The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (7 page)

M
y mother, who passed on from cancer a number of years ago, once expressed to me an observation she had made about herself as she sorted out both her illness and her situation in her mind. It is worth passing on here.

During the time she was dealing with her illness, she was reading through books that served to both comfort her and make her more aware of her spiritual nature. This daily routine gave her a soothing perspective during what was surely a difficult time. Though she tried to keep up with this routine, there were times when, for whatever reason, she drifted away from both the reading and her thinking about what she had read. She told me one day that when she maintained her effort, her thought process was elevated and more evolved. She felt different about herself and life, and enjoyed increased clarity and perspective about her situation. But she also noticed that
when she drifted away from her reading and fell into an “I don’t have time” or “I don’t feel like it today” frame of mind, she would feel herself slip back into attitudes and perspectives that she felt were not only unproductive but, unfortunately, very prevalent in the world today. Speaking about her reading, she said, “You need to keep reviewing these ideas so that you can hang on to their clarity and perspective. Otherwise, life steals them away.” Constantly reviewing new ideas creates, in a sense, a new habit of perceiving and processing our lives, a habit that brings us the sense of clarity we long for every day.

I took something from her words when I was writing this book. There are not that many ideas in this book; just a few, and they have always been there for us to discover. But they slip away from us in our daily lives so easily. They need to be studied over and over again from different angles so that they become a natural part of us. We are practicing learning them right now.

Sometimes I can’t read straight through a book because of my schedule. Instead, I might read two chapters today and another one three days from now. I have noticed that when this happens, I often can’t remember points made earlier in the book that, when I read them, I felt were very valuable. I wanted my book to be one that you could pick up at any time and open to any page and start reading. I wanted my readers to be able to remember its few ideas without much effort and without the need to flip back through pages to find them. I wanted you to realize
that we keep coming back to the same f
ew solutions to all the problems we feel we have, and to begin to understand that life isn’t as complicated as we had thought. Changing our experience of life is well within our grasp, but we must review and practice these few ideas again and again so that everyday life doesn’t steal them away before they become a natural part of who we are and how we operate. That is why I reiterate certain ideas throughout the book. I also wanted to bring out the interrelationship of these concepts and the interconnections of virtues we all would like to possess.

Patience is a good example of such a virtue. Patience is probably at the top of everyone’s list of most sought-after qualities.
Patience
is defined in the dictionary as “quiet perseverance.” I agree with that definition, but patience also contains a quality of calmness that marks its outer appearance. I am speaking of patience in general, whether we are dealing with a traffic jam, talking with someone who is having a bad day, or showing ourselves patience as we work at the ideas in this book. Yet why is patience so hard for us to achieve?

It might be easier to approach this question from the angle of impatience, because we all are more familiar with the feeling of being impatient. We notice when we are impatient because we experience negative emotions. When you are patient about something, life just seems fine. There is certainly no anxiety linked to being in a patient
state. But when you find yourself impa
tient about something, your experience is completely different.

Experiencing impatience is one of the first symptoms of not being in the present moment, not doing what you are doing, and not staying process-oriented. Staying in the present moment is one of the hardest lessons to learn. We are always dropping out of the “now” and letting our minds lead us around by the nose to who knows where.

I have observed my mind many times through listening to my internal dialogue. It goes from one totally unrelated discussion to another. It’s reminding me to pay a bill, composing a musical piece, solving a problem, thinking of a sharp-witted comeback I should have made yesterday when someone irritated me, and so forth. All this is going on while I am taking a shower in the morning. In that moment, my mind is everywhere but where I really am — in the shower. My mind is anticipating circumstances that haven’t happened yet and trying to answer questions that haven’t even been asked. We have a name for this: it’s called worrying. If you force your mind to stay in the present moment and to stay in the process of what you are doing, I promise you, many of your problems will melt away.

There is a saying: Most of what we worry about never comes to pass. Thinking about a situation before you are in it oncatters your energy. “But,” you say, “I have a difficult meeting with someone tomorrow, and I want to have my thoughts together before I get into the situation.”
Fine, then take half an hour to sit down i
n a chair and do nothing else but go through the meeting in your mind and be there completely, doing only that. In the calmness of that detached moment, when you are not emotional, think of what you will say, and anticipate the different combinations of responses the person might make. Decide on your responses and see how they feel to you. Will these responses have the desired effect? Now you are doing nothing else but what you are doing. You are in the present and in the process. You aren’t scattering your energy by trying to act out all this in your head while you are eating your lunch or driving to work. This constant inner dialogue, chattering away, brings with it a sense of urgency and impatience because you want to deal with something that hasn’t occurred yet. You want to get it done.

The first step toward patience is to become aware of when your internal dialogue is running wild and dragging you with it. If you are not aware of this when it is happening, which is probably most of the time, you are not in control. Your imagination takes you from one circumstance to another, and your different emotions just fire off inside you as you react to each problem your mind visits. To free yourself from this endless and exhausting cycle, you must step back and notice the real you, the Observer who just quietly watches all this drama as it unfolds. As you practice staying in the present, you will become more aware of the difference between the real you and your ego’s internal dialogue, without trying to do so. It will
happen automatically. Staying in the prese
nt and in the process is the first part of the perspective change that creates patience.

The second step in creating patience is understanding and accepting that there is no such thing as reaching a point of perfection in anything. True perfection is both always evolving and always present within you, just like the flower. What you
perceive
as perfect is always relative to where you are in any area of your life. Consider a sailor trying to reach the horizon. It is unreachable. If the sailor sees the horizon as the point he must reach to achieve happiness, he is destined to experience eternal frustration. He works all day at running the boat, navigating, and trimming the sails, and yet by nightfall he is no closer to the horizon than he was at dawn’s first light. The only evidence he has of forward motion is the wake left behind the boat. Unseen to him are the vast distances he is really traveling just by keeping the wind in the sails and applying the moment-by-moment effort of running the ship.

Look at the things you feel you need in order to create the perfect life, and think them through in your mind. Perhaps you want more money. Perhaps you believe it will make you happy. That’s the biggest falsehood ever perpetuated by humans. When does anyone ever have enough money? The wealthiest people in the world only want more, and they worry about losing what they have. There is absolutely no peace in this way of thinking. The
feeling “I’ll be happy when X
happens” will never bring you anything but discontentment.

There is an endless quality to life. There is always more to be experienced. Deep down, we know this and are glad for it. The problem is that everyday life steals this sense from us. It pulls us away from this perspective, constantly bombarding us with advertisements that all promise to fulfill us through purchases: “Get this, do that, and life will be perfect.” But none of this ever works. We need to let go of the futile i that happiness is out there somewhere, and embrace the infinite growth available to us as a treasure, not as something that we are impatient to overcome.

People involved in the arts come to understand this endless nature through direct experience, which is part of all the arts. That is why I believe that a personal pursuit of some form of art is so important to a person’s sense of well-being. It will teach you the true nature of life right up front, if you pay attention.

Getting started in an art form as an adult is not a difficult task, but you need to approach it with the proper perspective. Whether you’re learning a musical instrument, painting, archery, or dance, you must first find an instructor who meets your needs. This is a fairly routine task for most of us. We do it for our children all the time. What lies in wait to ambush our enthusiasm is our lack of preparation: We are undertaking an art that is infinite in its potential for growth, and because of that we need to
prepare to let go of the goal of being “
good” at it quickly. There is no goal to reach other than pursuing the activity.

This is not an easy perspective to function from, because it is so contrary to everything else we do all day. At work, this report needs to be done; that meeting is at 2 pm; and so on. Every task has a beginning, an end point, and closure. We pursue an art form to escape this constant task mentality and to indulge in the total relaxation that flows from the understanding that what we are doing
has
no end. Wherever we are in our process is where we should be.

When I was in my late teens, two incidents changed my perceptions about art and life, and, as a result, created much more patience within me.

The first happened shortly after I had started studying jazz improvisation with perhaps the best jazz pianist in my area. His name was Don. After one of my lessons, Don started playing around on the piano as I was packing up my music. I had never met anyone who played the piano as well as he did. He had earned his ability with years of a solid practice ethic, working at the piano sometimes seven to eight hours a day. While he was playing, Don told me that he felt that if he didn’t start working harder, he would never get really good on the piano. I was shocked by his casual remark. I commented that if I could play the piano as well as he could, I would be content to do nothing all day long but listen to myself play.

He looked at me and smiled. “You know, Tom, that is exactly what I said to my teacher years ago when I
first heard him play.” Don had studied with a world-renowned classical and jazz pianist. I had heard recordings of his teacher, who was extremely accomplished. Still, it occurred to me that if someone could reach Don’s level of playing ability and still feel unfulfilled, I was going to have to rethink both my motivations for studying the instrument and my need to reach some level of “perfection” in order to become fulfilled.

The second event grew out of the first, and began when I was nineteen years old. I had been studying with Don for just over a year. I was trying to play a certain passage in a piece of music and wasn’t having much luck at it. I was frustrated and feeling a bit sorry for myself for not measuring up to my own standards. In my mind, I wasn’t progressing fast enough. I decided that I would write down all that I needed to accomplish musically to meet my own criteria for good musicianship. The list included items such as being able to play fluently in certain difficult keys, playing in front of large audiences, ist ino forth.

Several years later, I was having another difficult session, this time in a small practice room at college late one night. I remember thinking to myself that I was never going to get any better, no matter how hard I tried. Depressed, I decided to quit for the evening. As I started packing up my music, a crumpled slip of paper fell out of one of my music books. It was the five-year music plan I had made when I was nineteen years old. I was twenty-two now, and I had completely forgotten about it. I sat
down and began reading the list to myself. W
hat I read took me by surprise and made a lasting impression.

I had accomplished everything on the list in fewer than three years, not five. In fact, I had done things musically that I couldn’t even imagine doing when I was nineteen, and yet I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t feel any happier with my music or any better as a musician. My horizon was moving away from me. My concept of a good musician was coming from a different frame of reference. I had a realization that took several minutes to fully evolve. I became aware that there was no point of musical excellence out there that would free me from the feeling that I needed to get better. I understood that there was no point I could reach where I would feel that I had finally done it, that I was as good as I needed to be, and that there was no need to improve because I had arrived at my goal. It was an epiphany. At first I felt overwhelming depression and fear, but these were immediately followed by joy and relief of the same magnitude. I knew that what I was experiencing was a realization that all true artists must go through. It was the only way to build the stamina necessary to continue in an infinite study.