One Continuous Mistake
Life is a magnificent mess
Hi everyone,
I’ve relocated the family to Boulder, and celebrated our first round of unpacking with a community potluck at our home yesterday. We had close to 50 sangha members and family enjoying the brilliant Colorado afternoon. I am most grateful for the diversity of our group, ranging in age from 20’s to 70s, multiple ethnicities and orientations, and a wide spectrum of social and professional places in their lives.
I hadn’t intended to take a 12-day hiatus on the newsletter, but it looks like that’s what needed to happen…. Now I’m back in the saddle with my work, and happy to have connected with past clients, several of whom have taken me up on a special offer for a one-month coaching “Zen upgrade”.
If you find yourself in this first month of summer in a reflective mode, I can help you make the most of it. My desire is to help you integrate your professional, personal and spiritual paths. We tend to over-compartmentalize these areas, thinking that makes them more “manageable,” but actually it makes your life more complicated.
Summer is a good time to bring these parts of your life closer together, to find what I call the Single Stream. The professional domain (hopefully) takes more of a back seat, and you can foreground deeper soul needs that tend to get overshadowed by work obligations. But you need to do this with some intention, otherwise you will fall into past habits and known grooves. No shame there, it’s just what we do!
If you’d like to explore a program with me, sign up for a free Discovery session with me and we’ll see if I can help. I love this work and I am in clear purpose with it.
Today’s newsletter is about a topic that is close to my heart: the power of making mistakes consciously.
I hope you enjoy and can recommend Zen@Work Today to your friends and colleagues. I post the main newsletter content to Facebook and LinkedIn, but my personal notes are for the newsletter subscribers only. I welcome others into this community.
Paul
One Continuous Mistake
“A Zen master's life could be said to be so many years of "succeeding wrong with wrong," or one continuous mistake. ―Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, quoting Dogen.
“Just keep going.” ― Shishin Wick Roshi
Most of us are usually trying to accomplish something (many things in fact), and anything that appears to work against our idea of what that looks like we classify as a “mistake.”
We want to play an instrument well and when we play the wrong note we’ve made a mistake.
We want to create a loving environment for our family, so when we exacerbate a conflict, it’s a mistake.
We want our profession to advance in a certain way, and when we flub a presentation, we’ve made a mistake.
This view of life — which is pretty hard-wired for all of us — completely misses a deeper aspect of reality, and ends up creating needless complications and difficulties.
For example, it’s very common, almost unavoidable, for us to follow a “mistake” with a little storm inside that criticizes ourselves and unleashes a little arrow of self-doubt against our intention. Are we good enough? Can we swing it?
A Zen perspective on life insists that you see yourself in a very large context, a context bigger than your ideas and expectations. When you expand your context to include the big unanswerable questions about life, death and the universe you start to realize that your ideas about yourself are limited at best and at worst the exact opposite of the truth.
And blessedly we come to see that our mistakes are nothing other than the essential steps on the path of self-realization.
You may have seen in a meme the quote from Zen Master Dogen that “life is one continuous mistake.” I’ve always loved this one-liner, but Dogen’s writings on this topic are (surprise!) more subtle than the meme, and reward us with a little more scrutiny.
In fleshing out what he means by “one continuous mistake,” or “succeeding wrong with wrong” (which is a more literal translation), Dogen gives a report of what happened when he went for a walk in the woods:
Last night, I unintentionally stepped on a dried turd and it jumped up and covered heaven and earth. I unintentionally stepped on it again, and it introduced itself, saying, “My name is Śākyamuni.” Then, I unintentionally stepped on his chest, and immediately he became enlightened.
Wow! I wish this story from Dogen was as well-known as some of his other writings. It’s so human. He steps on a dried turd — three times! — with such amazing and unexpected consequences.
I think we can all agree that stepping on a turd qualifies as a mistake, in that no one ever intends to do it (outside of a John Waters movie). Dogen specifically says each time he did so “unintentionally” to highlight this.
But look at the result! First, heaven and earth open up for him, then he meets the Buddha, then he helps the Buddha become enlightened! I am sure he did not anticipate such wonderments when he headed off on his walk.
In order to practice with a Zen perspective on our mistakes, we shouldn’t go around stepping on turds or desperately looking for Buddha to jump up out of clogged toilets (although he might). The point here is to hold a bigger perspective than our ideas or expectations about accomplishment, success and fulfillment. That those things come through our mistakes and not in spite of them.
When you play the note wrong, you try and play it again. Likely it won’t be perfect, so you’ve followed your mistake with a mistake. You keep on doing that and each time you become progressively more absorbed in your skill. When you become more accomplished, an “off” note will be perfect for your performance.
After unintentionally creating discord in your family, you don’t stop trying to create a loving environment. When conflict arises again, you reflect on how it happened and what you might you might have done better. Likely some important truth is present in the conflict that needs attention.
After flubbing a presentation, you get back on the horse and make another presentation. Learn from what happened in the previous one, and try something new. You might get a whole new perspective on your professional goals.
It’s important not to believe our fixed ideas about ourselves, positive or negative. Suzuki Roshi is quite clear on this:
We say, "A good father is not a good father." Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. One who thinks he is one of the worst husbands may be a good one if he is always trying to be a good husband with a single-hearted effort.
We can’t and shouldn’t live without strong intentions to grow and accomplish. The key is to recognize that inevitably the actions of our body, speech, and mind will fall short. And not only is that ok, it is required. When we refuse to see this, think we are the cat’s pajamas, or get way down on ourselves for our mistakes …. that’s when we really fall into error.
When we hold this bigger perspective for ourselves, my teacher Shishin Roshi’s main mantra “just keep going”, ends up sounding really encouraging. The spirit is not to “gut it out,” but to not let our ideas about success, failure, accomplishment, setback, obstacle or ease get in the way of steadfastly and consciously trying to actualize our intentions, knowing that things will not go the way we planned, and that we’ll be stepping in turds all along the way.
And it will be magnificent.
Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash