Meditation: by Mary Oliver, a poem entitled “The Journey”
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the one thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
Reading: from an editorial entitled “Out the Door and Into 2012,” which appeared in the New York Times of December 31, 2011
Perhaps you have a New Year’s Day of your own — a day when it suddenly feels as though you’ve truly left the old year behind. It may be the day you no longer have to think twice when putting the date on a check, if you still write checks, that is. Perhaps your new year started the moment the days began lengthening just before Christmas. Or perhaps you hold off for the vernal equinox (March 20 in 2012), when New Year used to be celebrated and when, in many places, you can feel the newness of the year about to burst out of the ground.
But the calendar insists that this is the start of the public new year, and so we adjust our feelings to suit, [and find…] an undeniable excitement to this day.
On what other day in the calendar do you feel as though you’ve been handed a large lump of time, to be shaped as you see fit? When else do you feel time’s door closing so solidly behind you as you step out into the new world? We are like children on a bright winter’s day, all sent out to play with no demands or excuses to stay behind.
You may be a maker of resolutions — even a keeper of them — or you may have resolved to make none at all this year. It makes no difference. A resolution, after all, is just a plan to take change by the throat, when we all know that that is what change does to us, whether we like it or not. There is simply no telling what this new year will bring, and that is the very thing that makes it so new.
Reading: a Sufi tale (from The Tree of Knowledge, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, p. 249)
A story is told of an island somewhere and its inhabitants. The people longed to move to another land where they could have a healthier and better life. The problem was that the practical arts of swimming and sailing had never been developed - or may have been lost long before. For that reason, there were some people who simply refused to think of alternatives to life on the island, whereas others intended to seek a solution to their problems locally, without any thought of crossing the waters. From time to time, some islanders reinvented the arts of swimming and sailing. Also from time to time a student would come up to them, and the following exchange would take place:
“I want to swim to another land.”
“For that you have to learn how to swim. Are you ready to learn?”
“Yes, but I want to take with me my ton of cabbages.”
“What cabbages?”
“The food I’ll need on the other side or wherever it is.”
“But what if there is food on the other side?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m not sure. I have to bring my cabbages with me.”
“But you won’t be able to swim with a ton of cabbages. It’s too much weight.”
“Then I can’t learn how to swim. You call my cabbages weight. I call them my basic food.”
“Suppose this were an allegory and, instead of talking about cabbages we talked about fixed ideas, presuppositions, or certainties?”
“Humm… I’m going to bring my cabbages to someone who understands my needs.”
Reading: a poem by Greg Kuzma
I begin my life
over. It’s easy.
You take a deep breath,
close your eyes,
open them, and
there it is,
all the familiar things.
Nobody has to get up.
It’s drawing the chairs
closer to the fire,
opening the window
louder on the sound
of people walking by
outside, taking
another sip of coffee.
It’s habit, too easily
broken by dreams
and regrets. My
mind’s a blank, my
heart stirs, my eyes
take on their gentle
obligation. My hand
is steady as a baby’s sleep.
The Promise of New Beginnings
A Sermon Delivered on January 8, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
January is a month for beginnings, starting life afresh, doing a better job living up to the expectations we have of ourselves, and fulfilling the goals we set ourselves.
Just days ago millions of Americans made resolutions to lose weight, get fit, quit smoking, fix their finances, or organize their closets. According to a New York Times article, we spent $62 billion last year on health club memberships, weight-loss programs, exercise tapes, diet products and the like. And we are likely to spend a good portion of that amount in January of 2012. (New York Times, “Your Recycled Resolutions Are a Boon for Business,” by Natasha Singer, Dec. 31, 2011)
In January new membership numbers at health clubs double. And the sale of nicotine patches and other anti-smoking products rises by about 40 percent in the first week in January alone.
And yet experience shows that by the time a few weeks have passed, many of us have fallen away from the path of self-improvement. Despite our best intentions, old habits die hard.
Our new exercise equipment gathers dust, our finances remain problematic, and the closets we briefly managed to clean up are once again accumulating piles of clutter.
Some would say our failure to fulfill our ambitious New Year’s resolutions is evidence of a lack of willpower. A weakness of will is our problem, and stepping up our ability to focus more firmly on a single clearly defined goal is the solution.
We have a limited amount of willpower, social psychologists tell us, because willpower is a tangible form of mental energy, fueled by glucose in our bloodstream. And this glucose is used up as we assert self-control.
The best way to cope with these natural physiological limitations, is by adapting a few helpful strategies, for instance to set a single clear goal, to make an explicit and public commitment to your goal before setting out to achieve it, to keep track of your progress, and to grant yourself some reward for your incremental improvements.
“Contrary to widespread public opinion, a considerable proportion of New Year resolvers do succeed,” Dr. John Norcross, a psychologist at the University of Scranton, said. Even though the majority of resolutions are abandoned six months down the line, “you are 10 times more likely to change by making a New Year’s resolution compared to non-resolvers with the identical goals and comparable motivation to change.” (New York Times, “Be It Resolved” by John Tierney, Jan. 5, 2012)
* * *
New Year’s Day is an auspicious time for us to make changes to our life course. New Year’s celebrations say: out with the old, in with the new. The collective attention we give the end of one year, and the beginning of the next, can provide us with the critical amount of excitement or motivation we need to part with behavioral patterns we are not proud of. We can turn away from habits that are destructive or self-destructive, and take steps guided by our better selves. But it isn’t easy.
It isn’t easy to let go of the past. And with every year it becomes more difficult.
That’s the way it seems to me, anyway. With every year I grow older, my habits of behavior and my habits of mind seem more deeply entrenched. With every year that passes, I accumulate more experiences, gather more information, and even acquire new skills - but all of them are arranged in long-familiar ways. My experiences re-enforce the established story of my life, taking me a few steps further along a well-known path. New insights and information simply serve to further substantiate long-held opinions and attitudes about the world and my place in it.
With every year we grow older, our life experience grows weightier. And regardless whether our days were filled carefree happiness, or with painful life lessons learned the hard way - our natural inclination is to hold on to this accumulated wisdom and knowledge.
This is the common human experience conveyed in the Sufi story about the island inhabitants who remain forever stuck on their old little island. They are unable to learn - or relearn - how to swim to new shores, because they are unwilling to part with the ton of cabbages, which they have diligently acquired, and without which survival seems impossible.
They are unable to leave the past behind and explore new territories, because they are weighed down by their own fixed ideas, presuppositions and certainties.
One way to think about it, is that the islanders lack the willpower to put aside their pile of cabbages, and that, if only they had enough willpower and only if they had a good plan, then they would be able to leave past certainties behind, and step out into a new world.
This kind of approach, is an attempt to take change by the throat. But as the author of our first reading sees it, this approach has its limitations. We can’t generally take change by the throat, because that’s what change does to us, whether we like it our not.
Even if we are expert planners, even if we are experts at focusing our energies on a particular goal, we will often remain stuck in old habits and old assumptions.
In order to move beyond deeply engrained habit, it is less helpful to imagine ourselves as experts. It is more helpful to imagine ourselves as beginners, beginners of a new venture, beginners on a journey toward a destination as yet unknown.
* * *
“Beginner’s Mind” is the term Zen Buddhists use to describe an attitude that can free us from preconceived notions, and allows us to gain new and fresh insight.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is the title of a book first published in 1970, a collection of lectures by the Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryo Suzuki. Born in Japan, Suzuki came to the United States in 1959, when he was 55 years old to support what at the time was the only Soto Zen temple in San Francisco. He died in 1971, a year after the book was published.
Suzuki’s teachings had a profound effect in popularizing Zen Buddhism in this country. He was a small, quiet, and very ordinary man. Unpretentious and unassuming, one student said, “though he made no waves and left no traces as a personality in the worldly sense, the impress of his footsteps in the invisible world of history lead straight on.”
Beginners Mind is a central idea in Suzuki’s approach to Zen. It is an idea that is intriguing in its simplicity and its subtlety.
The Beginner’s Mind is a mind that is open, limitless. It is the mind, when we try something completely new, for the first time. It is a mind that has emptied itself of all distractions and is attentive to whatever the present moment may hold.
“Our “original mind” includes everything within itself,” Suzuki says. “It is always rich and sufficient within itself… In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Suzuki’s teachings are distinctly Buddhist. And yet his ideas share much in common with those of Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel. As Heschel sees it, the world is sublime, suffused with the sacred. And yet we are often blind and deaf to the world’s wonders, because our perspective is so narrow, our perceptions so superficial. We are constrained by our own pre-conceived notions.
“We rarely discover, we remember before we think;” Heschel writes, “we see the present in the light of what we already know. We constantly compare instead of penetrate, and are never entirely unprejudiced. Memory is often a hindrance to creative experience. (Man Is Not Alone, p.6)
* * *
Our past experience can be an obstacle to any new experience. This simple truth has long been a subject of religious reflection. More recently it is also being better understood in scientific circles.
The best way to understand the subtleties of the beginner’s mind, is to look to our own beginnings. We are most profoundly beginners in the first months of our lives, as babies.
Scientists say, a baby’s brain is abuzz with activity, and capable of learning amazing amounts of information very quickly. Jonah Lehrer writes, “unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.” This is not the way we have always understood a baby’s experience.
Scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia. This view is being overturned.
According to more recent research, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants’ inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process. We often think adults are better at paying attention than children. But, as Alison Gopnik writes, the truth is actually the opposite. “Adults are better at not paying attention. [We’re] better at screening out everything else and restricting [our] consciousness to a single focus.”
For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time. Just go for a walk down the street with a two-year-old, and you’ll start to see things you’ve never noticed before.
Jonah Lehrer says, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can inhibit creativity and lead us to fixate on the wrong facts. Sometimes in order to create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option. (Jonah Lehrer, Boston Globe Apr. 26, 2009, “Inside the Baby Mind.”)
* * *
Our past can sometimes feel like a ton of cabbages, pinning us down, making it impossible for us to explore new ground. Because we can’t bear to part with those hard won cabbages.
Or our past can feel like a big old house in which we are trapped, by our own assumptions and expectations. Our accumulated old experiences can feel like voices that are perpetually shouting bad advice.
We may long to try something new, some way to be a better person - a more loving partner, a more caring parent, a better friend. We may long to live a better life, to find new reservoirs of courage and compassion, a new spirit of generosity and joy. And yet, when we dare to step outside familiar rooms and hallways, the whole house seems to tremble, and tug at our ankles.
If we dare to step through the doorway, and out into a new road, little by little, we will leave the old voices behind. And as the stars begin to burn through sheets of clouds, and as we stride deeper and deeper into the world, we may hear a new voice, which we slowly recognize as our own.
* * *
We can begin our lives over again. We don’t need superhuman willpower. We don’t need a master plan.
We can begin our lives over. It’s easy.
You take a deep breath,
close your eyes,
open them, and
there it is,
all the familiar things.
Nobody has to get up.
Just let your mind be blank. Let your heart stir. Your hand will be as steady as a baby’s sleep.
* * *
May we honor our past,
May we cherish the paths we have traveled,
which have brought us to the place we are today.
May our past not confine us,
but inspire us to step out into a new world.
Amen.
