Therefore, put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away and your original face will manifest.
Dogen Zenji (1200-1253AD)
Did you ever pause at any time in your life and wonder what the hell you are doing here? I recall having hard to describe thoughts like that throughout my life. Am I here for some reason that has yet to make itself known? I sometimes try and make sense of my life in a world that makes none. It can wear out your mind, especially if you cling to it a bit too tightly.
I have been writing pretty consistently for at least six years, from the time I started my memoir to my grandson, Shane, “Halloween in Portland”. After the book, I wrote my way over to my blog, mindandthemotorcycle.com and I have been at it for a couple of years. There were so many things I could write about, including a ton of life experiences and assorted opinions on most everything. It was like waking up and suddenly finding an outlet for anything that has been banging around my head for decades, from silence to sound, from an empty page to one covered in words.
I am not sure when i started to think I was running out of ideas to share. It could also be a cycle that runs its course and starts all over again, like concentric circles of introspection. To me, writing has been and continues to be about mining my soul. The deeper I dig, the closer I get to the main artery, the heart of it all, but that is life’s great illusion. It’s like dancing around a whirl pool and at some point, you simply let go and are drawn in. There are just some questions that don’t have the answers we are looking for because they can’t, at least not in a language we can understand.
There have certainly been times in my life when I thought I had the answers, sprinkled with long periods of not thinking about stuff like that. When my marriage came apart, the dream of some kind of perfect life was shattered for ever. It was a shitty gift for my two little boys, one they would have to sort out for themselves. My anchor was ripped from its mooring and the horizon was totally unfamiliar to me.
I don’t have the vaguest idea why I gravitated to the East for inspiration, but I did. I am sure being in therapy for the majority of my thirties helped push me in that direction. It seemed like the deeper I went in trying to make sense of my life, the less I understood. I remember having emotional breakthroughs one week and tumbling into the abyss of confusion the next. I saw two shrinks during that decade. The first was a big bear of a man, who took a little too much for himself in the relationship by becoming overly important in my life. The second was less cerebral and more visceral, focusing on the physical expressions of feeling, like beating a pillow to death with a tennis racket, releasing pent up anger. It was also my first brush with spirituality, allowing magic in, disrupting the predictable. At times during our sessions, I felt like a poet shepherd, overseeing his flock in the hills of the long ago Middle East, a member of the Jewish tribe.
The East West Bookstore was located on Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. I bought Beginner’s Mind by D.T. Suzuki, a Zen primer for all. They had meditation sessions in the basement, which I attended for a while. There was something about this sitting practice that pulled me aside and got my attention. I read a little about the Buddha and felt a kind of affinity, miles away from any feelings of worship. Zen’s approach to Buddhism felt for me like a very fine strainer, allowing his Mind nuggets to slip through, blocking the trappings of anything remotely resembling religion. I will spare you my history with the discipline.
Supposedly, the Buddha wanted to understand why there was so much suffering around him, which started his journey. In some ways, he did the heavy lifting for me. These questions of mine are not new ones, but I own them as if they are. I think the idea is if you spend enough of your time with the questions, you can live the answers without understanding them.
Can you imagine if there was actually an answer to the question, What is the meaning of my life?