Change

My zen teacher has as her email signature a play on a Martin Luther King, Jr quote. Her version is "the arc of practice is long but it bends toward awakening."

Recently, I had a rich conversation with anti-rebel.org about what exactly we are "waking up to" in this practice of meditation/mindfulness/zazen. One of the points I made in our talk was the "fungibility of personhood," and how the practice can help us relax around the rigid ideas about ourselves and who we need to be in the world.

I kind of like that, and I think another way of putting it is that not only can we change, but if we are paying any sort of attention to our lives, we "wake up" to the fact that we do nothing but change.

We are too close to ourselves to really notice or take stock of how our own goalposts tend to move down the field of being, or how our face changes over time. I liken it to the inverse of seeing relatives with children a handful of times per year; you really notice how much growth happens in kids over the course of a few months if you aren't witness to it every day. We are with ourselves constantly, so it makes sense to me that we miss some of our fundamental shifts in being in the relentless flux of our material reality. As much as our families, friends, and culture at large wants us to remain as fixed data points, personally speaking, growth is the goal of my journey, and unless we permit ourselves the grace to let go of who we used to be, that growth is never allowed to happen.

Maybe then my practice is to let go of what I think that change needs to be or look like, or perhaps it is to get my "self" out of the way in order to allow this change to unfold naturally and fully, and to avoid engaging in a bunch of fear and resistance to the immutable fact of erosion and decay. To just relax into being and shift away from "doing".

The doing tends to take care of itself if you can first be with the being. Everything is a relationship, and relationships are dynamic interactions that build over time. I'm old enough to remember when being a "flip-flopper" was a political liability. To permit oneself to change one's position dependent upon where the facts take you is in my mind, a mark of integrity and intelligence, not duplicitousness. Adhering to an ethic of fidelity to the evidence should not be considered a liability or a flaw. Instead we prize the relentless dogmatism of ideals, irrespective of how corrosive, or merely rhetorical, they prove to be. So long as the candidate stays on message and in step with the party, all is well. Focusing on the future is generally considered more important than reflecting on the path that brought us to this point. The past--a concept that falls apart under holistic analysis--is relegated and reduced to a term of art. We call it "history," and consider it a promenade reserved solely for established members of the academy, not for regular folks like you and I.

However, ignoring the actions of yesterday makes it all the more likely that the mistakes of that day will be repeated. To borrow from the Stoics "For this is what makes us evil--that none us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect only upon that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past."

Allowing yourself to consciously separate from the relentless and inexorable flow of time in order to drop into a space in which the expectation is to just sit may seem like a useless waste of the limited time we do get in this world. I no less invite you to try it, though, and to see it through when it gets unbearable.

It may change your life, if your self lets it.