Leaving the present moment is the American way
“It isn’t as if you’re trying to teach a tree to talk.”
Like much of what Chögyam Trungpa, the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher, said and wrote, this phrase slaps me awake. It reminds me to keep it simple, to notice when I’m fantasizing about something new and complicated to avoid the hard work of keeping it real in the present moment.
Like when I write about politics. My default is to strive to find a new way of looking at an issue, with all the new words (“neoliberalism,” “austerity”), rather than getting down and dirty with the basic situation: that this society is sick and backwards, and that what people are starving for is simple and direct communication about how to fulfill their unmet needs.
Maybe it reminds you of your tendency to cut and run when things get tough, when you’re bored with a relationship or job.
It’s sort of like “the grass is always greener on the other side,” except without the touch of “I told you so…” — sometimes the grass is greener over there, and you should go enjoy it.
Trungpa is pointing at why mindfulness is so powerful. Now, the present moment, is painful or boring or never good enough, so our minds go elsewhere. We regret something we’ve done but can’t drop it, replaying the scene over and over again. We look to the future — if I just lose a little weight someone will love me. We escape into abstraction, trying to “mansplain” life’s sheer power and infinite potential into neat little boxes.
We try again and again, so to speak, to teach a tree to talk.
Mindfulness is just the opposite: our mind is right here, right now, not in an intense or stoned way, but with a soft attention on our surroundings and what’s going on inside of us, our thoughts and emotions.
Where does our tendency to leave, to complicate things come from? A South Indian heretic found it wired into the human mind over two thousand years ago. In his own words, the Buddha’s first meditation was “accompanied by thinking and exploring.” He reduced then-existing meditation techniques down to a simple practice: watching thoughts without taking them all that seriously.
But we’re also swimming in it. American society was built on looking to the future while justifying the violence and pain of the present — it nearly says so in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“The pursuit.” Is there a better way to describe what living in this society feels like? The only gear we seem to have available to us when we feel lost, confused, or powerless is to strive harder. We are told to innovate and disrupt to solve problems. Whatever gets in the way of our pursuit, whether it be nature, women, people of color, our bodies, etc., must be controlled. And we now know that “all men” only meant certain men.
This is why meditation practice is so refreshing. We learn to stick with the messiness of reality, to pull on a door that we’ve been taught to relentlessly try to push.
