Sylvia Boorstein - Making Friends with the Present Moment

CONTENTS

Making Friends with the Present Moment

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, teachers save their pith instructions for their final breath in this life. As theyre dying, with their final exhalation, they utter the culmination of their understanding. Many years ago, a friend recounted a story shed heard from a Zen practitioner whose teachers final utterance was, Thank you very much; I have no complaints.

I admire that. I would like to have that as my final utterance. It would be a great statement about wisdom to be able to leave this life saying, I have no complaints. To complain would be to think that things could have been different. The fundamental wisdom we seek to connect with is that things are the way they are as a result of myriad causes and conditionsthings are what they are; we do what we can; and we work with what weve got. Thank you very much; I have no complaints.

I sometimes remind students, Try not to duck. Try to see the truth of your experience right now. Try to be there. When we are in contention with the moment, we push it away and then we dont see it clearly. When we see things clearly, we can usually figure them out. And when we see things cordially, or at least when we allow ourselves to see them this way, then theyre not distorted by our liking or not liking. Another way of putting this is, Lets see the truth of every moment and lets see it without contention.

Dealing with the Unexpected

As human beings, we are always subject to loss, personal and communal. We all experience the loss of our own body as we get older and, in some form, the loss of our friends, our hopes, and our dreams. In a certain way, we are always accommodating loss, from the beginning to the end of our life. I try to cultivate a mind that accommodates in a gracious way so that it has energy left to connect with benevolence. I think this is the key to being able to make it to the end of my life in a way that is warm, lively, energetic, and useful.

So many things are problematic in society and in the world. I heard a local news bulletin saying that engineers are currently working on plans to build dikes all around the inside of San Francisco Bay in preparation for the melting of the ice cap. I heard that while I was driving. And as soon as I heard it, I started to drive a little more tensely. Its not something thats going to happen very soon, but its an awesome thing to think about. We live in awesome times. But times have always been awesome for whoever was living in any historical period.

I want to tell you a contemporary story of difficult timesof financial insecurity, of economic stress, of so many people losing their jobsand of the relevance of understanding, wisdom, and practice in meeting those challenges. A friend of mine, my age, expecting to retire, and a longtime meditation practitioner, had all of her money invested with Bernie Madoff. I learned of this a week or two after the news broke that Bernie Madoff had lost all of his investors money.

I contacted her and we went out to lunch together. I really wanted to find out how she was and how she was dealing with this. She said, Well, Im really frightened because this is my entire life savings. My friends told me it was foolish to put all my eggs in one basket. But every month in my statement I saw how the profits were going up, and Madoff seemed to be a person of great repute who was doing wonderful things. Id not only invested my life savings from all the work Ive done, but Id also entrusted him with the small inheritance from my parents that I was saving for my children. My partner doesnt earn a lot of money. Here I am at seventy-two. I havent got a lot of time to work. How am I going to make it?

I asked, How did you feel the moment you got the phone call? She said, Well, the moment I got it, I didnt understand it. Someone called me and said that this is what had happened, and I couldnt believe it. They had to tell me several times; it just didnt go in. Finally it did go in. I got it, and I got terrified. Its like the whole bottom fell out of my world. I got frightened. Id get up in the middle of the night and think, What am I going to do, and how am I going to take care of myself and my partner for the rest of my life?

We talked like that for a while, and then she said, You know, the only thing I didnt get was angry. I didnt get angry, because I thought, Its extra. I have enough problems in my mind and in my life without getting angry; anger is extra. And who would I get angry at? Am I going to get angry at Bernie Madoff? Hes not like a real personhes something elseI cant get mad at Bernie Madoff. Should I be mad at the Securities and Exchange Commission for not having enough oversight? Should I be mad at everybody who worked for Madoff, who didnt report him earlier? Should I be mad at myself? I am mad at myself when I think about it. My friends told me, Dont do this. But, you know, the profits looked so good on paper, and I really wanted that money and it seemed like a good thing; maybe I should be mad at myself. The thing is, I just knew all the time that mad was the last thing I needed. Im just barely making it as it is.

Then she said, I couldnt have done this without all the years of practice. I just know that anger is not going to do me a bit of good. I need all my wits about me to figure out how to do the rest of my life. If Im confused by anger, that isnt going to be helpful.

This story is exactly relevant to our times, and its exactly relevant to every time. I think our practice is about cultivating the kind of mind thats able to say, Whoa, I didnt foresee this, and it isnt what I wanted, and its what I got, and Im going to have to figure out what to do next, and I dont know how. But I need to keep my wits about me so that somehow, so long as I dont let my mind become clouded with confusing energies, Ill be able to do it.

I take a lot of courage from this story, because if she was able to do that in her circumstance, maybe Ill be able to do it in another circumstance, because were each going to have our particular challenge sooner or later, one way or another.

The Buddhas Last Words

According to the Pali Canon, the earliest compendium of the life and teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni, the Buddhas last words of his final sermon before he died were: Transient are all conditioned things. Strive on with diligence. I like that a lot. It reminds me of impermanence. Things pass. With very difficult times, when the mind or the body may be very much in pain, it helps when we have the awareness that however painful this moment is, it will change.

Were always dealing with shock. We lose a job; we lose a love relationship; someone we care for dies; or something in our own body goes wrong. After a while, even if things arent better, we get over the shock. At that point, understanding the transient nature of things can buoy up the mind.

I think about transience in terms of contingency. Things happen and, as a result, other things happen. We need the understanding of impermanence. And we need the understanding of contingency, of interconnection, that things happen because other things happen. This is the meaning of karma. Finally, we need to have the insight that suffering is the tension in the mind when it is unable to accommodate the truth of our experience of impermanence and contingency.