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I have a garden in my backyard, and even if you don't call
it a garden, you do too. In the fall, the broad canopy of giant sycamores in my
yard turns faintly yellow and the leaves sail down. First by ones and then by
tons. A part of every autumn day finds me fuming at the sight of falling
leaves. Then I pick up a rake.
Tell me, when I'm sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it
getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from
my life? Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes--the life
I'm dreaming of.
We don't just struggle with a shirt in a Zen koan. We
struggle with the shirts in our hampers. With the pants, the blouses, the
sheets and the underwear. Laundry presents a mountainous practice opportunity
because it provokes a never-ending pile of egocentric resistance. Its not
important to me. It's tedious. I don't like to do it!
If we're not careful, this is how we approach mindfulness:
as an idea, one we rather like, to elevate our lives with special contemplative
consideration, a method for making smarter choices and thereby ensuring better
outcomes. The problem is that the life before us is the only life we have. The
search for meaning robs our life of meaning, sending us back into our
discursive minds while, right in front of us, the laundry piles up.
Transcending obstacles and overcoming preferences, we have
an intimate encounter with our lives every time we do the wash. Its nothing out
of the ordinary, but no one turns their nose up at a clean pair of socks.
With only a slight change in perspective, the most ordinary
things take on inexpressible beauty. When we don't know, we don't judge. And
when we don't judge, we see things in a different light. That is the light of
our awareness, unfiltered by intellectual understanding, rumination, or our
evaluation. When we cultivate non-distracted awareness as a formal practice, we
call it mindfulness meditation. When we cultivate it in our home life we call
it the laundry, the kitchen, or the yard--all the places and ways we can live
mindfully by attending without distraction to whatever appears before us.
