That Full Catastrophe at Wendy’s

The line- up is short and not too many people are in the Wendy’s. I stand in line and wait for my time to come. I order and stand aside. I notice the movement of hands as the food transfers from raw ingredient to cooked product, to something wrapped and ready to take home. I marvel at the efficiency. And for a moment, I wonder if there is a single being in the room. When I take away thoughts of ‘me’ standing here and ‘others’ preparing the food, what am I left with? The sounds,  the smells, the process, food flowing by, a sneeze, a nose blowing, dust flying, brooms sweeping, and shuffling to get to a vacant seat. Life is a verb, life is a breeze. Life is buzzing, is blowing. But is there anything ‘living’ that I can point to? Can I point to one single piece in this process and say “that is life, and that is not life”? Subject and objects dissolve at the Wendy’s.

Many years ago, I read Jon Kabat Zinns’ book on mindfulness called Full Catastrophic Living. Since then, it has become something of an Indigo/Chapters classic. Every time I go to the bookstores, I am seeing several copies of that book. And it’s a good book if only for the metaphorical title, which says many things about life itself. For me, there is a humor in that title. It acknowledges, as Kabat Zinn does, that hardly anything really goes according to plan, and we don’t have it all together in our lives. Not only this, but there is no expectation that one ever will fully have it altogether. As the Venerable shared with us in the Dharma Talk this evening, people have to use skilful means to interact with mind. All the great religions provide an access point for people to dialogue with the mind and find peace with the mind, yet the religious figures themselves are projections of mind.

But how we “dialogue” with mind or when there is fundamentally only one mind, this mind, is tricky to understand.  I can’t say that I have integrated the teaching into my life, because I still behave as though there are things and people separate from mind. The analogy used in the Dharma Talk tonight was about a man who played chess with himself in the park, beat himself, and gave himself a heart attack over a rude gesture he gave to himself! This sounds crazy, but we are always interacting with our previous thoughts, so in that regard, we are all very much like that chess player. The violence of this inner dialogue comes when we don’t recognize the suffering we create when one thought reacts to the previous thought. We think that this previous thought is something outside of us, or someone who bothers us, or a separate object from our own subject.