Recently, I went and played golf with my son. He’s a very good player, but he’s also very competitive. When things weren’t going his way on the back nine, he lost control of his emotions. As we unpacked that experience, I introduced him to a technique called “Fly on the Wall.”

I’m not sure where I got it, to be honest, but I’ve been doing it for a while. Fly on the Wall is simple; all it asks you to do is to imagine you are outside of your body watching the experience from the outside. The effect is that you are able to detach yourself from your inner thoughts and understand the experience from the outside. You gain a little objectivity about the experience.

Here’s what we did:

1. I asked him to close his eyes and put himself back on the fifteenth green where everything fell apart.
2. Then, I told him to describe what he saw.
3. After he described what he saw, I asked him what he thought about it. He had some pretty negative things to say about what he saw. (This, of course, was not easy.)
4. Then, we turned it around. I asked, “That person did those things, but are you that person? Is that who your are?” He immediately said, “No.”

I was actually pretty amazed with this eleven-year-old’s answer to that last question. He knew, deep down, that his identity was not kid-who-threw-a-fit-on-the-fifteenth-green-after-missing-a-short-putt. Moreover, this exercise interrupted all the negative self-talk that he had cultivated over the course of the last few holes. Instinctively, he started to understand the beginnings of anatta, no-self. He understood that he did those things: he tossed his putter, he used unkind words, etc. But these are not what defines him. His identity is not found in a single emotional experience on the fifteenth green on a Friday afternoon.

When he opened his eyes, he smiled and said, “Dad, can you teach me to meditate?”

I've often felt like expectations were everything. They tend to color the lenses through which we see all of our experiences.

Many years ago, Natalie and I went to a Bob Dylan concert. I've seen Dylan in concert many times. While I enjoyed each show, I knew that his skills were waning. His back had been bothering him, so he'd traded his guitar and harmonica for plunking away at a keyboard. The full-throated, clear croak of his voice from the 1960s and 1970s had given way to a wheezing, groaning grind that was often unintelligible.

Yet, even with his powers diminished by the years and the miles, I still enjoyed that show in Boston because I went into it with appropriate expectations. The best I'd ever seen Dylan was when he toured with Paul Simon in support of his much-lauded Time Out of Mind. Nearly twenty years removed from that performance, I didn't expect him to have the bite and snarl that he had in the late 1990s. I didn't expect him to sound like the sneering jokester who'd screamed "Like a Rolling Stone" at the patrons of Royal Albert Hall in 1966.

I had the right expectations. The expectations we carry into something, tend to impact how we see the event.

When you enter into something — a new relationship, a new job, a new experience — try to check your expectations at the door. Let the experience be; enjoy it for what it is.

Recently, Brené Brown hosted Dr. Amishi Jha, author of Peak Mind, on the Dare to Lead podcast. In my house, Brené Brown is such a familiar voice and figure that we offer refer to her as "my friend Brené" or simply "my friend." For example, if I told Natalie, "I was listening to my friend's podcast today," she would know exactly who I was talking about.

Brené with Dr. Amishi Jha on Finding Focus and Owning Your Attention

A game-changing conversation about attention, focus, concentration, and mindfulness—specifically how mindfulness can literally change our levels of attention—with neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha.

Brené Brown

In this particular episode, Dr. Jha walks my friend Brené through the differences between attention, focus, and concentration. For our purposes, this isn't really important, but what is important is the myth she dispels in this podcast and in her book. Many people believe that meditation is about clearing your mind of all thoughts.

It's not.

Tell that to my anxiety-riddled thought process that's been popping off lately. As I've documented elsewhere, we are in the midst of a major life transition. As the breadwinner in the family, learning that your contract will not be renewed and you'll need to find another employer can certainly be nerve-wracking.

It's keeping me up at night. My FitBit sleep data proves it. Worse, however, than the data is the experience of it. I'm struggling to sleep because I'm just lying awake strategizing:

• How do I position myself in this interview I have later this week?
• What kinds of questions will they ask? What will my answers be?
• How do I leverage my network to create more job opportunities?

These are all great questions but not at 2:00 am.

I call this line of thinking "the thought-train." When the thought-train leaves the station, it can be really difficult to bring it back.

In situations like these, it would be great if I could empty my mind, clearing away all thinking. I want to go blank and let the thought-train disappear.

That's just not possible.

What is possible, however, is training my attention on something else. In my case, what seems to be the most helpful is counting my breaths. I simply start counting:

• INHALE = 1
• EXHALE = 2
• INHALE = 3
• EXHALE = 4

…ad infinitum…

Counting my breaths grounds me and helps me get off the thought-train. It's not easy and it takes some practice, but it definitely helps.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the one seat. Now, as I'm looking at the earth spinning again, I'm reminded of that piece. Let's account for the things that have happened here in the past few weeks:

• Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine.
• Gas prices here on the Gulf Coast have reached record highs at over $4 per gallon.
• I've been told that I won't have a position with my current employer after this academic year.

None of this is in my control. I have no influence over global events. I cannot stop the march of inflation and the collusion of OPEC. I cannot guarantee that I will always be employed.

Not everything is in my control.

What is in my control? Well, today, at this moment, I can take the one seat. I can go deeper into my meditation practice. I can focus on this moment. What is it like to be at this unique vertex in space and time?

It doesn't always feel good. Sometimes, the one seat can be painful and frustrating. This doesn't, however, mean that it isn't good. Feeling good and being good are two different things.

When we take the one seat, we lean into this, and we say, "This is enough." We say, "Life is not something happening to me. Life is happening because of me." We take a little bit of control and responsibility for what's going on.

The world continues to spin, and we hurtle through space, borne upon its surface. The universe never promised us control, but the one seat lets us take stock of what we have.

When we look earnestly at our failures, we come to understand who we really are. We get rid of the image of the self that we keep trying to build up, and we get to the root, to the truth.

The injunction to "know yourself" dates back at least to ancient Greece where it is inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Plato also puts the command in the mouth of Socrates on several occasions. It's got history. It's got gravitas.

The problem with simply knowing yourself, however, is that you have to cut through a lot of the bullshit that we build up around ourselves. We can look to social media as an analog. The lives we saw on Instagram and other popular platforms are carefully curated P.R. pieces intended to put a good foot forward.

You've got to cut through that to the core of who you really are. (Personally, I find a healthy meditation practice helpful in this regard.)

Knowing yourself, then, really means understanding your whole self, the good and the bad. Becoming acquainted with your failure, as Julian of Norwich suggests, is one way to open yourself up to the grace, compassion, and generosity necessary to live the unruly life.

Failure, after all, is the greatest teacher.

As I’ve hit forty years old and started to look toward the second half of life, I’ve been challenged to think about what creates real happiness. We spend so much of our time in early adulthood trying to make a name for ourselves. I tried to build a career as an academic and then as a teacher. I spent so many hours scheming, trying to figure out a way to improve systems so that I could build something and point to it and say, “This is my doing. Reward me.”

I smile as I write this because all I can think these days is: “What a waste of time and energy.”

Many years ago, I taught a course called The Quest. The class focused on spiritual journeys and pilgrimages. I started the course off with a reading of Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. In the story, Gilgamesh seeks immortality in a variety of ways, but he fails. So, he builds the walls of his city, Uruk, provides protection for his people, and achieves immortality through his building program (and with the help of the poet).

We can interpret this story in so many ways, but I always felt like the primary theme dealt with the futility of seeking immortality. Ironically, though, here we are, nearly 5,000 years later, still talking about him.

Gilgamesh can’t beat death, but he can practice generosity, do something for his people, and be remembered as a great and benevolent ruler.

Sometimes, though, when I read the story, I can’t help but wonder what might have been. What if Gilgamesh hadn’t wasted so much of his youth de-flowering maidens, conquering monsters, and trying to rescue his friend, Enkidu? What if he had started his rule in the same way he finished: thinking about how he could make things better for his people?

My own story — résumé-building in my 20s and 30s — mimics, in a tiny way, Gilgamesh’s story. I sought to conquer monsters and achieve some kind of immortality through my career in education. But now that I’m embarking on my fifth decade, I can see the futility in this.

Humans are not built for immortality. We are built for generosity. All of our stories tell us this, from Gilgamesh to Santa Claus to the magical empathy and warmth of Mirabel in Disney’s Encanto. The more we seek the well-being of others (and the less we focus on ourselves), the better things tend to be.

I really am fascinated by this. We vilify Gordon Gecko in Wall Street and the Roy family in Succession, but our behavior is often incredibly self-centered. Why is it that our stories center on the importance of generosity, the value of giving back, but our behavior doesn’t square with that?

It must be because of our drive to survive and the visions of the good life ingrained in us from a young age. As an American, I’m told that I can live my dream. But I’m also told that my dream should focus on luxury, on comfort, on money.

Meanwhile, The Beatles remind me that “money can’t buy me love.”

Why are we trying so hard? Why are we focusing on building wealth, on creating the perfect Instagram profile, on proving our worth through home values, stock portfolios, bank accounts?

I live in a country that saw fit to elect Donald Trump as its leader. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

But I also know that small changes can yield exponential results over time. Therefore, I try to commit myself to generosity:

• What if I assumed the best in people?
• What if I took time to offer metta to those who have wronged me?
• What if I took the time to recognize the people who have poured themselves into my life and my community?

This is a better way to live, and I think you’ll find it yields far more happiness than the pursuit of wealth and status.

Every afternoon, I pick my son up from school and drive him home. This usually happens at about 5pm. He likes to stay after school and play outside with his friends: basketball, soccer, whatever is competitive. On the way home, he’s often a little zonked from playing so hard. But I ask him: “What do you want to do when we get home?”

I ask him this question or two reasons:

1. I want to set some expectations.
2. I’m trying to solve a problem.

The problem I’m trying to solve? Well, it’s this:

How do I maximize my time with my child for optimal impact? Furthermore, how do I do this while also getting the other things done that I need to get done?

Just writing this makes me feel kind of gross. It’s clear that my afternoon routine, intended to help us have a better, more efficient evening, really just means that I’m treating my son as a problem to be solved.

I do not want to treat my child as a problem to be solved.

How did we get here?

Our culture indoctrinates us into the problem-solving mindset. It’s part of that cult of productivity I’ve been writing about.

In school, we are encouraged to be creative problem solvers. We are asked to solve problem after problem. Some problems are in the form of algebra or calculus, others are in the form of persuasive writing or historical interpretation. From kindergarten through high school, we identify problems, and we solve them. The scientific method, after all, is set up around this idea: define the problem, create a hypothesis, design the experiment, etc.

We are taught from a very early age that solving problems is valuable.

And it is! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with solving problems. No doubt, much of life is problematic, so we might as well seek some solutions to it.

That being said, to treat the people in our lives as problems to be solved is really to treat them as objects. It supplants what philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship with the I-it relationship.

We want to avoid treating people as things. Immanuel Kant would’ve called this a violation of the categorical imperative. I just call it: wrong.

What does letting go of problems look like?

This is where mindfulness comes into play. A key part of a mindful life is becoming aware of the underlying causes and desires that exist within us.

When I ask my son what he wants to do this evening, I intend to solve a problem. However, the first step in moving past this is to recognize that that’s what I’m doing. When I recognize this, I can easily then see the pattern for problem-solving that I’ve set up, and I can work to subvert it.

Step one, then, is just recognizing that you’ve turned something into a problem.

Now, you move to the next step: Is this a problem I’m trying to solve? Or is this a human being I’m trying to have a relationship with?

Sometimes, we do need to be in problem-solving mode.

• How do I get dinner ready and get you to baseball practice?
• How do we get all of our chores done and get to bed on time?

Most of the time, however, our interactions with the people we care about do not need to be treated as problems to solve because, after all, people aren’t problems to solve.

The final step in this is what I call “entering the now.” It’s a simple, but radical shift in thinking. Rather than seeing my son as a problem to solve, I see him as a now to be with. I can ask the same question of him — “What do you want to do tonight?” — but I can do it with an eye toward how I can be with him, spend time with him, enter the now with him.

It’s about intention, then.

• Is my desire to solve some problem called “what to do with these hours between school and bedtime”?
• OR…is my desire to be with my son?

The Steps

Consider the intentions behind your interactions with the people you know, the people you care about, the people you love. Do you sometimes treat time with them as a problem to be solved? If so, maybe take yourself through these steps:

1. RECOGNIZE. This is good. You’ve recognized that you’re caught in the problem-solving trap. Name it.
2. ASSESS. Is there really a problem I need to solve here? Sometimes, during holidays, for example, when we’re trying to fit many things in our calendar, we really are trying to solve a problem. If, however, we’re treating the other person as a problem, then we move to step three.
3. ENTER THE NOW. Give up on the calendar, give up on the clock, and enter the now. How can you be present with this person? What is it really like to spend time with them? To listen? To converse?

I find that when I enter the now, time flows freely, and I’m often unaware of just how much time has passed. Why? Joy, to be honest. Entering the now is like a little dose of joy, most of the time.

Each morning presents us with the opportunity to start afresh. I've found a few things that really help me get my day going. I wake up. I meditate. I do some writing. But, the thing that has really kept me grounded lately is a morning intention-setting practice that I call "Daily Note."

For this practice, I use a great note-taking app called Craft. I've combined it with an Apple Shortcut so that it automatically creates my Daily Note and links it to my calendar. It's handy, but you don't need any of that fanciness. All you need is something to take notes on: notebook, journal, some app on your phone or laptop. Up to you!

"Daily Notes" consist of three major sections:

1. Intentions & Priorities
2. Notes
3. Links

I'm not going to worry about the ladder two in this post because they are more about keeping notes throughout my day and tracking helpful things I find on the Internet...not exactly pertinent to this conversation.

So, let's zoom into "Intentions & Priorities."

Intentions & Priorities

This is a practice that I largely stole from the good folks over at Monk Manual. I love their product, but after going through a few Monk Manuals, I realized that I needed something digital.

(NOTE: I have not really been able to effectively replicate their Weekly and Monthly pages, but the Monk Manual daily pages work well for me in Craft. ALSO: I would wager that handwriting these Daily Notes would be a more effective practice, but I'm prioritizing the digital convenience...for now. Perhaps I'll go back to Monk Manual...)

In the screenshot below, you'll see the blank page.

Today's Theme

I begin with a theme for the day. Typically, this is just some sort of goal or intention. It's often something I wrote in my morning pages. Lately, I've been going back and forth between two different themes:

This. This. Just this.

This theme is a reminder to stay present. Don't worry about what's happening beyond this moment.

Let go of results.
Lean into the practice.

As I've been working on projects for It's Not Working (Yet), I've found myself leaning hard into the idea that the practice is what we need: meditation and writing practice for me. We can't worry about the outcomes of these practices; we just have to trust the process. If I "lean into the practice," then results might come. If I don't lean into the practice, however, then results certainly won't come.

Today's Priorities

In this section, I list three things that I really want to accomplish today. Sometimes, these are actual tasks: "Work on a blog post." At other times, though, they are a bit more abstract: "Enjoy today."

Whatever I want to be my priorities for the day, I write them down for the sake of writing them down; it helps me keep them firmly in mind. PLUS, since I use this document to take notes throughout the day (hence the "Notes" section mentioned above), I see them often.

Simple Questions: Gratitude and Hope

Lastly, I write down something I'm grateful for today and something I'm looking forward to.

Expressing gratitude here is like a mini metta practice. It just puts my heart in a grateful space, a space where I'd really like to live from more often, to be honest.

I started asking Gus every morning what he was looking forward to that day. This always led to fun conversations, usually about aspects of his school life that I wasn't privy to. Though I had done this dozens of times in a Monk Manual, I had stopped. I wondered why I wasn't asking myself this question anymore, so I started back up!

Taking note of what you're looking forward to creates a little bit of hopefulness. It forces us to take stock of where we're headed that day. For me, it creates a little signpost that says: "Don't be afraid by joy today. You've got good things coming up."

Here's today's final product:

That's it!

I just wanted to take an opportunity again to thank the folks at Monk Manual. Though I'm not currently using one, I've found their product valuable. I also enjoy Monk Notes, the Monk Manual blog.  Check it out!

The week after Christmas is typically one of the slowest weeks. The holiday rush is over. Aside from New Year’s Eve plans, things are remarkably chill. No sports practices, no school, no carting kids all over town.

Therefore, this morning, since I had some time on my hands, I took a moment to reflect on the practice of sitting.

When you’ve been meditating a while, sitting becomes a really pleasurable experience. If you’re new to meditation, then this might ring a bit hollow. Sitting, in the beginning, can seem torturous. Aren’t I supposed to be doing something? What am I doing here? Is that a spider crawling up my back? Crap! My legs have fallen asleep…again...

After a lot of practice, sitting takes on a new feeling. Of course, there are times when it can be frustrating, times when I can’t stop thinking about all the things that I’ve got to do later today. But, for the experienced sitter, these simply become part of the meditation: Oh, another thought about what I need to do has popped into my head. Heh. Back to the breath.

If you are having trouble getting to that space, however, sitting can feel like torment. So, I thought I’d offer you a couple of thoughts to consider as you work toward finding the peace and pleasure of sitting.

The Secret of the Serene Smile

When I begin a meditation session, I almost always have a set jaw and my tongue on the roof of my mouth. That’s tension and stress at work. The face becomes hardened. Everything's locked up. When I use a guided meditation app (Calm and Headspace are my go-to apps these days), the instructor often reminds me to soften my jaw and to let my tongue rest.

To be honest, just doing those two things — relaxing my jaw and letting gravity take my tongue down where it belongs — make a world of difference. I can feel a relaxation sweep down the rest of my body. (Instructors will often tell you to un-knit or soften your eyebrows. Also helpful! We carry a lot of tension in our eyes...)

Then, the instructor typically gives me the final piece of the puzzle to help me find the enjoyment of the moment. Different instructors will call it different things, but I call it the serene smile.

The idea is dead simple. After relaxing your jaw and ungluing your tongue from the roof of your mouth, all you have to do is put on a little smile. I’m not talking about a full-on CHEESE for the cameras kinda smile. No. It’s more like a Mona Lisa smile.

Almost every time I do this, I feel a conscious lift, as if the upturning of the corners of my mouth leads to an uptick in my mood.

Taking a moment to consciously relax that and then produce a smile always changes things.

The Silence is the Peace

Sometimes, when we sit for meditation, we feel like we need to do something, like we have to manufacture a feeling or a thought or some special kind of focus. These little efforts, however, can be counterproductive because they robs us of what we’re really seeking: peace.

The cult of productivity tells us to go-go-go-go! But what most of us really need is a moment of peace. Next time you sit for meditation — perhaps right after you read this post — bring this to mind early on: the silence is the peace.

You have everything you require happening right here and right now. Enjoy it! Lean into the peace, turn on that serene little smile, and find your home.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the cult of productivity, our need to constantly be moving forward and producing. Ironically, the cult of productivity came squarely into view earlier this week. Here is a transcribed excerpt from my journal:

As I write this, I am on vacation. One of the wonderful things about being a teacher is that you get long stretches of (nearly) guaranteed time off: summers, Thanksgiving week, Winter Break, Spring Break. Yet, here I am, staring down the productivity monster who is alive and well inside me. All I can think about are the things I want to get done, the things I need to get done. Inside me, I can hear this voice welling up. It says, “Don’t waste this vacation.” Like I need some added pressure to ensure that I get all my shit done here!

This is, of course, the work of the productivity cult, the way it’s been engrained into my American soul. We’ve turned productivity into such a value that we often fail to relax. Even our vacations become a list of tasks, of things we know we should do.

When I wrote that, I was fully aware that I’d probably turn it into a blog post. This, of course, is part of the productivity monster’s scheme. Everything that we do, even reflective writing like morning pages, becomes fodder for the production of some commodity.

This, I suppose, is all part of the machine. The desire to produce something, to improve the self, to constantly be moving forward, seems ever-present…inescapable, even!

It is.
And it isn’t.
:)

Here are a few thoughts for dealing with it. They’re simple and easy, and you can work through them no matter when or where you are when the productivity monster strikes.

Capture Everything

One of the reasons that we sometimes feel a need to produce is because we are worried about losing the thing that we’re thinking about or working on.

This week, I watched all eight hours of Get Back. (I know, I probably deserve some kind of medal for that, right?) A careful viewing, however, revealed several golden nuggets for those of us interested in creativity. After all, watching eight hours of the greatest rock band trying to pull together an album in just a couple of weeks is sure to yield some fruit!

At one point in the film, George Harrison comes into the studio and starts talking about a “rocker” that he wrote last night. He tells John Lennon that he’d plan to go to bed, but then he remembered a piece of songwriting advice that Lennon gave him many years before: “Finish ‘em straight off.” With that idea in his head, Harrison forced himself to stay up to get the bones of the song down. The result was the beginning of “Old Brown Shoe” which would be released just a few months later as the B-Side to “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

Lennon’s advice — “finish ‘em straight off” — may seem to run counter to what we’re talking about here. Lennon’s (and Harrison’s) fear seems to have been that they’d lose the thing, the muse, the bit they were working on. This is legitimate. If you’re involved in a creative pursuit, you don’t want to lose what you’re working on.

This is why I capture everything. (I’ve written about this previously.) But, as The Beatles show us in Get Back, nothing they brought into the studio was even close to being finished, nowhere near fully conceived. Instead, they brought in ideas or even less: ideas for ideas.

Here’s the point: if you capture your ideas, then you’ll have them for later. You won’t need to fear that you’ll lose that spark. Take some notes and let yourself out of the productivity trap.

Should vs. Get-To

Many times we have this nagging feeling that we should be doing something. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this kind of thinking leads to anxiety. We have enough people in the world telling us what we should and shouldn’t do; we don’t need some nagging productivity monster joining that chorus.

As I consider the things I’d like to do, the things I’d like to produce, I like to ask myself this very simple question: Is this something I should do, or is this something I get to do?

The difference might be a bit subtle, but it’s about attitude. When there are things that I should do, like sweep the floors, I often don’t do them because they feel like unwanted and unwelcome obligations. When a task or activity is framed as something I get to do, however, I feel like it’s something I can look forward to.

I call these the get-to’s.

Today, for example, I get to:

• Write this blog post.
• Meditate in the morning.
• Take a long ride on the Peloton.

If I rewrote that list with a “should” in front of it, it would feel totally different. Each of those tasks would become a burden.

As the productivity monster rises up in you, consider the difference between the should’s and the get-to’s. What are the things you get to do?

Here’s a simple workflow:

1. Write a list of things that you feel like you’re supposed to be doing.
2. Label each item as “should” or “get-to.”
3. Go off and do the get-to’s.

You can save those should’s for another day. Even better, over time, you may find that some of those should’s become get-to’s.

Back to Center

Lastly, remember that the only thing you really need to do is be here now. Everything that you feel like you are supposed to be doing can probably wait. Unless you’re actively engaged in an emergency — in which case, why are you reading this article? — you’ve got time to accomplish the various things that need accomplishing.

What do you really have to do right now?

BREATHE.

That’s all you really need. Therefore, I suggest you come back to center with a little mindfulness. When you feel that productivity monster welling up inside you, close your eyes and take a deep breath. You can use any number of strategies for this, but my favorite is counting breaths:

• When you inhale, mentally count: “1.”
• When you exhale, mentally count: “2.”
• When you inhale, mentally count: “3.”
• When you exhale, mentally count: “4.”
• …

You get the idea. When you get to ten, start over again.

Vacation

So, here I am on vacation. I’ve got Ulysses open. My dog is snoring next to me. What’s going on with the productivity monster? Well, I looked at the list of things that I should do, and I said to myself: “Hm. I get to write this blog post.”

Enjoy!

A few years ago, when my son was very young, he started watching Thomas the Tank Engine. He got deeply into trains, and I was always so glad when he chose to watch earlier versions of the show when it was a stop-motion animation narrated by Ringo Starr. We had Thomas t-shirts, Thomas toys, Thomas bedsheets, and such.

One day, while chatting with a good friend who had a child of a similar age, I mentioned my son’s obsession with Thomas. He looked at me and, in the nicest way possible, said that he doesn’t allow his son to watch Thomas because he doesn’t like the show’s central message. Puzzled, I asked him to explain.

“Utility,” my friend said, “The show is about being useful. The best thing a character can be is useful.” He paused, but then went on: “My son is a human being, not some machine to be used for or by others. I want my son to know he’s more than just useful.”

I felt like this was an excellent point. I, too, want to feel like I’m not just “useful” to others.

But American culture doesn’t particularly hold with this. A key part of the American brand of individualism is the constant need for improvement. This, one might say, is a version of the American Dream: the idea that I can work to constantly improve myself. We live in a productivity culture where we measure our value based on how much we improve and how much we produce. While this isn’t exactly the same kind of utility that Thomas and his train-friends value, the cult of productivity certainly does seem related.

I, for one, am often obsessed with this idea of self-improvement:

• I keep metrics on my workouts.
• I read books about self-improvement.
• I sit in meditation every day in an effort to better myself and my relationships.

When I get particularly into this frame of mind, I spend much of my time thinking about the most efficient ways to improve myself.

The Need for Productivity and Improvement

If we were to ask ourselves what drives this need for productivity and improvement, one of the obvious answers would be capitalism. In the U.S., we look constantly to corporations to produce and improve. We want more efficient systems, more efficient means of products: we want more for less.

We also seek this kind of efficiency in our personal lives. We want to be able to do more with our minds and bodies, and we want to be able to achieve all of that in less time. Very rarely are we encouraged to take the long-view. Instead, we want results, and we want them now.

The idea of improvement is also embedded into the American Ethos in the bootstrap narrative that governs our education system. As a young person in the 1980s and 1990s, I was constantly told that if I continued improving, then I could “succeed,” I could “make something of myself.” The overarching ethic of the time — and this is still true today, at least based on what I’m seeing — was “work hard, stay in school.” Doing so would result in some future “success” which was defined largely by financial security (and not much more).

As the American economy has evolved and specialization has become king, we see not only the need for improvement as a key value in our education system but also the need for productivity, for efficiency. What is the quickest way I can get through this degree program? How can I avoid becoming a generalist (because being a generalist requires a lot of time)?

I know I certainly fell prey to this kind of thinking in the mid-2000s when I discovered I could shave a year off my master’s degree by switching to a different program. The degree I earned has a similar title, but the education was definitely sub-par. Why? Because I was in a damn hurry to get to the finish line! I wanted to improve in the most efficient way possible.

We might understand this need for improvement and productivity as a manifestation of dukkha: the Buddhist principle of suffering. The best way to describe dukkha is by simply understanding it as that overwhelming feeling that things aren’t quite right, the notion that things could/should be better.

Something should be different.

Dukkha produces tanha, craving, the feeling that we want to make a change. This thirst for change, for something else, drives our need to improve.

American culture, in this sense, is an engine of dukkha which creates tanha. We see this, for example, in advertising, an industry whose sole purpose is to help us to see that our lives aren’t quite right. When we understand that our lives could be better (because of the images we see in the ads), then we start to crave that improvement.

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with this sort of thirst, this desire to improve. No, we can’t so quickly judge it or place a value on it. Instead, we start by understanding that it is; we don’t need to label it positive or negative. Then, however, we have to ask ourselves, what is it that I’m really thirsting for? What is it that I’m really craving?

I sometimes worry that my American-ness, my need for constant improvement and productivity, has turned me into one of those trains of Sodor: a cog in the machine that keeps the owning class happy. Nothing wrong with helping other people find happiness, but what has it done to me? Well, it’s turned me into the sort of person who struggles to appreciate things as they are. The need to constantly improve breeds the kind of myopic worldview that identifies the worst in people and systems: it makes me judgmental.

Allow me a silly example…

Every day I go through a typical morning routine: showering, brushing teeth, etc. It’s basic hygiene and it requires little thought. However, sometimes, I put an inordinate amount of thought into the way I do this. For example, I might think to myself: “Brush your teeth while the shower warms up. Doing so will result in the greatest efficiency.”

There’s nothing wrong with this because it doesn’t really affect anyone or anything. It’s my personal little efficiency, and that’s fine. When I move outside myself, however, the inefficiencies I see around me become sources of judgment. The need to improve and produce creates in me a value called “efficiency.” When I see something inefficient (like the way my ten-year-old son performs his incredibly long hygiene routine), I see it as a problem. Now the world is out of whack (dukkha) and I want it to be different (tanha), so I have to come in and fix it.

This is a silly example, but you probably work with someone like me, someone who looks at systems and immediately recognizes flaws and inefficiencies. That person is sometimes invaluable to the engines of capitalism, but they are also probably pretty annoying and aloof.

Just This

How do we get out of this trap? If you’re reading the unruly buddha, then you probably already know the answer: mindfulness, meditation, be here now, or what I call just this.

In the mornings, lately, I’ve been writing the following phrase at the top of my journal:

This. This. Just this.

This, whatever it is, is all I need right now. This, whatever it is, doesn’t require my judgment. It just requires my attention and my awareness. When I do this, whatever it is, it breaks up that need for improvement and productivity. Improvement and productivity are about dissatisfaction with the present and projection into the future. They aren’t about appreciation for the now. They don’t come out of sufficiency but out of insufficiency. They do not express abundance but lack. In short: improvement and productivity as core values produce dukkha, which leads to tanha, which leads to an overwhelming feeling of discontent. Therefore, we must counteract all of this by getting a little radical, getting down to the root, by coming to appreciate the now in all its fullness.

How do we cultivate this? Well, we take the one seat, and we practice. We practice and practice and practice. As Jeff Warren said in a recent meditation, we are “always getting started.”

Pick a practice. Take up your seat. Start today.

Need some help starting, check out the praxis section of the site for some ideas.

The past year has been quite a rollercoaster ride. We worked through (and continue to work through) a pandemic, managed to make it through the most contentious (and still contentious) presidential election in my lifetime (or yours, for that matter), and yet the world still turned. Battles rage on in American public life: a pair of infrastructure bills in the senate, bans on local mask mandates in Texas and Florida, a clamping down on educators as we try to teach American history and literature in our classrooms.

As I look beyond my country’s borders, I see the Taliban gaining strength in Afghanistan, controversy (once again) at the Olympics, and a deadly earthquake and tropical storm in Haiti.

In the midst of all of this, I managed to drop my writing practice. Compared to the events mentioned above, I know this is the smallest, silliest thing to think about as a “loss” during the clustercuss that has been the last two years. But, this morning, I picked up my pen again, and I found myself thinking about this very issue. I used to handwrite three pages every single morning. It was an important part of my routine:

1. Wake up.
2. Stumble downstairs and pour a cup of coffee.
3. Walk back upstairs, avoiding the creaky sixth step so as not to disturb the rest of the house.
4. Sit down for twenty minutes of meditation.
5. Write three pages in my journal.

My entire routine remained the same throughout 2020 and 2021. But at some point late last year, item #5 was dropped from the list.

My morning pages practice has always been about getting my thoughts and feelings down on the page. I wanted to expose them, hold them up to the light so that I could examine them and see what they were all about. This regular act, to be quite honest, had changed my life. As I wrote in June 2020, “Morning Pages has served as a place to dialogue with myself as I seek to figure out what I really value and what I want to prioritize.”

Why, then, did I stop writing them?

In part, I think it’s because the act of writing, in my mind, tends to reify things. Things become a little more real when you can see them sitting there on the page in front of you. To continue down the hole and into the darkness of the last twelve months was a little scary. I think my subconscious knew that.

Writing, sometimes, can trick us into believing that things are permanent. The words on the page, after all, are static. Once I set that pen to paper, those words aren’t going anywhere.

Except that they are definitely going somewhere, aren’t they?

In an earlier post, I wrote about anicca, the idea that nothing is permanent. The illusion of permanence that comes with setting pen to paper is alluring. Many of us seek ways to make permanent the things that are merely ephemeral. This is the source of so much suffering, our desire to press pause on the world, to stop the incessant march of time. We want to stop aging, freeze the sunset, carry on with our current successes. We have great moments that we never want to end and bad ends that we never want to have their moment.

But no matter how hard we try, no matter how much ink we might spill to get it all down, all things must pass.

The paper I’m writing on will decay. Its atoms will be redistributed into other aggregations, other forms. Eventually, they’ll be sucked up by some wandering black hole, waiting for eternity to evaporate them back out.

Less cosmically, perhaps, I might remind myself that the ink I use in my fountain pens is water-soluble; therefore, in the case of a flood, the thousands of pages I’ve written will all be lost and gone.

Whether destroyed by flood, fire, black holes, or the ravages of time, these thoughts, these ideas, these feelings will cease to be.

And, really, isn’t that why I wrote them down in the first place? To get them out? To let them go? To download them from my head and my heart? To exorcise my mind’s grip and need for control?

Yes.

This morning, then, I took up the pen again as an important part of my spiritual practice. The practice of writing three pages each morning has changed my life a thousand little times. Nothing is permanent, so I know it will change my life yet again.

:)

This morning, I was working through a guided meditation with Jeff Warren. Jeff was walking participants through the idea of “the one seat.” As he did so, he said something about the world turning around us. When he said this, my mind went somewhere else. It launched into this thought process about how we go about participating with, engaging in the activity of the cosmos.

Go on a little journey with me…

I have a son. He’s ten years old. We often have conversations about what we can control and what we can’t. For example, he and I play a lot of golf together: I am, after all, still a suburban dad. You can’t control the bounce that the ball takes off the side of the green and into the water. You can’t control the direction of the wind. You can’t control anything except for what you’re doing as you prepare for this swing.

This is actually a little scary, isn’t it?

When we get in touch with the reality around us, our lack of control often confronts us. It’s a big universe out there, and I’m just a speck of dust riding along the current, along the whims of the winds of change. I’m going with the flow.

This is a good thing.

We want to go with the flow.
We want to be flexible.
We want to open ourselves to the ride.

But, sometimes, this means that we are robbing ourselves of agency and engagement as we do so. We start to think of “going with the flow” as if we play no role in our circumstances. We look at the huge, unfathomable, elemental forces of nature, and we do not see any way to participate in the current. The world is happening to us. This, however, is a matter of perspective. All things, of course, are a matter of perspective, and this particular perspective denies us agency in the cosmos. It says to us: you are not a participant in the motion of the universe. Instead, you are, at best, a bystander, and, at worst, a victim.

But this is no way to live. (“Live,” after all, is an active verb, y'all.) Moreover, this isn’t really “going with the flow.” This is not, in Jeff Warren’s words, “the world turning around us.” This sort of mentality and approach to life understands our role as passive. The world isn’t turning around us, we are being flung about by a massive Earth that is being pulled by the gravity of the Sun which is being yanked around by the gravity of the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way which is being propelled on a head-on collision with the Andromeda Galaxy…

There is a difference between going with the flow and being tossed and tumbled by the current. It’s the difference between active and passive. I’m a participant in my life. I’m engaged in the making of the world.

How do we make this move? How do we go from passive to active?

Sit outside. Find some birds or some squirrels or whatever wildlife you might be able to see. This is the one time in the history of everything that these elements will be configured in this way in this space and time. How do I participate in that? How do I engage in it? How do I move from being tossed to being engaged? From sitting a top a world spinning out of control to sitting here and witnessing the world spin around me?

The first step is to pay attention.

When we engage with what’s happening around us, we move into an active, engaged space where we can see and accept it all. As Jack Kornfield says:

As we take the one seat we discover our capacity to be unafraid and awake in the midst of all life. We may fear that our heart is not capable of weathering the storms of anger or grief or terror that have been stored up for so long. We may have a fear of accepting all of life, what Zorba the Greek called “the Whole Catastrophe.” But to take the one seat is to discover that we are unshakable. We discover that we can face life fully, with all its suffering and joy, that our heart is great enough to encompass it all.

To reach this unshakability, to find this engagement, we have to pay attention. Paying attention, after all, is active. It requires engagement. So...

Pay attention.
Pay attention.
Just pay attention...

My life is not something happening to me. It’s happening because of me.

The unruly buddha sat at school one morning waiting for her class to begin. She looked around the room: tables, chairs, a poster of a cat hanging from the branch of a tree. One-by-one her peers came into the classroom. Some came in laughing, chatting with their friends; others came in quiet and alone. This was the first class of the morning, so many students looked a little bleary-eyed. One boy had hair that floated up off his head, toward the sky.

The teacher came in and began speaking, but the unruly buddha couldn’t pay attention to her because she was so transfixed by the gravity-defying qualities of the boy’s hair. How did it do that? Not simply a wisp, nor even a tuft, but a whole section of his hair appeared weightless, bobbing gently up and down with the slightest motions of his head, as if he were floating in outer space.

The teacher continued to speak, but the unruly buddha could not understand her. Her lips were moving, but she made no words. Instead, all the unruly buddha heard was the sound of car wheels on pavement. It was the oddest thing, for the teacher’s mouth was moving and sound was coming out, but the sound was just the kkkkkksssssshhhhh of tires on a road. Road noise. The sound ebbed and flowed, following the pitch and rhythm of what the unruly buddha thought was human speech, though she couldn’t really be sure anymore. She looked back to the boy with the space-hair and saw the hair floating, moving in rhythm with the road noise of the teacher’s voice.

Behind her, the unruly buddha heard a baby scream. She whipped her head around, but saw only the cat clutching the tree branch. Hang in there. Hang in there. Hang in there. Hang there. In there. Hang in. Hang. In. There. There. There.

The room fell silent. The unruly buddha closed her eyes and kicked off one of her sandals. Her foot touched the coarse, industrial, stain-camouflaging carpet. She felt a great rumble, low and deep, as if she sat in a movie theater watching an action movie, but she was deaf to everything except the vibration of her seat as the bass rumbled and the screen exploded.

The Earth was moving.

For a moment, she believed the Earth was alive. She saw it arising and passing away, and she saw everything on it doing the same. She saw herself born of her mother and her mother born of hers and her grandmother born of hers too. She traced the threads of all of her previous lives, of all the ways that the atoms in her body had been assembled and reassembled. She traced them back to the foundations of the Earth itself, the ignition of the Sun and the exploding of some ancient star that produced all the heavy elements in her world. She saw that explosion in reverse, a great star remaking, reassembling itself from its shattered, fragmented remains, now burning blue for billions of years. Space around her contracted, everything gathering in on itself, whooshing past her, blowing her hair up into a strange, floating formation.

And then everything was still. It had all gathered into a single tiny point, no bigger than a speck of dust.

All was silent. Not quiet, but silent, for there was no air around her to carry the noise.

Then the speck grew bright. Faintly, the unruly buddha heard a growing sound. kkkkkksssssshhhhh. The sound grew as the speck became brighter and brighter. It reached a deafening volume, and then everything flashed white.

It was quiet and dark.

The unruly buddha heard the faint whir of air conditioning and felt the industrial carpeting against her foot. She opened her eyes and saw the teacher standing in front of her, staring at her, an expectant look on her face. The unruly buddha looked at the boy with the floating hair. He had turned and was looking at her, his eyes still half asleep.

The unruly buddha looked back at the teacher and felt a sense of joy welling up in her, billowing up from the pit of her stomach like ash come up from a volcano.

She smiled.
She smiled.
She smiled.

She looked into the expectant eyes of the teacher. Saw everything. Smiled.

She felt the surface of her desk, where it was smooth, where it was rough, where someone had etched a lewd word into its surface.

Still, the teacher waited and the boy’s hair floated up and up.

The unruly buddha slapped the surface of the desk as hard as she could, and from deep inside her belly, she yelled, “KTZ!”

Clouds float up to the sky.
Rain falls down to the ground.

Something in this takes me forward.
Something takes me back.

Clouds. Rain.
Forward. Back.
Back. Forward.
Rain. Clouds.

Take me back.
Take me forward.

Down to the ground.
Up to the sky.