What would it look like if you were really you?
November 15, 2007
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Leo Babauta, of Zen Habits, asks his readers today about an interesting tension between two philosophical systems. On the one hand there is zen buddhism which suggests that you give up all desires, and on the other hand there is the desire to improve.
I have several reactions, but my first one is that zen practice itself is driven by a certain desire. If not, why go through the practice. Sitting motionless for sometime is hard work, hurts your legs. You have to overcome resistance from time to time, to actually go and sit early in the morning. Why do this? Because you desire a better life, where the turmoils of the world disturb you less and less. It is a good reason and a good practice, driven by a reasonable desire.
Most importantly however, I think that this is a question that lives in a consumerist world, where our failures are pointed out, over and over again. And if we didn’t think there were any failures, marketers will let us know that we overlooked something.
Take working out for instance. Why do we work out? If you believe the marketers, you work out because you have flabby abs that are just not sexy. You are overweight and that is bad, didn’t you realize it? In other words, pointing out what is wrong sells.
It takes effort to turn this around. Work out because you love your body. Now that is a radical concept. We have learned to think of working out as a hard labor punishment that we bravely confront. Look at horses in the wild. Let them loose and they will run. It is in their nature. My dog picks up the biggest stick she can find. That is in her nature. Children play in the street (if they can) and they run around like mad. That is in their nature.
Adult humans however lost their sense of their nature. And so the idea of self improvement was born. You see, if you don’t know who you are, then you can think about improvement. But it is not self improvement. That is the deception. We improve precisely because we don’t know ourselves anymore. If we really knew ourselves, the idea of self improvement would disappear. We would simply express ourselves all the time. We wold not work out, but be physically active in a way that works for us. I was told that running was good, and tried to like to run. In the end though, I hate to run. I just hate it.
I love to work out with kettlebells. That is what I do.
Zen practice is not a practice to learn to be quite and minimalist. Zen practice teaches you who you really are. The moment you think about self improvement, sit. Who are you really. What would it look like if you are really you? That is a much harder question.
Technorati Tags: improvement, zen, sitting, kettlebells, running
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