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A test site for design and programming, formerly a scrapbook of thoughts, links, news, etc. from Cori Faklaris

Saturday, May 26, 2012

On transiency - Indianapolis Zen Center Spring 2012 column

Published in "The Ember," the newsletter of the Indianapolis Zen Center, Spring 2012


The newsroom at The Indianapolis Star is in chaos. The actual room – most of the second floor – is being demolished and renovated. There are wires hanging down, caution tape, desks upended on packing crates, cubicle dividers neatly stacked like firewood, nails and shards of wood strewn across the subfloor where the carpet was torn up, a gaping hole where the spiral staircase used to be. I have to cross the empty space every day to get from my new, temporary desk in a corner of the old Intake office to the time clock and the other new, temporary desks in the little 1st-floor warren where the news and sports departments were relocated. It’s fascinating to see it coming apart – many of us have been posting photos of the work in progress online – and it was fun and therapeutic one day to swing a hammer into a wall of the main conference room. 

One afternoon, after the workers had packed up for the day, I was walking alone on the floor and stopped suddenly, roughly where my old work area for Metro and A1 design had been, and it hit me that those 13 years I’d spent in and around that space were gone, and the future was unknown, and life would never be the same. Tears came to my eyes. I was not just sad, but also simply overwhelmed by the pace of change and to realize the utter transience of so much that had seemed solid and unchanging and dependable for so long, and that I had helped build in my small way, and now in small ways was helping to dismantle.

The editor of the paper, Dennis Ryerson, came into the room just then and saw me. “Everything changes, Cori,” he said. (Which turned out to include his role as our leader. Probably he already knew then that he would be announcing his retirement, effective June 1.)

Everything changes. As Buddhists, we are taught the impermanence of all phenomena. Nothing stays forever; nothing has a fixed self-nature. Things arise from emptiness, remain for some period of time, but eventually pass away and return to emptiness. This is right in plain sight – if we stop and look clearly. If you truly want to understand yourself and help others, you have to perceive this world just as it is.

So we’ve read and been told; so I’ve thought and known intellectually. But it’s different to experience it, to be right there with it in the moment. It really does mark your consciousness: the Three Seals of Existence – all compounded things are impermanent, all dharmas are without self-nature, nirvana is perfect stillness – are well-named. The transiency of all things can hit you with joy and celebration – you can fall in love; you can welcome a new baby; you can see justice done and a bad situation remedied. But when the delusion of permanence falls away, it can be startling and scary and lonely. In that moment in my former newsroom, I felt my own death and the death of everything and everyone I care about.

What to do with that? Accept it. It’s our holding onto and fighting for a delusion of things’ permanence that causes much of our suffering. Letting go of that can feel like wrong, like choosing to fall into a void, but it is also the only way to escape from that suffering. “We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence,” said Shunryu Suzuki. “Without realizing how to accept this truth, you cannot live in this world. … You have to make this kind of effort.” It’s necessary to take that leap of faith – faith in one thing that never changes, our Buddha nature, that place from which all things arise and to where all things return. If we steer by that, we’ll always be OK.

I am grateful that no matter what happens to me, I’ll always have my posture and my breathing, the expression of my Buddha-nature. That afternoon, I returned to my desk and sat down – putting my headphones on since my echo-chamber office is full of photojournalists who are anything but quiet (and who have every right to make noise while doing their jobs!). I imagined a string pulling my spine straight to the ceiling (I really do that, it’s not just something I tell new students) and breathed deeply in, to the center of my being, and deeply out from that same center, and in the middle of the work day, with everyone around, that was my dharma room and cushion for that moment. I can sit through a lot of difficulty. I have practiced it.