were able, as Henry Miller put it, to stand still like a hummingbird.
In Tibetan and Zen styles of meditation, one sits with half-shuttered eyes. In Japanese this is called fusoku furi, unattached and undetached. Not open to the public world, not closed into a private world. In this way we sustain concentration and stillness while remaining fully aware of our surroundings.
• • •
In 1980 my teacher Gregory Bateson was dying. He was in the hospital for three weeks, then the San Francisco Zen Center invited him to be there for what turned out to be his final week. Beyond the big hospital bed that had been imported, there were black-robed figures, young American men and women in long-term Zen training. Four of them would sit in meditation in the corners of the room, facing the wall, breathing slowly in time with Gregory, who had lung disease. They seemed oblivious, like human furniture, while friends and family came to visit each day, talking with each other and with Gregory. But the moment something was needed in the room, including some of the ugly things that accompany the dying process, the Zen students would pop up and do what was needed, instantly, carefully. Then they would sit again and disappear into meditation. The image of those Zen men and women came back to me sixteen years later as I watched the Secret Service agents, with their evenly hovering attention.
• • •
In medicine the most common errors are due to premature closure — arriving at an initial diagnosis that seems to fit the case but does not encompass a deeper investigation into all the phenomena and all the patient might have to say. As institutional pressures mount up on doctors to see more patients per hour (“productivity” is one of the most unfortunate buzzwords of our age), premature closure is implicitly encouraged. The physician too eager to fill in the chart from a set list of diagnostic codes will be less likely to see the patient.
How often do our well-intended efforts to fix things end up making them worse? How many of us have tried to fix a mechanical item with repeated, frustrated force and ended up breaking it instead? To remain present long enough without knowing the answer, to take the time to closely examine how the parts of the machine are connected, to respect its complexity, to perceive details and relationships that are not immediately apparent, can itself be a lubricant. To remain open-eyed and open-minded, while still retaining access to the technical information we have accumulated through our years of learning, is one of those balancing acts that comes under the heading of “wisdom.” Cherish peripheral vision. The activity of our nervous system, conscious and unconscious, is constantly parsing the signal-to-noise ratio. Yet signal and noise, figure and ground, need to change places from time to time. The ignored detail that seems to be nonsense or unimportant might be the crucial thing that pops up as danger, opportunity, or inspiration — playful, off-the-wall, improbable.
Psychoanalysts will tell you that the great practitioners don’t interpret. This is a funny statement coming from a discipline whose most famous book is The Interpretation of Dreams. To pause and allow listening to flower is an art that takes discipline and gives material a chance to develop in surprising ways.
• • •
The practice of intent listening, which we will encounter in a later chapter — paying attention to birds, to water, to industrial sounds, to the human sounds around us, to our partners in conversation — seems like the easiest thing in the world. But it is amazing how much we miss. Something else is always going on amid the endless tape-loops of consciousness. Remembering, repeating, and rehearsing clog up our ability to listen. We retell our inventory of hope, fear, anger, triumph, resentment, and jokes. Once I was taking the two-hour drive from my home in Virginia up to Washington, DC, listening, or trying to listen, to an audiobook. The CDs were divided into three-minute tracks. There was a segment early on, with an especially elegant sentence that I had vaguely remembered from reading the book long ago. I wanted to catch it and taste the words. But I kept missing it. I was thinking instead about a hurtful interaction that I had had with a close friend and colleague. While the recording was playing in my car, the tape-loop of my ruptured friendship was playing in my head, the same few rueful thoughts in different combinations and permutations. Everyone gets caught playing those old tapes about mother, father, ex-lover, ex-employer. In playing these tapes we bind ourselves up in resentment or regret. I decided to try listening to the novel as a simple mindfulness exercise: just get through a three-minute segment with total attention. But I could barely make it through a minute before my inner tape snuck in and captured my consciousness. Half an hour later I was still hitting the rewind button. After an hour I finally succeeded in getting through the three minutes of storytelling, but just barely.
In many schools of meditation, we first learn to steady ourselves by counting our breaths. Just breathe regularly, and count each exhalation, from one to ten, then start over again. If you lose count, restart from one. It seems simple to do this for a few minutes. But it can be quite challenging to get past the number three. Consciousness is often touted as the glory of the human race. Actually, it’s not so hot.
• • •
Cross your arms over your chest. Simple. Now uncross them and cross them in the opposite direction. Perhaps nervous giggles break out: we feel clumsy and discover that we have formed a lifetime habit of crossing right over left or left over right. To do it the other way around feels funny, strange, uncomfortable. We get comfortable with a certain way of doing or seeing, and that becomes the universe of possibility. Now think back to how many times in the past you’ve lit up with the realization that life could be so much better if you changed one habit — and then discovered just how disconcerting such change can be. To create something new, you have to unmake yourself to some extent. And that can be tremendously difficult.
Freedom to act in the moment — the capacity to improvise — can liberate us, but it also terrifies us. We are often afraid of our own ability to change, our own agility. A friend who had gotten divorced said, “It’s easier to keep complaining about my mother, my ex-husband. Then I can avoid taking the risk of asking that man over there to dance with me.”
In artistic production, we become comfortable in our habitual styles and methods. We can stick to these patterns forever and stay assured that we know what we’re doing or that we are producing a product people approve of. This is how we can become pigeonholed by our own success. As Rilke wrote,
we’re left with yesterday’s
walk and the pampered loyalty of an old habit
that liked us so much it decided to stay, and never left.
For the monk who won’t let go of the image of his partner carrying the girl across the stream, learning the rules and sticking to them provides stability and clarity in this confusing life. This is how one should behave. This is how music is played. This is how sentences are written. “This,” quoting the mantra of many organizations, “is how we do it here.” The this is comfortable. We know what we are going to find there. Thus, we get stuck in conservatism and in doing as we’re told.
Stickiness is not only a matter of stasis or conservatism. We can be sticky to the need to innovate or to appear to be innovating. At a music festival I attended, a fine avant-garde percussionist produced virtuosic sounds from his snare drum, reveling in extended techniques, rubbing the drumhead with jeweler’s rouge, kitchen utensils, rubber balls, and plastic tubing. He got wonderfully elongated moaning sounds from the drum. Then his fingertip flicked out and hit the drumhead, making a classic snare drum stroke. It was clear from his face that he felt he had made a mistake. He had made a conventional snare drum sound and therefore wasn’t being original. He quickly covered this over with more activity, in the way musicians learn to distract attention from accidents. Was it uncreative to play a recognizable, traditional sound?
Bruce
