Don’t turn away, this is the point
How distraction is simply another form of (misunderstood) attention
It’s 9.11am and so far, I’ve roasted some carrots and green beans, diced up some mango and de-seeded a pomegranate, picked and chopped bunches of parsley and basil, and combined it all with some grains and seeds into three days’ worth of salad for my partner while I’ll be away for the next few days (and to save food otherwise going to waste because he has his ways of caring and I have mine, such is our way of domesticity).
The grey water from scrubbing the vegetables, fruits, chopping board and dishes has been recycled to quench the thirst of the lavender bed and pots of alliums and lilies in the garden, ahead of another day of warm spring sunshine and no rain. I’ve also scraped the safety stickers from the windows of my cabin, which I’ve scrubbed clean. And cleaned the wooden floors of dust and debris.
All the while, sneaky thoughts have been drifting in about how I ought to be at my desk, writing, how this is just all just a distraction from my “real work”. Only those thoughts are not true. This is my work. This is the work of the day, the work that needs to be done, the work that draws my attention – not away from other things, but towards being here now, awake to these moments.
I wonder if this seed of an idea in my mind about domestic chores being somehow less worthy of my time is rooted in my cultural conditioning, which defines the value of work as something with an output worthy of capitalist credit.
Wondering makes me resist that narrative and emboldens my felt sense that no, these tasks of nurturing, caring and tending – to the plants, the flowers, my partner’s health, the cabin that gives me refuge and shelter – are more meritorious than anything else. And in fact, it’s everything else, the thoughts included, that are the distraction.
Except that’s also a limited, albeit valid narrative (aha, the paradox at the heart of all these wonderings and the hint of the problems that the mind makes by seeking other meanings than the simple facts in front of us).
Because it has always been thus. Some 2,500 or so years ago, the Buddha, realising that we with our simultaneously gifted and afflicted consciousness create this mental confusion, taught that all we need to do to free ourselves from the mind’s dissatisfaction-inducing tendency to reach, seek and resist is to return to the body, to the breath, to whatever we are engaged in.
Just this, just do this, come back from all the wandering. Free your mind from all the cogitation and rumination that overshadows the moment by dragging you away from the here and now. And then, on to the next thing when the next moment, task, work needs to be done.
Simply that. No need to make a big deal of any of it.
Except we do. People did thousands of years ago and will continue to do so. Because that is the nature of the mind – to wonder. And it’s also the nature of the mind to return, to liberate itself from what really, when we approach it lightly, is a tragi-comic state of made-up affairs.
Stop, for just a moment, trying to figure things out. Press pause on the mind’s machinations. Don’t wander into thoughts about the past or the future. Notice when you are thinking that you should be doing something else or start demeaning what you’re actually doing by being mentally elsewhere. Don’t do this to yourself. Do what you’re doing instead.
These are the fundamental teachings. Fundamental because they are the foundation, the ground of where we stand in any moment, the place from which, having restored ease by loosening the mind’s grip, we can greet the rest of the day.
This is what it means in large part to be awake (i.e. enlightened) – to not sleep walk through the moments that make up life, adrift on thoughts about other things, ideas about the future. That is the real distraction – thoughts that take us away from the here and now.
Zen practitioners are renowned and admired for their particularly fastidious observance of daily chores/work, to a granular level of detailed attention. The tradition is full of stories of eager students, seeking answers to what they (we, me!) believe to be life’s great existential questions and the meaning of life, finding themselves at the door of accomplished masters only to be told to wash dishes, sweep the floor, make tea.
What?! We intellectually-inclined and cleverness-obsessed people cry in disappointment. Partly because society has always misled us to believe that there has to be more, that this, whatever this is, cannot be enough. And partly because the mind is as wonderful and is it is exhausting for its habits of wanting more, more and more.
Surrender. Give it up. Give up all the questioning and seeking. That, if anything, is the answer. Frustrating at first, and then, ah, the sweet relief. It’s simple, but not easy. And therefore essential.
Cleverness is overrated
It’s these seemingly simple tasks that give life meaning, that enrich the moment and the mind. We do not need to look elsewhere for depth, for answers. It is in fact that searching and seeking tendency which keeps us stuck and from which we do well to liberate ourselves.
None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with being clever. There is a time and place for knowing things, for understanding the depth of things, for digging deep into details and figuring things out. But it’s not sustainable or healthy to stay in that realm. It’s a recipe for a headache. While the recipe for relief is to let go occasionally.
I say all of this as a recovering “intellectual” who has learned to lighten up and loosen my mental grip on needing to know things, of conceptualising everything, needing to find the meaning in everything, as someone who loved and still loves the life of the mind, of books, of reading, studying, cogitating and wondering. And I say this as someone who has been exhausted by all that seeking – by what in the Buddha Dharma is described as “the dissatisfactory nature of samsara”, where samsara is just limiting view of the world. Because in samsara is also nirvana, a broader perspective that sees the same things differently.
If ever there was a decolonial practice, this is it. Decolonise the mind from the misleading idea that your life as you live it is not worth your attention.
Chop vegetables, wash dishes, water the plants. What else is there to do? Many things, most likely. And when the time comes, do those things. Simple. Really, it is, if we let go of thoughts and ideas about a myriad of other things, and let it, let ourselves, just be.
See for yourself
As ever, the only way to truly “know” anything is to know it for yourself, through your own experience. I invite you to give this a go - stop what you’re doing, for one minute, five minutes, however long it takes to experience what it’s like to let go - and watch your mind likely resist giving up all the thinking and doing. Ease up on your conditioned and habituated sense of what is important, and allow this moment and yourself within it, to just be. Let me know how it goes!
So many beautiful reminders in this post! "Samsara is a limited view of the world." Love this so much.