Happy Blessed Opportunity

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." Woody Allen

The title of this blog entry gets referenced with sarcasm, or maybe mirth is more like it, by members of the spiritual community with which I study Zen. The group of persons that sit and study with a Zen teacher is called a sangha (silent ‘h’) and in ours, you can consider yourself a sangha member if you want to be.

As it happens, I am handwriting today’s entry for transcription later as I sit in the parking lot of Alice’s middle school campus (though she is in high school—I actually drove here after dropping her off at the high school campus both because the parking lot is large and I can park under the shade of a pine tree and meditate, and because it’s too early to go to Target!) and I am waiting for John to arrive with stepson Robert in tow, to jump start my battery which I just discovered has died.

I love and appreciate my Zen practice so much, although it makes me giggle to describe myself as having such a thing. I think to giggle might also be the experience of anyone who really knows me (the word sister comes leaping to mind here). I doubt even after 6 years of daily  sitting  meditation (sometimes at home, sometimes in my car) accompanied by trips to the Zen Monastery Peace Center as I can manage -- where not only is everything done in the silence of the ‘privileged environment,’ the entire time, but, we are encouraged to refrain from eye contact --  would anyone confuse my temperament with His Holiness the Dalai Llama (and the word children comes leaping to mind here).

So, all of that is a round about introduction to my reassurance to anyone reading, that I am not now nor will I ever profess later that I’m in fact grateful for the chance to sit alone in the school parking lot for an additional hour I didn’t sign up for. This opportunity to enjoy the sights and sounds around me that in other circumstances I’d have left behind, otherwise quickly forgotten as I speed off to Target (When you are a working parent with a sitting meditation practice, trust me, you are ALWAYS mediating in one parking lot or another), is the slice of solace I didn’t even know I wouldn’t hate until it came my way.

That said, a promise we make out loud before and after sitting meditation, is “to use everything in our awareness to see how we cause ourselves to suffer.” To this end, I have participated in all sorts of exercises over the years with the goal of greater self awareness as in who are these ‘selves’ I call me? To wit, I have worn my watch on an alternate wrist, walked around with a notebook all day to record all sorts of observations within and without, worn a bread bag twist tie on my finger for the sake of remembering to “come back to the breath” or center, often times one and the same experience.

I never was and am not now a fan of disrupting my carefully planned, normally jammed schedule. For reasons not entirely clear, but about which I don’t care one ounce of kapok, I don’t feel the need to sit cursing our car, my bad luck, or worrying myself to death over whether I’m still going to make my doctor’s appointment, or fit in my Target errand. Nor do my thoughts run to trying to second guess how John and Robert feel about rearranging their morning and what it means if some of them is or isn’t feeling or acting put out.

“It is what it is” and that includes time to sit quietly, once dreaded by me and now a chance to gather my thoughts, read more of my book and to savor in writing m newfound solace where once there was angst.

"To enjoy the world without judgment is what a realized life is like." Charlotte Joko Beck