Break Time!

    What is a break? What is the phenomenology of "taking a break"? Or what about the unexpected break--those moments when you are prepared to do something only to find that it was canceled or postponed unexpectedly? This happened a couple of times to me recently: when I was about to go to a Buddhist class that is 3 hours long, I realized too late that the class was cancelled that day. And then I had this enormous amount of time available for me. What to do with it? Actually it didn't matter. The point is that I had this energy that was supposed to go to one thing, being channeled into the focus of non-doing. I think this is a kind of interesting paradox.

     When I expect things to be a certain way--as dictated from outside, for instance--I become attached to the form it will take. I am no longer free in those moments; I become a kind of slave to the form. Now, this works the other way too. Let's say that I did not have anything planned at all that day and knew about it beforehand? Would I be as free from form as if I had something to do? Again, what often happens in this case is that I become attached to "no form", or at least a false sense of freedom that comes from negation of doing. This just leads to a free-floating kind of boredom and anxiety that wonders "what to do next". But if, somehow, I am able to feel the potent energy that is in this moment without attaching to a form of "what it is supposed to be" and not attaching to its "lack of form", then this energy is extremely powerful in itself. It is a kind of invigorating potency that I can't describe. It is the sense that even though we are suffering, we can still feel the determination to come out of suffering.

    I think this is what it means when the Zen masters talk about "busy doing nothing". The doing nothing part does not emphasize "nothing" (as though it were a negation of doing), and nor is it a form that the doing attaches to. In fact, there is an act of doing, but the doing works on things that have no substance at all: like bubbles or reflections in a mirror. But, it does not fall into the despair of "there's nothing to do". Instead, it is able to stay with the determination of doing, even when there is no object on which the doing is directed. The whole of doing is only one of many revelations that doing has no substantial self. Doing is pure doing in this moment.