“When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.” SHUNRYU SUZUKI
You know, there are stories within stories, at least that’s how it is for me. I like to try and include as much as I can each time I sit down to do this thing. There are no pure colors in this life, every moment is another hue of the one from just before. I am a sucker for them.
I probably should begin this one with why I have chosen a quote from Shunryu Suzuki and its back story. In my early thirties, the world began crushing me and I was running out of answers, choking on the questions. I honestly don’t know where the idea of looking to the East came from. It certainly had a romantic, exotic feel to it. Growing up in Queens in the Fifties, it was way too early for any of that.
I was within inches of too old for the hippie, social pandemic of the mythical Sixties. In the summer of Woodstock, I was living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a humongous high-rise with a grotesquely, gargantuan chandelier in the lobby. Married, in a finely decorated apartment, with a surprise newborn now living in the beautifully appointed dining room.
After the shit hit the fan, rupturing domestic bliss forever, I started thinking about therapy. It was around the same time an interest in Zen seemingly came out of nowhere. While I may not have been in the trenches of that historic, social explosion, I was certainly in the damn neighborhood.
The Beat Generation of the Fifties, spilling over into the early Sixties, ignited an entire generation of young people, socially, intellectually, musically and yes, sexually. I was there, breathing that hypnotic air, no matter my address or circumstance.
Maybe I had this idea that if I sat on a cushion and tried to understand what the fuck the Buddha was talking about, I’d be good. In the midst of a weekly therapy session, followed by a group therapy, emotional grope, I found myself thinking about the Buddha and what he had to say.
I don’t know. Maybe, ten years of therapy, an emotional sponge, squeezed out dry each week for fifty minutes, punched my ticket for the trip I’ve been on ever since. I remember at the start, being in my early thirties and blown away by the cataclysmic revelations, emotionally flattening me each week.
In a way, decent therapy allows you to redraw the map of your life, both going forward and back. In the process of thinking about the world I wanted for myself and how to make sense of it, the Buddha would very quietly and unobtrusively sit right next to me. He never made a big fuss, because there was no need.
I am so incredibly grateful that my mind and heart have found a life long chess partner. We always play to a draw. The answers to the biggest questions you could possibly think of are an enigma for now and always. The vocabulary for this journey is in a language of the heart, felt, but never meant to be understood.
None of this stuff was a big deal to me. It was just something that subtly inhabited my thoughts and guided how I traveled on this life map of mine. It is still kind of secret, in that I don’t walk around and talk about it at all. What for?
Then, my grandson was born. The quote from Shunryu Suzuki that birthed this story has everything to do with him. Only recently, I told him my job was to stay out ahead of him until he catches up. I don’t think he’d mind if I said I’m guessing a lot at what might help him frame the world he has begun painting for himself. So, I looked for a quote from this author.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is like an introductory bible to the world of Zen, certainly leaving you with more questions than answers, tranquilly mesmerized in the process. I have recently asked my grandson if he’d like the book, so it has been on my mind anyway.
I am one of these idiots who wonders why he is here, or why anyone is here, for that matter. Are we here to build skyscrapers? Make millions? Get laid? Save the world? I think we live on two stages and it’s important to keep the shows separated. One of the terms Suzuki used is Big Mind and Small Mind.
I think when you’re able to pretty much understand that idea, you start moving into the territory of One Mind, the ultimate interrelatedness of all things for all time.
Honestly, the idea of thinking you are separate from anything at all just means you haven’t learned to gracefully cross between those two stages. The border between them is incredibly porous. Maybe, the distinction even wears thin with the passage of time, at least it’s the experience for yours truly.
We spend so much time acquiring knowledge about so many things, but often leave ourselves for last. We never learn about ourselves in school, do we? The better we get to know ourselves, the less our bodies feel like prison, trying to crush the suffering that is so much a part of all our lives.
Part of the journey of time brings us back full circle when everything was brand new and had no names or history. If we are afforded the luxury of punching our own ticket, I am guessing we meet ourselves in that split second between now and not, where everything is so new, there aren’t even words for it yet and never will be.
So, the story of the quote, is the story of my journey, is the story of what I want for my grandson, is the story of why I write.
I know enough of myself to know it is an endless process, peeling away layer after layer of encumbered expectations. Sitting on the cushion each morning, I meet myself yet again, each breath an introduction and an embrace.
The photograph is my dear friend, Eiju, a very close relative of the Buddha. However, that is yet another story and a marvelous one. I have been blessed to know them both.