Beware busyness

On going back to the bare necessities

Aug 30, 2022

There is this thing that happens in life where if you don’t watch out, you’ll just keep getting busier… One must beware.

While sometimes one gets very busy all of a sudden, more often it’s a slow, gradual accrual of busyness that befalls people. For me, it often starts during nice, relaxing weekends or vacations when my mind has time to wander and my days have hours to fill. Without the activity from work, my brain comes up with countless new activities to pursue: “I should learn how to do X” my mind tells me, “What if I did this every day for a year? I’d get so good at it! Totally worth doing...” Perhaps it’s learning a new language, performing a new sport, starting a long series of books… During the vacation I spend hours turbo-launching this new activity and the momentum gets me through a few weeks or months; the enthusiasm of novelty propels me forward.

The problem, of course, is that life isn’t vacation. Other obligations arise and the days start to get crowded. Forgetting that my new undertaking is a choice, I continue to force it into my day, squeezing it in among the other series of to-dos I’ve already amassed.

Adding yet another goal doesn’t come without a cost. After a few while, the fun new activity I wanted to learn starts to feel like a chore. “I need to squeeze in 5/10/15 minutes of this new language I want to learn,” I tell myself. My mindfulness starts to suffer. Subtle stress accrues.

When this happens, I need to pull out of the busyness nose-dive and recenter. I need to trim down to the bare essentials. Similar to Marie Kondo going through and ridding closets around the world of anything that does not “spark joy”, I go through and ground myself in the bare necessities. And when I look deeply, the bare necessities are actually quite bare.

LIFE AS TEA CEREMONY

When I first started writing this newsletter almost one year ago, I wrote a lot about mindfulness. In late 2021 I’d reached a personal equilibrium with a ton of meditation. For a little while I had a rule that the amount of time I spent on meditation had to be greater than the amount of time I spent on news or social media. This was a great kick in the pants…

I was recently listening to Craig Mod talk about his Vipassana experience and I really liked the way he described it. For those that don’t know, Vipassana is a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I highly recommend it - it completely changed my life…

Craig writes about how the first three days of Vipassana were terrible for him since he wasn’t truly mindful. However, he describes how everything shifted for him, once he was able to be completely present (note: emphases added below):

Maybe it was the birds that inspired in me a brief moment of pseudo-spiritual maturity. I continued talking to [myself] in monastic tones: Time will pass as it passes regardless of what we do here. (Who was speaking now? I didn’t know.) You can be a grumpy fuck and write angry letters to a non-profit organization skewering them for having a bad on-boarding experience, for having no affordances as to why we were looking at our nostrils, left or right, perhaps, or both, perhaps, but it won’t change anything. Anyway, they harbor no ill will. This entire thing is constructed for us, flawed as it may be. So stop being a dick and be present. There are seven more days and that’s a lot of time, and if we leave without having gained something, the fault is ours and ours alone.
And that’s when everything changed, and everything became a meditation.
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I realized there were about a hundred discreet actions we performed each day. A sampling: Opening the screen door, closing the screen door, pulling back the curtain of the dorm room, folding the futon, walking up the stairs to the meditation hall, putting toothpaste on a toothbrush, brushing your incisors, your molars, rinsing your brush, applying soap to your hands, then your face, swirling your hands around your face, pulling toilet paper from the toilet paper roll, taking a plate from a stack of plates, opening the rice maker, sprinkling sesame seeds on your rice.
I decided to master them all. Every action. Everything a tea ceremony. I pulled toilet paper from the toilet paper roll with total deliberation, total focus, complete reverence, love, presence. Pulled and folded and pulled a little more, folded once again, ripped perfectly on a perforation. We couldn’t speak to one another but I realized I could speak to the others with toilet paper: I would fold the end into a little triangle, a perfect equilateral triangle, that poked out from the top of the holder, making it ever so easier for the next person to take hold. They would feel my love — what was turning more and more into a true love, a full bodied love — through the folded toilet paper, I was certain of this.
My steps were light, lighter than ever, I made no noise as I tread across the floor or up the stairs. A perfect articulation of leg and abdominal muscles absorbing all impact, creating no sound. I quickly mastered the screen door — silent and then silenter still. As for picking up a plate, I was the best, totally aware, totally present, an economy of motion, the lightest of touch. No motherfucker could pick up a plate like I could. (The more meditative I became, the more gently profane — Kendrick Lamar inflected — became the running inner monologue.)
I realized quickly that in having nothing to do, nowhere to be, nothing to consume or take us away from the meditation center, that to rush or feel rushed or feel any sense of frustration was pointless. (You then hope to carry this understanding back into the Real World.) When the gong rang for food I rose slowly as others bolted. Took metered steps, present for each one as others ran past, hurried to get food. Why? To what end? To do nothing once they were done? It became sadder and sadder as the days wore on, the rushing of some of the students.

When I first started writing this newsletter I had regained this zone that Craig describes. Of course, it’s a state that is achievable anytime, for anyone. It “just” requires being present.

TAKING LIFE SERIOUSLY

One of the books that’s changed my life the most is The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. There is one part of it where Sogyal Rinpoche writes about how the key to finding happiness in modern life is simplicity:

Once when I was taking part in a conference in Britain, the participants were interviewed by the BBC. At the same time they talked to a woman who was actually dying. She was distraught with fear, because she had not really thought that death was real. Now she knew. She had just one message to those who would survive her: to take life, and death, seriously.
Taking life seriously does not mean spending our whole lives meditating as if we were living in the mountains in the Himalayas or in the old days in Tibet. In the modern world, we have to work and earn our living, but we should not get entangled in a nine-to-five existence, where we live without any view of the deeper meaning of life. Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way to learn not to overstretch our selves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
In Buddhism this is what is really meant by discipline. In Tibetan, the term for discipline is tsul trim. Tsul means "appropriate or just," and trim means "rule" or "way." So discipline is to do what is appropriate or just; that is, in an excessively complicated age, to simplify our lives.
Peace of mind will come from this. You will have more time to pursue the things of the spirit and the knowledge that only spiritual truth can bring, which can help you face death. Sadly, this is something that few of us do. Maybe we should ask ourselves the question now: "What have I really achieved in my life?" By that I mean, how much have we really understood about life and death?

“I have not used the telephone for the last 25 years”

There is this passage of a Thich Nhat Hanh interview that really stuck with me where he talks about how he takes time for himself – it’s amazing (and perhaps less surprising in retrospect) that even this great monk had to set strong boundaries to remain mindful:

Tricycle: You have become so popular that I have heard people say “Thich Nhat Hanh is a movement, not a teacher.”
Thich Nhat Hanh: That’s not my impression. I see myself as a very lazy teacher, as a very lazy monk.
Tricycle: I don’t think very many people see you that way.
Thich Nhat Hanh: I have a lot of time for myself. And that’s not easy. My nature is that I don’t like to disappoint people, and it is very difficult for me to say no to invitations. But, I have learned to know my limit, learned to say no and to withdraw to my hermitage to have time for my walking meditation, my sitting, my time with the garden, with the flowers and things like that. I have not used the telephone for the last twenty-five years.
My schedule is free. It is a privilege. Sometimes I remember a Catholic father in Holland who keeps a beeper. I asked him, “Why do you have to keep that?” and he said “I have no right to be disconnected from my people.” Well, in that case, you need an assistant. Because you cannot continue to be of help to other people if you do not take care of yourself. Your solidity, your freedom, your happiness, are crucial for other people. Taking good care of yourself is very important. I have learned to protect myself. That does not mean that I have to be unkind to people, but sharing the teaching with helping professionals, well, I always say, “You work so hard. Doctors and nurses and social workers, you work too hard. And if you face so much stress, you cannot go on, you have burned out. So please find ways—by all means—in order to protect yourself. Come together and discuss strategies of self-protection. Otherwise you cannot help people for a long time.” Because I urge other people to do so, I do so myself.

There’s a theme running through all of these lessons: simplify, create boundaries to be present, and take care of yourself.

Personally I find there are only a few things I need to really do everyday to stay grounded: I need to meditate and minimize distractions, I need to exercise, and I need to try to eat well. Everything else is icing on the cake. Life can actually be quite simple…

It’s been amazing writing this newsletter this past year. I’ve made new friends and rekindled old friendships. It’s forced me to write and it’s forced me to reflect. I am really grateful to all of you reading this.

As I was diving into Craig Mod’s work, he has a few posts about how to write newsletters. One of his main suggestions is to make temporary, “pop-up” newsletters. It’s almost like “seasons” of tv shows. Craig recommends this approach since it makes the process of creation more enjoyable, it helps reduce the pressure of having to write indefinitely, and it also establish time boundaries to make it a better reader experience.

As I approach the one year anniversary of writing this newsletter, I’m thinking about what the next year will entail… Perhaps Seasons is the right approach? My post next week will be my reflections on a year of newslettering. After that, I’m going to put a wrap on “Season 1” and then take a step back to dream about what’s next.

If there are any things I’ve written about that you’ve particularly enjoyed and/or areas you’d want me to expand on, please let me know!

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