abbey a quote from Suzuki Roshi was photocopied and hung on various walls to pop into one's view unexpectedly as one went about the day: "Enjoy your life."

Enjoy your life. Good idea--why not? For us monks and nuns, leading a disciplined, vegetarian, sex- and drug-free lifestyle, it was wonderful advice, and very accessible. Speaking for myself, I would have to say that my time at the Abbey was perhaps the most enjoyable of my life--in many ways. Certainly there were times when I experienced a greater depth of joy there than I have anywhere else.

Suzuki Roshi was pointing, I think, to the idea that enjoyment of one's life is more a matter of choice or attitude than of circumstance. Whatever's happening, why not enjoy it? What's the alternative? And why would you prefer that alternative? You can feel hard done by, ripped off, and cheated--and maybe in some sense you have been cheated. Well--what of it?

I think about Epictetus, the philosopher-slave of the 2nd century AD. How we respond to any situation is up to us: a tyrant can send me into exile, but he can't force me to be uncheerful about it.

Life might be a horror--but don't people pay to see horror movies? Our love of story proves that we recognize deep down that life is in some sense a problem--an unending series of problems. And yet I feel ripped off when I face problems in my own life, as though they shouldn't be there.

But do they have to be so hard?

Years ago on Saturday Night Live there was a sketch done in the form of a late-night movie, some low-budget Italian show about Hercules that had been dubbed poorly into English. A pot-bellied, cigarette-smoking, middle-aged Hercules was going about his labors. One of his labors was to lift a boulder. He strains at it briefly, then says, "That rock is too heavy. Perhaps I can lift a lighter one."

Yes, maybe I can lift a lighter rock. But somehow, this seems to be the one I've actually got in front of me.

who are we?

As established in yesterday's post, I never have only one project on the go. What else, then, have I got going besides a massive novel (and intended sequels thereto)?

One project, I suppose potentially a nonfiction book, is a more or less directed inquiry into my own beliefs. What do I believe? What do I think is true?

I remember reading, years ago, I think in an astrological text by Zipporah Dobyns, that it is a good idea to discover what one's beliefs are, to bring them from the darkness of unconsciousness into conscious awareness. Twenty years later I'm still working on it.

Who knew that this task would be so difficult? It is much complicated by the fact that, as the painter Robert Henri put it,

Most folks don't think what they think they think.

He's pointing to our capacity for self-deception. For while we tend to deceive others more or less all the time, or at least conceal our true thoughts from them, the issue of self-deception is less obvious, and indeed impossible to discover without outside help. It doesn't have to be professional help: other people are well able to act as mirrors for our self-deceptions. Others can see clearly where we're kidding ourselves, as we can see where they're kidding themselves.

The specific project I'm now working on is centered around the question of identity, and my working title for it is Who Are We? Who are we? I find this question provocative, mysterious, koan-like.

And indeed in a sense it's a very Buddhist question. Buddhist analysis shows that the root of all our suffering in life is one thing: what we call our ego, or the thing denoted by the word I. Then it instructs us to isolate this I to discover what exactly it is.

The Buddha's answer is that if you look long and hard enough, you will discover that there is no I. What we call I is a shifting collection of thoughts that exist first of all for convenience, and then become a matter of intense emotional attachment. When we look very closely, we find that everything we think I is, it isn't--and that it isn't anything other than these things either. It's a movie projected on mist.

Very well. I'm prepared to accept that the ego, the I, has no ultimate existence. It's not for me to contradict a wisdom tradition of 2,500 years' standing, or the teachings of a practice that has brought me so much personal benefit. But how about on the relative level? My keyboard and coffee-mug don't have any ultimate existence either, besides being a temporary agglomeration of atoms in a particular configuration. Nonetheless, for practical purposes, in those configurations they have existence and usefulness. As my teacher Sangpo at shedra, the monastic college at Gampo Abbey, taught us, relative truth is not so much in dispute, because it's all a matter of convention and convenience anyway. These are the things that are true essentially by agreement, rather than in the nature of things. If we argue over whether a certain thing is or is not a coffee-mug, for instance, it's really just an argument over a definition--not over the essence of anything.

All right. But in purely conventional terms, can I define what I am? Can I discover how I, and how we all, use what we all call I as the basis for our actions? What do I think I mean when I use it?

In writing my story for The Mission, I came to see the issue of identity, especially as it manifests in what we now call identity politics, as a key thematic strand. Why do "my people" hate "your people"? What's going on there? Why do we care about the fortunes of our local hockey team, even when its members hail from Sweden and Finland rather than anywhere nearby? Why do thousands get depressed if the team loses against "them"? Isn't that peculiar?

These questions are just a few bite-sized samplers of what got me involved in a parallel nonfiction project--a work of philosophy, really.

I have other projects too--but more of that perhaps another time.

restless attention

I never have only one project on the go. I'm not like, say, Kimmie, who can keep at a single activity almost indefinitely. Up in her sewing-room, her "mad scientist's lab" as we call it, putting together patterns, fabrics, and trim for Barbie clothes (or as she now calls them, "11.5 FD clothes"--meaning 11.5-inch fashion dolls, the technical term), Kimmie can go all day, pausing only reluctantly for meal-breaks. (It helps that I provide room service for hot drinks and, later, wine.)

Not me. I tire of things. The activity of which I'm capable of the most sustained effort is reading, and the utmost I can manage there is about three hours. I can rarely read from a single book for longer than an hour, no matter how interesting I find it. It palls on me; my mind wanders and I feel overfed. I need a change.

For a long time I saw this trait as a sign of native dilettantism. If you can't focus on any one thing for any length of time, how can you achieve anything meaningful?

When I attended the Vajradhatu Buddhist Seminary in the Colorado Rockies in 1994, my meditation instructor was Ruth Astor, an elderly woman (who has since died) of, I believe, the famous American Astor family, which became prominent through the fur trade and New York real estate. A former filmmaker and veteran of the three-year meditation retreat, the pinnacle program for Vajrayana students, she was one of the instructors of the seminary, and developed a special fondness for me over the course of the 11-week program. One day I expressed to her my worries about this shifting attention of mine, how I couldn't stick with any one project. Her answer was immediate: "You need to organize your space so you can grab whatever you want to work on at that moment."

She didn't see my restless attention as any kind of problem in itself; she saw the issue only as one of setting up my office space. (She also predicted that I would be famous.)

I have tried to keep her advice in mind. The advent of the PC has made things a lot easier. Now I have folders for my various projects and ideas, and I can shift between them at will with a few keystrokes.

But still I worry. For as new ideas arise, new projects crop up, the old ones get muscled aside. They become the runts of the litter that can't make their way to a teat, and they shrivel and starve. I'm the sow lying on her side, unconcerned with the accumulating corpses of my farrow, because I'm always interested in the latest, and there's always plenty more where they came from.

In short, I write the way I read: with more or less intense concentration applied in short bursts. And as you can tell from the growing reading-list in the sidebar of this blog, I always have several books on the go, and many of these lapse unfinished. My interest and attention move on, and I need new inputs; the old ones die away, perhaps to be picked up another day.

Rarely do I commit to finishing the reading of a book. I can't stand the slog of continuing to read material that I have lost interest in, that I am continuing to read only because of an artificial decision to reach the end. I like to trust the wayward horse of my interest to find its own way. Because, even as it continually changes direction, it's always going somewhere. And I'd rather be animated by the passion of the present moment than by a promise made in the past.

But while this noncommittal, devil-may-care approach seems harmless in reading, I feel more anxious about applying it to writing--my creative output. Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge the pattern is there. Just as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list: there are a lot of unfinished works lying dead at the roadside. I have to take solace from the fact that, as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list, there are also finished works. I do finish reading some books, and I can even say that I also, sometimes, finish writing them.

At this stage, that's just going to have to do.

An interesting side-note: Three-year-retreats are conducted not in complete solitude, but in small groups. (The actual length of the retreat is three years, three months, and three days.) One of Ruth Astor's fellow retreatants was Migme, an ordained nun and one of the senior residents at Gampo Abbey, who had spent her working career as a paleobotanist. When I was a temporarily ordained monk at the Abbey in 2002, Migme, well into her 70s, was my meditation instructor. I remember how she teared up in recollection when I mentioned that Ruth Astor had been my MI at Seminary. As with Ruth, I felt that I had a special connection with Migme. It feels very significant to me, as well as profoundly fortunate, that I have had a deep and beneficial spiritual connection with these two women.

May I live up to the teachings I have received from them!

boneless tongues

I probably need to make a lifestyle adjustment in order to get back to writing. As time goes on, I will need to make a regular place for paying work, and right now that's sitting right smack in my usual writing period of the day. In the past I have bumped my writing period to first thing in the morning, over my morning coffee, but this is not my preference; it has the flavor of duress. Of course the problem of creation vs. earning has always been central to many artists' lives.

In some sense I'm not (yet) too exercised about my long tarrying at chapter 30, since the problems I have been tussling with in it--and solving--reach far beyond the confines of that chapter. On the other hand, no matter how slowly this train moves, I don't feel comfortable when it's just sitting at the station.

For the time being, over my morning coffee, I'm keying notes from A Study of History, volume 1, by Arnold J. Toynbee, and from A History of Israel, volume 1, by Theodore H. Robinson. I continually ingest more research books and convert these slowly into typed notes for myself. I suppose this process will not end until I have polished my last draft for the last time. Indeed, the only thing that will probably end it will be the taking up of reading for my next project, whatever that might be.

Yes, folks, I love reading. I always have loved it, and a day in which I don't read is both rare and, for me, feels rather wasted. I feel that I've cheated myself of what I love the most.

When I was first exposed to Buddhist thought while traveling in 1979--in the form of books, of course: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and The Way of Zen by Alan Watts--I discovered that conceptual knowledge, the kind derived from books, can never lead one to an accurate relationship with reality. I found this to be both liberating and disappointing. Liberating, because it seemed to confirm a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction in trying to learn the truth from books. Disappointing, because I felt that what I had always loved to do was now, in some sense, a waste of time.

This tension followed me in the ensuing years. When I took up meditation in 1986 I learned again that enlightenment can never be attained conceptually; it can only be a matter of direct experience. Nonetheless, the meditation center offered courses in which books were studied, and this type of study was encouraged. I latched on to it and studied dharma books--along with my regular diet of reading, which I never gave up.

Luckily, as I progressed in my Buddhist practice and studies, I became more relaxed about the role of reading. While concepts were still regarded as a faulty and incomplete way of knowing, they were still essential for the student. The real problem was in clinging to concepts: solidifying them as "true" and thereby creating stumbling-blocks for oneself.

I remember attending a dharma talk given by the late Tibetan teacher Jamgon Kongtrul in Vancouver. He was a young man (soon to die in a car crash in India). As I recall, the teachings were on the bardo--the "in-between" state that we inhabit between successive births. In the Tibetan teachings, a number of vivid, phantasmagoric events happens to us in this state. The question came up as to whether such experiences were real or not.

Jamgon Kongtrul responded that "these experiences are beyond duality, so you can call them real or unreal, just as you please."

This struck me. On the one hand it seemed annoying and irritating that there was not a clear answer as to whether something was real or not. But on the other, I felt power being placed in my hands--in the hands of all of us. Whether we call something real or not, in any given situation, is for us to decide. How we term things, how we see them, how we choose to respond, is a power that always lies with us. Even "reality" is situational: something that is useful in one moment, but not in the next.

I recalled another thing I had read, a commentary by some Zen master on the enigmatic statements of another master: "His tongue has no bone." At first it was a baffling image, but soon it clicked: our boneless tongues can move any which way. They're not constrained or forced by anything; they are not limited; they are free. Free to say "real" one moment, and "unreal" the next.

When I was at the shedra or monastic college at Gampo Abbey in 2002 I did lots of reading and writing--more than I did meditating. There we were taught to regard study itself as a practice, like meditation, undertaken with discipline and a certain attitude. We were still taught that a buddha's mind is free of concepts, like a cloudless sky. But I was and I remain skeptical of this. As far as I was concerned, if a buddha was using words, he was using concepts. It seemed to me people were too eager to usher concepts out the door, like unwanted relatives at a party.

But then again, what does it matter? We can call them concepts or not, just as we please.

my people

Forward progress on The Mission has slowed lately. On the one hand I have copywriting to do--and therewith the earning of (some of) my keep. On the other I have problems with my story, and with the world of my story, that I'm still working out. These things combined have brought the course of my stream, which has never been a torrent, to the stillness of a lake. Now I'm just poling the raft along, searching for the outlet so I can resume my journey to the sea.

Last night on CBC's Sunday Night was a segment on monasticism among young women in Canada and around the world. I watched with much interest, since I was myself, briefly, an ordained Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton. The segment specifically focused on the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary in Michigan, whose convent was founded 10 years ago. According to the report, the average age of a Canadian nun is 74, but this convent is filled with young women who have turned to a life of poverty and chastity in order to commune with God.

Kimmie and I were both impressed with the convent and with the girls. As I recall, the convent houses about 90 nuns, of which nine are from Canada. All the ones that appeared on the show were young, and it was clear that the convent was not a dumping-ground for unmarriageable Catholic daughters, but a destination of choice for thinking and spiritually aware girls who had many other options open to them.

I found myself identifying with these girls as they talked about wanting to do something meaningful with their lives, and enter into the question of why they were born and why they are here. Some of them had given up athletic and political ambitions, and all of course are giving up aspirations of having a family of their own--as well as personal possessions.

I recognized the "feel" and the attitude among the nuns, for I venture to say that the monastic experience is probably not too different between the different spiritual traditions. When the girls get up to pray to God, it's not so different from the morning gathering of the Buddhist monks and nuns to chant and meditate before breakfast. Each person there has made a definite, conscious decision to orient his or her life around a spiritual discipline, and has implemented that decision fully. It's an extraordinarily powerful basis for a community. While Buddhists don't refer to their ultimate reality as God, they share with the Catholics an intent to live in accord with ultimate reality, and their discipline and their behavior are probably not very different. They lead spare, unadorned, mutually supporting lives.

The girls interviewed were in no way sanctimonious or zealous. Their speech had a soft, heartfelt, and candid quality that I recognized from my own monastic experience. These are not people who "can't cut it" in secular life, but rather people who have perceived the emptiness and unfulfillingness of many worldly goals, and who have decided to do something about it. The Buddhist monastics I knew included bond traders, zoo-keepers, scientists, athletes, and nurses.

While I don't think that monastic life is for everyone, I had a strong feeling while watching the segment that the world needs people who have had monastic discipline--as many of them as it can get. We need selfless people who take a long, deep view of things and speak from the heart. We need spiritual people as much now as we ever have, and maybe more.

Yes, as I watched these young novices and nuns I had the feeling that I was again among "my people".