Not knowing, is most intimate —Zen Koan
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am sitting with my Questions”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Trying to figure life out is like rummaging in a sack trying to pull a mystery object out, that you are looking for, without knowing what it is. Having a phone in your pocket means you never get to sit with a question and let it nag at you. You have become used to having instant answers on tap. You have normalised the abnormal.
You got so drawn up behind the battlements of your own story, your own life, your own experience, that you sometimes forget that other folks are having their own experience, and instead of expecting instant answers, you don’t ask any questions at all. You assume—you assume their tone, their intention, assuming the shape of their journey, and assuming what they are rummaging in the sack of life for is something you can guess and be right about.
Life has become so busy, so noisy, so urgent, and so troublesome, that the really big questions in life, the ones that have no easy answer or perhaps no answer at all, are the ones you stopped sitting with.
Be not so quick and certain
to be your full accomplished self.
For how ever
is the greater version of you
to arrive and take up residence,
if all the seats are taken,
and all spaces and silences
filled with who you already are,
and what you already know?
If you think about that sack of mystery you are rummaging in, there is a way that you can shape the hand of your grasping mind as if it knows what it is trying to grab and draw out. Sometimes the way you are holding a question is exactly what will make the answer evade your grasp. This is what the Zen Koan means: Not Knowing is Most Intimate. A Koan is in fact a tool used in the Zen tradition that poses a riddle or question, that is not meant to be solved. The work, if it can be called that, is done in the interstitial space of uncertainty.
It means simply that if you want to get really close to an idea, to the truth about yourself, or in grappling with a big question, or if you want to really connect with another person, you have to stand naked of what you think you already know.
TAKE HOME/PRACTICE
The take-home today is itself a question.
How close can you get?
How intimate can you be with your own Life?
How many times can you stop yourself from simply reacting—from assuming what someone else is saying, or what life is saying to you right now?
Can you allow yourself to wonder about something and sit with the wondering of it without reaching for your phone and a rapid answer? Can you allow yourself that patience? What might arrive in that space that you hold?
Can you recall the big questions again, the ones that don’t have easy answers, or any complete answers at all? Can you be troubled again by the questions you have carefully avoided asking?
Can you carve out a quiet moment in your day and be very still, and let the old question come back—about what the meaning is to the way your life seemed to take your dreams away and turned your focus instead to this granular mundanity of bills and dishes and laundry?
Can you open yourself to the vastness and wideness of that expanse of wonder you once sought passage into as a child? Can you make some room in your headspace today, for mystery?
SOMETIMES by David Whyte
Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest,
breathing, like the ones in the old stories,
who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task is to trouble you
with tiny but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what you are doing right now,
and to stop what you are becoming
while you do it,
questions, that can make, or unmake, a life,
questions, that have patiently waited for you,
questions, that have no right to go away.
SOMETIMES, By David Whyte from his book, Everything is Waiting for You.
Just be Like this today.
Today I am okay with not knowing. Today I am most intimate with Life.
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