“I wanted to figure out why I was so busy, but I couldn’t find the time to do it.”
~Todd Stocker
“People say time is money, but time is life.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“If you take time to enjoy dishwashing, then dishwashing can become meditation. If you think of the time of washing as the time that you lose… then you lose yourself. It means you continue to lose your life.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Every day I hear someone say, “There isn’t enough time,” or “I’d like to do mindfulness, but I don’t have the time.” I know. There is never enough time to do everything. But somehow, we manage to have enough time to do what we value. Thich Nhat Hanh notes that we organize our lives around what is most important to us. This past week was super action-packed for me and I started to feel stretched thin. All this doing has led me to two ways of thinking about time and busyness. They are not new or complex, but they are both a radical departure from our culture of rapidity and stress.
The first thing I realized was the more I looked into the future and saw the big list of all the things to do, the less capable and trustworthy I became. This is the first realization of taking hold of your time—keeping our view small. Buddhist peace activist and organizer, Bernie Glassman writes, “Just because things are overwhelming doesn’t mean they have to overwhelm you. If you realize that things are not under your control, you can go step by step. You simply stop long enough to ask yourself, ‘What do I do with my time for the next hour’” (Instructions to the Cook, p. 77). When we break our time into small moments and focus what we commit to doing, we shift the lens and suddenly we are capable and competent. An hour is a different prospect than a day or a week.
Shrinking our window of planning is good and there’s that expression we all know, but few practice doing one thing at a time. Ahh, the essence of Zen, attending to just this moment. Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, that our very connection and presence depends upon our ability to drop into this moment of experience, otherwise, we lose our connection with life. Thay reminds us that “while drinking the cup of tea we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one moment of life” (The Miracle of Mindfulness, p. 8). When we spend our time focused on the big list of “to do,” we shift our perception of time and lose the time we have now.
It’s revolutionary to read, Bernie Glassman’s line, “There’s always enough time.” Glassman is not ruled by time, instead, he chooses to set his priorities to get done what needs to get done and using time as an ally instead of a master. His common knowledge secret is the wisdom from Zen master Maezumi Roshi, who told him, “when you walk, you walk.” It’s that old, one thing at a time practice. This is the spirit in which Thich Nhat Hanh describes two ways to wash dishes, “The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes. The second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.” We can extrapolate that direction in our own lives to when we drive, we just drive, when we sit, we just sit, when we make breakfast we just make breakfast.
Doing one thing at a time, with a small window of planning sounds so supremely simple, but then why is it so difficult? One reason is that the mind can develop a strong habit of taking care and get a bit overzealous. This hyper-vigilant mind state can become reflexive, giving us less than helpful reminders, “Have you thought about what you’re going to say at the meeting? You know you have a due date, shouldn’t you be further along?” This nagging, hurrying, protecting mind does all this out of love for us and the deep desire to keep us safe. Sometimes, it’s wise to thank our mind for trying so valiantly to be our guardian, and then, with promises of calling and visiting this anxious warden, we come back to the small circle of momentary engagement, right here right now. It is not easy because the mind convinces us we will risk everything if we ignore the hurry up message.
There is hope for the chronically overscheduled. Bernie Glassman gives this explanation of how we can free ourselves from the idea of the time prison, “when we eliminate the gap between our expectations and what we’re doing, our energies all go into what we’re doing at the moment. We’re not wasting our energy on what we think we should be doing. At that point, all of a sudden, the notion of time disappears.” When we set up our lives to include what we value, focus on what is achievable in a short amount of time and then stay present with what we are doing, with our mind and our body, that is about as good as it gets. Then we can find that we too have all the time we need for what is needed.
May we all trust our light,
Celia
