Cowboy Cottage
Cattle Pasture, East Napa, California, USA
May 21, 2020
"He's sitting in a chair. It's one of the most remarkable things I've
ever seen in my life: this man ... just sitting ... in that chair. You
may ask 'What's so remarkable about something as mundane as a person
sitting in a chair?'. The thing is you never see a person
just sitting in a chair. A person sitting in a chair is never just
sitting in the chair. When they're sitting in a chair, they're doing
something else other than just sitting in the chair.
They're thinking. They're looking around. They're fidgeting. In fact
when they're sitting in a chair, they're doing everything
but just sitting in the chair. He's just sitting in the
chair. It's both disconcerting and mesmerizing to witness."
Here's the question for you: for how long can you sit? Yes, just ...
sit? By that I mean, for how long can you bear to do
nothing at all but sit? That's right. A minute? An hour? A
day? Longer? OK, let me tell you the question I'm
really asking. The question I'm really asking is "For how
long can you bear to just be?" - but it's easier to contemplate
for how long you can bear to be, if you contemplate for how long you
can bear to sit. It's why I ask "For how long can you sit?". A week?
Even more?
Sooner or later, a limit to how long you can be,
shows up
- like "Oh, there's a lot of urgent stuff that I have to get done
Laurence,
which limits how long I can just sit.". OK, let's assume you have a
personalassistant,
a PA who'll do it all for you so you don't
have to do anything urgent at all. Now for how long can
you just sit?
You see, it doesn't matter if you have a PA to do it all for you, or
not. The limit that
shows up
for us human beings, is not that we have urgent things we have to get
done. It's more pernicious than that. It's our unexamined aversion
to just being that limits how long we can be. Tell
the truth:
it's not urgent tasks which call us away from being. They're just the
excuses, the
distractions
(and we welcome those
distractions).
It's our aversion to just being, which calls us away from just being.
And we welcome that which
distracts
us from an aversion we don't examine or fully tell
the truth
about. Indeed, in this regard we welcome an array of go-todistractions.
This, I assert, is a curious oddity about being human: unexamined,
we're averse to just being - which is to say we have an aversion to
being who (and what) we really are (it's a stretch to
consider
it's not curiously odd). We are who (and what) we are (and
we're nothing else, yes?) ... and yet we have an aversion to just being
who (and what) we really are. We
resist
it. We avoid it. We barely (if ever) examine it. We fill our lives with
go-to
distractions
that we adroitly use to avoid
experiencing
it.
Now we're all in the midst of the stay-home. And all the extra time we
now have not doing those urgent,
distracting
tasks is driving some of us crazy (or so we say). But look: all the
extra time we now have, not doing all those urgent,
distracting
tasks? It also
presents
a truly profound opportunity: we can sit longer if we want to, so we
can be longer if we want to, so we can take an
intimatelyclose
look at exactly what our aversion is to just being who (and what) we
really are - if we want to.
Wait: it's even
richer
than that. It's: even if we don't take an
intimatelyclose
look at exactly what our aversion is to just being who (and what) we
really are, being is what
shows up
anyway (if we don't
resist
it) without the go-to
distractions
in a stay-home. It's when we examine our aversion to being who (and
what) we really are, what appears as a by-product of that process, is
being itself. That's awesome. It's truly profound.
With all those urgent tasks now on hold, this is a fine time to look.
What exactly are these so-called go-todistractions
we use to avoid
experiencing
being who (and what) we really are? Watch: they're all
ordinary
activities in which the
experience
of being who (and what) we really are, isn't
present.
Now be careful: the
experience
of being, may be
present
in
ordinary
activities. That's
Zen.
Anyone who lives the examined life will recognize this. So it's when
life is unexamined, that any
ordinary
activities become
distractions
in averting the
experience
of being who (and what) we really are. I call them go-todistractions
because we can safely "go to" them time after time after time. Any
unexamined
ordinary
activity, always provides refuge in its mundane
ordinariness,
from
experiencing
who (and what) we really are, without social stigma, criticism, or
disagreement. And in a stay-home, the number of
ordinary
activities that don't require urgent attention (and hence the number of
go-to
distractions)
is
vastly
reduced,
presencing
the profundity of this opportunity.
