Patience
[Resurrected from my old blog...the original with comments, if it is still there, is...err...here.]
7 February 2006
Napa, CA
On Friday last week my friend, Roger, and I went up to Occidental, a small town in Northern California, to sit with a group from the Pacific Zen Institute. This was their last full day of a seven or eight day retreat. The retreat was in a lovely area in a dense stand of redwoods. The air was cool and quiet; the soil moist and musky. All in all a perfect place to sit in meditation for few hours, and then hear a talk about meditating.
The sitting part was fine for me. There was a sort of break every twenty-five minutes or so. Someone rang a bell, and whoever wanted to would then join the group in a walking meditation for a little while. Or, if you wanted to, it was fine to just stay put and sit with whatever was occurring in that moment. Very zenny.
Time, for me anyway, moved as it often does when I am sitting like that. I notice that sometimes the moments fly by, and I find myself quite still and at home with myself. Then moments emerge that seem to drag on forever, and I feel like a great ship dragging her anchor across the seafloor. I can almost hear the chains moaning under the strain. And I feel myself wanting to break the chains freeing myself from that anchor and allowing myself to drift off into unconsciousness - the way I can when I daydream.
And the time moved along in those ways that time moved until it was dinnertime.
Right from the moment of our arrival that afternoon we were welcomed. Michelle, who I guess became the unofficial greeter, made sure that we were comfortable. No doubt she would have invited us to join them for dinner. As it happened, Roger had brought along a fabulous chicken salad for the ride up, so we weren't hungry. We decided to take a walk while the group went on to dinner. We arrived back at the main building in time to sit for a half hour or so before the talk and before my excruciating tussle with patience would begin.
The talk (I guess because it was the finale for the week) turned out to be a two-fer. John, the meditation teacher I wrote about before, was joined by his colleague, David. They had decided to do a talk in which each one would add some comments to the other's. Perhaps there was a coin toss in the foyer, I don't know. Anyway David went first, and he began to speak about patience...
Early on in his talk David introduced a story as an analogy to the meditative process. It was a story about patience, and waiting, and it was meant (I think) to highlight a kind of posture of waiting needed for meditation.
It was a really stupid story about a dog left behind by a Japanese guy at a big train station in Tokyo and the guy died at work and because he happened to be dead at the time he didn't come back to the station that night and the dog ended up waiting every day at the station looking expectantly at each passenger for about ten years until he died too and the Japanese people erected a statue of the dog commemorating such loyalty and devotion and patience.
Did I mention how stupid I thought the story was?
Oh, and did I mention how impatient I was becoming as I listened to this stupid story?
Christ, I thought, why didn't someone take the poor dog home? Maybe he could have found some kids to play with, or some cats to chase? And the statue, what's up with that? It seems that people in Japan really like suffering and the idea of this longing. As I said to Roger later, the Japanese seemed to have put the "d" into delayed gratification...
Once I was able to let go of this one trait shared by many people in Japan that I find rather unappealing, the rest of the talk was OK. I got used to being irritated with David's story, and even took home another koan from John that seemed useful. At one point he introduced a koan that says something like this: The coin lost in the river is found in the river. That got my attention as I began to think about how often I have lost a coin in the river and then went off to look for it under the broccoli dish, or (in my less irrational and more concrete moments) under the cushions in the couch. And I thought about how impatient I was becoming, and how much I was irritated thinking about all the coins, all the important facets in my life, that I have lost in the river, that do not ever show up under the broccoli dish or behind the couch cushions.
But mostly I was irritated by that stupid Japanese shaggy dog story.
And then somehow Friday became Saturday, and finally I became curious about why I had such a reaction to that story, why I carried it with me all the way back to Berkeley, and slept with it that night, and woke with it, and then carried it all through the day until I found myself sitting with it in a coffee place in Berkeley waiting for my Verger* friend, Rachel, to come and meet me for a quick dinner before she went off for the evening.
And gradually, the story became less stupid.
As it happens from time to time in the Bay Area on a Saturday evening, traffic sucked. Actually, as it happens every Saturday in the Bay Area, traffic sucks. This particular Saturday evening it just sucked more than usual. Since I wasn't coming down from Napa like Rachel was, I could take surface streets and merely become impatient with the stupid traffic barriers that the proletariat in Berkeley had their commissars in the city council erect in order to make it impossible to get from Point A to Pont B in Berkeley without having to touch base with at least six other points in a zigzag pattern that is almost as irritating as that story. Even with all those impediments, though, I was able to get to the coffee place before the time we had set to meet. Rachel on the other hand, was on I80 somewhere north of Berkley. She did not share my good fortune.
And so there I was sitting in strategic spot at a busy intersection in Berkeley watching all the hustle and bustle of a Saturday evening, and I began to think about that little dog.
What must it have been like for him? I could almost see him with his tongue hanging out, and his tail wagging, straining to see each passenger. The eager look when he would see someone who resembled his master, who wore a similar coat, who had similar hair. And then that moment of disappointment, when he realized that this man in the coat was not the one he was waiting for. And then that awful moment when there were no more passengers that day, when the crowd had thinned. Did he go home, or did he find a place to sleep near the station?
Certainly, I have had such experiences in my life - literally. There is a time I will never forget waiting in old Terminal 1 (that pier is closed now) at the San Francisco Airport, waiting for the woman I loved to come up the jetway at Gate 14 in those days when you could wait at the gate for arriving passengers. How I scanned everyone looking for her, and how after some number of passengers had deplaned, I worried that maybe she missed the flight, and how then I saw her, and all the waiting - patiently and impatiently - and all the longing for her arrival just evaporated like the tule fog when the sun comes up.
Those kinds of waiting are full of expectancy. Always there waiting with me at the edges of my awareness - in those kinds of waiting times - is the possibility of disappointment. Somehow, though, in this particular waiting time, sitting at this particular table outside this coffee place, watching people all around me come and go in the early evening, I noticed that I was neither patient nor impatient. I noticed the couple at the next table pouring over a newspapaer looking up the time of the movie they wanted to see. Her hand resting on his knee. His arm across her shoulder. This affection for each other was so clear that it was almost transparent, almost invisible. Then I noticed the old man walking so carefully so as not to spill his coffee that he had filled too close to the brim. And then two girls came walking by arm in arm smiling and talking at the same time. Everything was just as it was.
Then I thought about Rachel, and how she must be a bit frantic by now and worried about keeping me waiting. And since I was not frantic, and not disappointed, and not expectant, and neither patient nor impatient, I was able to get in touch with the compassion I had for her in that moment. I was also aware that I was powerless to change anything. If I called her to tell her not to be frantic, she might only become more impatient and stressed. So I just waited. I was looking forward to seeing her without being concerned with how much time we would have together. Fifteen minutes. An hour. It was all the same.
What became clear to me then was how different this kind of waiting is. How little this kind of waiting has to do with patience. When I am able to sit without expectation, without the fear of disappointment, without all the usual chatter in my head, then I am able to experience a compassionate mind - at least for a moment or two.
So what of this word patience that you have been waiting patiently to know about? As it happens, it has an origin that is quite telling. Patience comes from the Middle English pacient, from Middle French, from Latin patient-, patiens, from present participle of pati "to suffer"; perhaps akin to Greek pEma suffering.
It is a good thing not to suffer once in a while.
* Verger refers to On the Verge, a group of emerging young leaders in the Bay Area working in non-profit organizations.