Thoughts Engendered By A Friend's Curiosity

 A friend, when he discovered I rarely watch film and television, asked with shock, "What do you do all day?" It's a monastic existence, I admit, but still rife with anticipation. How many miles to go before I sleep, and what will I do with them? As my friend, Mr. Priestly, said, "I have always been delighted at the prospect of  a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning." 

So, I got to thinking: how does this writer spend his day? I have no meetings, script conferences, no long term planning sessions. Phone calls are few and mostly unanswered. Not yours, of course. I'm talking hucksters and scam artists, although if they were truly artists they would have caught me. Details. It's all in the details. Pay attention. So many details take up so much time that the day passes without knowing where it went. (We joke about watching paint dry, but what could be more Zen? The sound of one hand clapping? Really?) Just suppose you believed that all the earth and everything in it were sacred, so much so that every step you took was taken on hallowed ground. Every step. Everything you smelled and touched. Just sayin'. Everything you saw and heard. Suppose you believed that every pebble, every beetle, every mote of dust were somehow sacrosanct? Chris Hedges, a radical journalist with whom I currently disagree, said the point is, "To tie the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos."  I think about the Buddhist monk whose words taught me to "chop wood, carry water." How to transform the most basic of tasks. To do what you do and not do anything else but that. To pay attention. Just stop and think it through. To follow the connections. To grasp that one is a part of all this. It takes thought and attention to detail and that takes time but time passes and so does the day. Is there always magic waiting somewhere behind the morning? Of course not, but there is always that possibility. 

And so I spend my day kind of meandering from one moment to the next, dawdling as much as I want, establishing the flow, or so I try. And try. And try.

The Buddha was sitting under his tree when a horseman raced by.

    "Where are you going?" asked the Buddha

    "Ask my horse," answered the rider.