95. Design Thinking & Zen Sitting
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How to think Design?
Nothing is sep’rate in it —
Nothing excluded!
During the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, like most other people I gained some wait and lost some of my vim and vigor. This is owing to the natural ravages of aging, sickness and death as taught by Buddha, I know, but I want to warn you that your Design thinking can lead you astray if you let it, in the sense that you begin over-thinking your daily practice, and fall prey to a common misunderstanding of Zen. This goes back to something Matsuoka Roshi once cautioned us about, to “Be careful about that one little thing that you allow yourself.” We tend to look at our daily lives as extremely complicated and demanding, even as we retire from our main vocation. We fill in the time with other preoccupations.
As householders there is always something. A new roof, new gutters, repairs and maintenance of the plumbing and electrical, the HVAC, the yard work, the whole catastrophe. A house’s job is to fall down. Ours is to prop it up. You don’t believe me, just let it go for a while. I don’t know what kind of landscaping Master Dogen may have had to deal with personally, but his expression: “Yet in attachment, blossoms fall, and in aversion, weeds spread” is not just a poetic whimsy. To this I can testify personally. This rainy spring we are letting our back yard go more so than usual, in the hopes of providing the neighborhood wildlife — bugs, bees, bats, birds and other beneficial critters along with pollinators — some degree of sanctuary from the golf course mentality that afflicts too many of our neighbors, with the constant spewing of noisy and polluting leaf-blowers, and spraying of herbicides and pesticides.
Then there is the occasional boundary dispute with otherwise very friendly folks who decide it would be a good idea to lop off some of the black bamboo in your cultivated stand, intended to provide screen between the yards, and to offer to the zoo for feeding the pandas. But I digress. You get the point.
The point is that all these worthwhile and perfectly understandable activities, set against a background of constant bad news from the larger community out there, can become a substitute for your Zen practice. As can joining the board of directors, managing the newsletter publication, and the various other necessary activities around operating a Zen center. Beware the substitution effect.
So the other morning I was the willing victim of an online scam for the first and last time in my life. The Home Depot, which is a few blocks from our house, and of which I am a loyal customer, owing mainly to the convenience factor — and had been a consultant to their headquarters here in Atlanta before retiring from commercial design into full-time Zen practice — was offering gifts, free but for a handling charge, simply for filling out a survey about shopping there. I did so with all sincerity and — surprise, I won! — a cordless power drill that was enticing to the point that I could feel it in my hand, even though I already own a perfectly fine and functional cordless power drill. But not the same brand — another justification for my power-tool lust.
But as I was filling out the necessary information to collect my prize, it occurred to me that as a frequent shopper, Home Depot already had this information on file. Further more, the first credit card number I entered was, naturally, the one issued by Home Depot, but it did not work. Then I entered my Amex card number which, voila! worked like a charm. My dawning suspicion was not enough to prevent me from clicking the “submit” button, however, and I was hooked. When the response told me I would have to wait a few days to collect my reward, I panicked. I told my wife “I think I just screwed up” or words to that effect.
She swung into action and shut down the Amex card, contacted their fraud division and in a few minutes I was talking to a nice lady with an accent — this on an early Saturday morning, mind you — from the Philippines. Once I could understand what she was saying, it took her only a minute or two to verify that I am indeed who I am, and to cancel payment on the $1800 dollar charge that the fraudsters had already made on the card, instantly, allowing for time zone changes. My wife kindly pointed out that in the address attached to the offer was “uk,” meaning this came from Great Britain, not my friendly neighborhood store. These guys are sitting up all night to pull off this fraud. Amex cancelled the old card and is promising a new one by the end of the month. I got another offer from Dick’s Sporting Goods, ironically also the employer of another former client.
Owing to my focus on catching up with household chores, working on multiple sources of revenue, and maintenance of my weekly podcast, daily online dialogs with Zen students, et cetera, I had not been sitting much in recent weeks. I was experimenting with my sleep patterns, which I have had the luxury of doing for years since semi-retiring, and was waking up later, sans alarm. Not in time to make the sunrise sit at the Zen center, but still attending every Sunday morning 9 am zazen. So when I checked my email at 8 am this particular Saturday morning, I was still half awake, in that dreamy state known as hypnopompic. Usually I wake up fully while sitting in zazen from 6 to 7 am at the center.
Meanwhile, my writing for publication side hussle had a resurgence, with the publisher approving a foundational work, a series of readers excerpted from Matsuoka Roshi’s collected talks that we self-published as “The Kyosaku” and “Mokurai” many years ago. Collaborating with two of our practice leaders in Wichita and Chicago, I had already completed the first draft of half of the first manuscript, writing just after waking as early as 4 or 5 am, or in-between online dharma dialog calls. And feeling pretty good about my prowess as a writer, which I had never seen as part of my self-identity.
In cutting and pasting Sensei’s selected talks for the first reader, naturally I had to re-read them. In one of them I came across his recommendation that we sit often, “at least daily,” which I vaguely remembered but had slipped my mind. I have always held, in discussion with students, that to make Zen or zazen a “have to do” rather than a “get to do” is to distort its meaning, and potentially discourage yourself. I have instead related Matsuoka Roshi’s most frequent admonition to simply never give up. So it made more sense to me to de-emphasize something as measurable as daily sitting rather than set up arbitrary parameters around zazen. Yet here I was, falling for a scam, in the context of not sitting daily, at least in recent weeks. This is obviously not the way to follow the Precept to “proceed clearly.”
So I urge you to sit daily. At least sit, if not just sit. That is, at your desk, or behind the driver’s wheel on the commute. Or on the side of your bed. Take a moment. Or ten or fifteen minutes. Just keep sitting, even while you are doing other things. Especially if you are tempted by something online. Sit up straight. Breathe deeply. Return to your surroundings. Come to your senses. Okay, enough of that.
Back to Design thinking gone awry. While it is true that we all need to be preoccupied with the hassle and hangups inherent in being a householder, we are not necessarily designing our most effective or efficient approach to it. I am amazed on a daily basis by how much the yardwork tugs at my attention. When in actuality, I could be out there every day slugging away at it, and it would not make much of a difference in the long run. Certainly not in the nature of the great outdoors as home to the flora and fauna of the big city. Our parcel is a diminishingly small percentage of a percentage of the overall emerald city. But it is where we live. And the yardwork is one of my fitness regimens. An effective one.
In designing your approach to designing your life, I recommend that you include sitting as an intrinsic part of it. Whether you are outside sweating under the sun or drenched in the rain, or inside mopping up the “endless, unremitting, unthinkable, unnameable” dust accumulation — apologies to Master Dogen — consider an interval training approach to sitting. When you take a break from the inevitable, unavoidable grind, really take a break. Sit up and shut down, as some wag said. You will find it easier to blend activity with meditation as a constant, than to set it aside as something special. And the amount of time you spend in actual zazen — just sitting or sitting only — will magically expand on its own, until it becomes 24/7. We all know that there can be no actual separation of zazen and everything else. But that is one little fantasy that we can allow ourselves, if we are not careful.
Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston
Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.
Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell
