Just Being There

Appreciating the brilliant dullness of everyday life

Cathedral Grove

The basic fuel burning at the core of zen practice is the desire to experience reality directly. That means removing all distractions and forms of escape, and cutting through our ideas and opinions about life. What do you see when you let go of all your formulations and fancy interpretations, and genuinely just pay attention?

I think most of us want to be present to our experience, but we do it in a selective and inconsistent way. We operate under the impression that certain parts of our life are worth paying attention to, and others aren’t, and we want to get the latter over with as efficiently and obliviously as possible, so we can get to the interesting bits.

That’s why you (hopefully) don’t scroll your phone while you’re having sex, or bring your laptop to a nice restaurant so you can watch Netflix as you eat: because those activities are deemed worthy of presence and attention in a way that, say, sitting in a doctor’s waiting room until you get called in for your appointment, or riding the bus home from work simply isn’t. We’re not expected to really enjoy or want to be present for experiences like that, because they’re filler, mundane, the kinds of things we only do because we’re waiting for or on our way to something more meaningful or special.

When you take up zen practice, though, you’re confronted with the reality that, whether it’s an enjoyable part that you want to savour and don’t want to end, or a miserable part that you’re really scandalized by having to experience at all, and just want to get over with as soon as possible, it’s all your life, and there’s really no other way to live it than to be there. We know that being present feels better than being distracted, even if the thing we’re present for isn’t inherently enjoyable. Avoidance and escape are survival strategies, I guess, but they wear away at us over time—weaken our resolve and deplete our actual aliveness. So the religious life is really just a life that embraces and tries to be present for all the details—not just the fun, delicious, exciting ones, but the dull, humble, everyday ones as well.

One of the ways to reset your approach to paying attention is to practice meditation. When you meditate, you’re truly just sitting there: completely silent and still, eyes open, fully encountering reality in all of its glorious boringness. You can really feel the time pass when there’s no phone to reach for, no one next to you to talk to, no music or podcast playing in the background. On the one hand, it’s dull as hell. Just plain, bare existence. On the other, you awaken to how truly rich and captivating everyday existence can be: wherever you are when you’re meditating, you’ll come to notice all sorts of odd sounds, smells, weird ideas and memories, shifting patterns of breath. The world of your everyday experience, even without the additives of background music, screens, company, and other distractions, is vibrating with depth and detail.

On retreat once a zen teacher told me that we don’t meditate to become better meditators, but to have a better life. We get this by learning to pay better attention to, and more fully accepting, all of our experiences, to stop sorting everything into good and bad. Attention is a muscle, and we train in meditation so we can be more attentive and engaged with our life all the time. If you can sit still and pay attention for 30 minutes while doing nothing in meditation, the normally boring parts of your life off the meditation cushion will eventually come to seem that much more intriguing and inviting to be present with. When you meditate enough, you learn to stop wishing away the unexciting parts of your life, and to fully engage with and appreciate them instead. That’s a basic, accessible version of realization.

And so awakening, in zen, is something very simple and bare. There’s no rapture, no visions, no special insights. It’s more like a kind of profound sobriety: you realize you don’t actually need any of the those things, and that reality itself is, in effect, miraculous: startlingly beautiful and bright, even at the absolute dullest and most depressing times. We miss that so much of the time because we’re too busy rushing towards something more stimulating, trying to get away from the unwanted parts, always turning away from life itself. Right practice means realizing there’s no escape.