Leaves and Rivers

The oldest stories say that before meditation became a wellness practice, before it became an app on a phone or a word printed on the spine of a self-help book, it was simply the act of sitting and noticing.

The sages of India sat beneath trees and watched the movements of their own minds as carefully as astronomers watched the heavens. They discovered a troubling thing: a person can survive hunger, heat, grief, and loneliness, but they suffer most from their insistence that the world should be other than it is.

The Buddha called this clinging.

The Daoists called it resistance to the river.

The old Zen masters called it picking and choosing.

Different names for the same invisible habit.

I seem to possess this habit in abundance.

Not anger. Anger is too honest a thing. It arrives like a storm, overturns the furniture, and leaves evidence of its passing. 

I remain defeated by the smallest irritations. Such small things.

Look how inconsiderate they are.

Notice how selfish that was.

See how little they understand you.

I become like a dog with a burr caught in its fur, turning and turning in circles, unable to think of anything else.

I have watched these small things transform ordinary people into caricatures of their flaws. A friend's impatience becomes cruelty. A stranger's thoughtlessness becomes proof of humanity's failures. An awkward moment becomes an indictment of an entire relationship.

An endless negotiation with reality.

There is a particular shame in this.

One does not wish to admit to being conquered by something so small.

This morning I sat with my teacher, though I had not come to him for comfort. A wind had come through during the night and covered the stone path in yellow leaves.

The monks had not yet swept them away.

For weeks I had been sitting in silence and understanding less each day. The instructions seemed simple enough when spoken aloud, but when I tried to follow them my mind only grew more tangled. I told him as much, perhaps more sharply than I intended.

"I do not understand what I am supposed to do," I said. "I sit, and my thoughts do not stop. I watch them, and still they return. I try to be patient, and I become impatient. It feels as though I am failing at the very thing I came here to learn."

When I finished, he looked at the leaves scattered across the path and said, "You believe the purpose of meditation is to make unpleasant feelings disappear. It is not."

I frowned. "Is that not the point? To not be controlled by it?"

"To see it," he said. 

He picked up a leaf from the ground and turned it over in his hand.

"If this leaf wished to remain on the branch, would that keep it there?"

"No," I said.

"If the river wished to flow backward, would it?"

“No”.

He nodded. "You ask your mind to do what no leaf or river can do."

I had no answer for him.

He placed the leaf in my palm.

"Suffering begins," he said, "when we demand that this moment be different than it is."

I looked down at the leaf in my hand.

It seemed so small a thing.