No Patience
The other morning I was trying to hurry my son and get him out to kindergarten. He had, of course, other plans. He needed to finish building his train, which involved completing the long tracks all over the living room floor. He was really working hard, but I had things to do.
More than that, he was still in his pajamas and hadn’t had breakfast yet. With each track piece he laid down, I felt a little more anxious, and reminded him that we had to get a move on.
At one point, he stopped his building, turned around and looked up at me: “Dad, is it really so hard to have patience?” He held my gaze for a moment, and then returned to what he had been doing.
I closed my eyes and in my mind bowed down to him, my five year old enlightened teacher.
Of course there are times when we cannot linger over play or coffee, and we have to meet deadlines and appointments. Others may depend upon us. In each case we need to assess the moment fully, a moment without any precedent, and decide what the best thing to do is.
What is the most helpful thing in this moment? How can I meet this moment with wisdom and inner balance? To know what is needed, we need to first not know. This means we can’t presume to already know what the situation is, and who the players are.
Each Moment Is Unique
I can't simply superimpose the solution for another situation onto this one. In another way of looking at it, we need to know and not to know at the same time. We know the externals - the names of the place and the people but as a new moment in time, with a new combination of conditions, we also don‘t know what this unique situation requires.
We can let go of prior judgments and embrace the unique circumstance with interest. We investigate, even if the outer reality seems very familiar. If nothing more, you are inhaling new breaths, and you can turn your awareness to those.
On September 11, 2001, when the twin towers were burning, the governor of New York at the time, Rudolf Guiliani, famously said while witnessing the event, “We’re in unchartered waters now.”
The attacks put the world into a sense of being in a totally unique - albeit terrible - moment of time. As people committed to a mindful spiritual practice, we are aware that every moment is in truth like this. At times terrible, or joyful, or quiet, or frantic, or sad, or whatever.
Waking Up
We don’t need to wait for the huge blows to wake us up from our slumber, but instead attempt to practice wakefulness in every moment.
The word Buddha means one who is awake, and so to follow a Buddhist path is to receive every moment as a moment of awakening. Each moment is an alarm clock going off, reminding us to wake up to the here and now. Think of it as a mindfulness bell, so that each time the phone rings or a car horn honks, you are gently invited to come back to your breath and your present awareness.
By habit we reach our self-grasping arm over to hit the snooze button, and relax back into our comfort zones. We can continue in that pattern, of shutting down to the birth of this moment, or we can strive to awaken again and again to each sudden breath.
On the door to my meditation room the Zen evening prayer is hanging to remind me:
Let me respectfully remind you
Life and death are of supreme importance
Time quickly passes by
Strive to awaken, awaken
Do not waste your life.
On that other morning my son reminded me of my ability to awaken to the moment at hand - but only when I’m not in a rush to get through it and meet some other time I believe is more important. What is truly more important than the real moment we are living now?
The others will come in their due time, and they will then be the most important moments of our lives. It continues like that endlessly, from one most-important-moment of your life, to another.
Don’t waste a single one, for that special opportunity, or invitation, to awakening will be forever gone. We can have the same open attitude to all our experiences, the easy and the hard, as Katagiri Roshi encourages us, “Your problems are Buddha’s gift to you.”
The hard moments demand a presence and awareness from us that can often be glossed over during the good times. In this way they are gifts of mindfulness, demanding all of our attention and investigation. Check them out fully, and discover the insight which is embedded in them.
If nothing more, our painful times make us more sensitive to a world which involves a lot of suffering. We know the First Noble Truth which the Buddha first taught, that of life being difficult, first-hand.
The Perfections
In Mahayana Buddhism there are six qualities, called perfections, that are characteristic of the spiritual life, and which we aspire to develop: patience, generosity, morality, energy, meditation, and wisdom.
The first of these, and the ground of all the others, is patience. We can develop all these wonderful qualities only when we are willing to be with the times that they seem weak or absent. That takes great patience.
When we truly practice patience, however, it is not waiting calmly for something to happen, but it is the commitment we make to be present.
Patience is the letting go of wanting something other than what I have right now before me. I turn to my present moment with full attention, and in that turning I practice infinite patience. Where else should I be? And, when we do practice mindfulness of the present moment in all its manifestations, is it really so hard to be patient?