You Got Problem, I Got Problem, Everybody Got Problem

That's the mantra that Ahmed, my Albanian landlord, used to intone whenever I came up with a fanciful excuse about why I couldn't pay the full $600 monthly rent on my Bronx apartment back in the 1980s.  He was a decent landlord and used to let me slide for a couple of weeks until I could come up with the scratch. I've been thinking a bit about excuses latey. What are they really? Are they reasons things don’t get done, or self-fulfilling prophesies grounded in nothing more substantial than our fleeting and ever-changing views on the way the world should be?  I mean, to some degree we ALL make excuses about why this or that thing never happened or couldn’t get done, and in some cases there is a legitimate basis for the excuse. Example: “I missed the meeting because the train was 30 minutes late”.  There’s nothing you can do about a missing train, so an excuse of that sort is really more of an explanation. No problem there.

The problem arises when we make excuses for why we can’t do something, despite the fact that the excuse is more properly characterized as an act of avoidance rather than an act of random happenstance. Does that make sense? People write all sorts of scripts in their heads and play their roles with great intensity. For example, “I have no time at all to meditate” is really a declaration of subconscious desire. “I don’t really want to meditate but I feel like I should so I’ll say I have no time” is probably more accurate.  The kicker is that most of the time we’re completely unaware that we are mentally shutting things down. This holds even when we’re directly challenged about something we really think we believe.

That said, assuming the role of “Director” and pointing out places where someone can easily, say, carve out 10 minutes of time out of their schedule to sit on a cushion, will not get anyone to change their minds (or behavior), but it will almost certainly get you into trouble. People don’t want their scripts (or beliefs) challenged; only validated. When we are challenged, we lock up. We can’t process the dissonance because it calls into question a very firmly held super-structure of beliefs about the way the world should be. Strongly held beliefs, as the Buddha told us all those years ago, are the principal cause of much of life’s needless suffering.

 I think that the role of Zen practice is to help us re-write our scripts.  What Zazen does is points us to where we’ve gotten stuck, and pries us loose from the web of beliefs and so-called certainties that we spin out of the silk of our mental constructs.

I have always believed that we manufacture a good measure of our own misery. One thing practice has taught me is that problems are never as insurmountable as we think they are. Often finding a solution to a problem that seems intractable is as simple as  sitting with it and unraveling the web of ideas, strand by strand.