Your station isn't a sentence; it's your starting point

Natural tendencies guide us, but we decide what matters

I have studied zen buddhism, but not a ton. I’m no expert and can’t cite many authors or gurus (I have a deep suspicion of gurus, even when they bring good wisdom). The puzzle was a vision that came to me and I draw from my experiences to make sense of it. I want to stay on choosing the wood and water for a bit not because I’m a zen buddhist but because the parable and analogy to life is the best I found in my journey through faiths & philosophies (which I’ll speak to more next) for achieving presence and leveraging it to work on…shall we say meaning, for now.

When I was chopping wood and carrying water, working hard and loving it, I began to face the emptiness - both the emptiness zen practices show us at the center of it all AND the emptiness of my choices. How did I get to the mop? How did I get to this place of supreme frustration with very little choice left?

We often dream of radical transformations - the overnight career change, the all-new identity, and my favorite the ‘burn it down and rebuild’ reboot of life. But the data on these harsh changes is clear. Drastic change fails far more often than it sticks. When we pretend we’re blank slates we erase not only the limitations of our current station in life, but we ignore the beautiful parts of our puzzle and all we’ve built up to that point. Further, actually, we abandon the puzzle pieces at our fingertips that are best suited to help us make non-scorched-earth changes that last.

Presence is the gift that sloughs off all the external trappings and judgemental mind and allows us to engage. Then we can step back and plot the path forward from the work. We can use our natural tendencies, the biases of our brains, to know what work we’ll do best at and what will just not click as well.

Presence and natural tendencies are the engine and the car. Our current station in life is the road…the world around us. It’s almost not an analogy, almost literal, but our station is made up of our experiences, our resources, our external constraints. Of course if we get good at finding presence we will invariable be amazing at what we’re doing. We can’t say, however, that since we found presence we can go from our family business that’s in debt with 4 kids and health issues straight to getting that amazing job and becoming rich (which isn’t a great goal anyways). There’s, like, a lot of pieces in between.

We must accept where we are and, with our newfangled presence skill and wisdom, plot a course for our puzzle to the promised land (which also sounds not the right thing, but it’s just a saying). We inventory our puzzle pieces. We develop a vision of where we go from here. Start now. Not ‘if only I had made better choices I could…’ or ‘I just need XYZ then I can start.’ Just accept and start changing what you don’t like.

Our vision can be bold. We must be able to see the connection, however, between our current puzzle and available pieces and the bold outcome. We don’t need to be able to see all the pieces along the way. It turns out helping others and others helping us is the true way to achieve goals that are outside of our current puzzle.

After I would mop floors, fully present, I would leave the work and take stock of the day, inventory my puzzle pieces and look at what I had done. Having done the best I could with the day my anxieties sometimes melted and my mind felt clear. I could see my vision for a different path and the pieces I needed became apparent. Sometimes it required other, much harder, things I needed to do. The complexity of how to move towards my vision of greater impact started to make sense. I could see how the puzzle pieces fit together and how I would get there from where I was.

Our vision starts with our current situation, right now. Presence combined with natural tendencies will not just fill our path with joy and accomplishment but show us new paths, some that were completely dark and we never knew existed. I knew it wouldn’t be overnight, the change I wanted, and I didn’t care. I was loving what I was doing. And just beyond the chopping and carrying was the choosing which lead to different water and wood.

Zen buddhists may say it doesn’t matter what the wood and water is, stop thinking about it. Just keep chopping and carrying. This has never felt complete to me. Whether I am not good enough at it or not I still have a drive from my natural tendencies and my drive must move forward. So I choose where to point my drive and I let it find it’s joy in progress. I try to accept my station and connect the puzzle from here to my vision. Do you have natural tendencies that push you towards some things and away from others? Can you use them to see how you got here? Can you use them to see the puzzle you’ve built (your station) and what kind of puzzle you want to make now?

I let my puzzle vision be fuzzy in areas, knowing that I don’t have the experiences to make it clear yet. I mostly am clear on direction, not destination.