Sunday morning I woke up to a half-bare kitchen
and made a grocery list. I was still half asleep and hardly conscious of what I was writing. I got distracted, posted something on social media, flipped through the Sunday Book Review, and thought about all the work I had to do. After a while, Steve came into the kitchen and poured himself a mug of coffee. Then he beckoned me over to my list on the counter. “Want to tell me what’s up with this?” he asked, his question more like a statement.
I peered closer to see what I’d written.
Toilet paper!! x 5
aot [sic] milk
Rest!!
“Ahh-oat milk?” Steve smirked, stretching the hard A so that he sounded like the Swedish Chef on the Muppets. “And this?”
He was pointing to Rest!! I must have gotten confused and thought rest was something I could go get at the grocery store, like a loaf of bread or a carton of aot milk. The girls were standing behind him and burst into laughter with him. Rest! they all howled. Ah-oat milk! But I was too tired to think it was funny. Suddenly, I desperately wanted to go on vacation: my desire was so visceral I could taste it. Forlornly, I pictured myself in a luxury hotel room near an ocean, far away from my mocking Scandinavian family, lying in an enormous bed where no one could bother me.
Instead, I went outside. It was finally warm enough to take my meditation cushion to a sunny spot beside the fountain in the backyard. On my way out the door I pulled Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, by Shunryu Suzuki, off the shelf. I’d tried to read the book once before, but unlike his classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I found this one denser, harder to understand.
I sat down and opened to chapter one: “Things-As-It-Is” [also sic]. If you had to boil Zen down to a single idea, this is it: facing each moment as it is, rather than as you want it to be. Seeing the truth of the way things really are instead of how you hope they’ll turn out. It sounds simple, maybe even a little boring. Don’t we all love to imagine fantastic outcomes?
All week I’d been wrestling with a paradox: I was trying to sell a lot of books while trying not to have expectations about selling a lot of books. Holding both in my mind felt like trying to walk the teeniest, tiniest high line over Niagara Falls without a harness. Looking down, it seemed like an impossible balancing act, a long way to fall. I really wanted my book to do well. Maybe I wasn’t so Zen after all.
Sitting, though, I realized that the paradox itself contained the answer. Only by trying my absolute hardest in each moment was I free to let go of the outcome, knowing that I’d done my very best, and made what in Zen is called complete effort. This wasn’t a denial of my desires, but rather a sign true determination. “When I say to see things-as-it-is,” writes Suzuki Roshi, “what I mean is to practice hard with our desires—not to get rid of desires, but to take them into account . . . This is big mind within which everything exists.”
You can apply big mind to anything you do. Training for a race. Publishing a book. Starting a business. Baking a cake. Raising a child. You make complete effort, keep an open mind, and accept “things-as-it-is.” Winning, losing, failing, succeeding—all possibilities exist already within us.
A few days later, I got an email from a writer friend. “I hope you are getting some rest,” she wrote. I thought about it. I was working harder than I had in a long time, different work—outward work—riding my bike and running, too, but I was sitting more than I had all winter, and I no longer felt like a Zen fraud. The grocery list was on the fridge—we’d run out of Ah-oat milk again, like always—but now when my family mocked me, I laughed even harder than they did.
Letting go is resting, too.
Brief Flashings is a # 1 New Release on Amazon again this week!
Thank you for all your fantastic words and raves, and for your many social media posts. Please keep posting, spreading the word, and reviewing on Amazon and Goodreads. This wild little wonder has wings—and it’s YOU, dear readers!
Book tour kicks off this coming week and next in the Bay Area and Denver! Check out my website for a full listing of events—highlights here:
Friday 5/3: Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA. 5 pm.
Tuesday 5/7: Run and reading, Healdsburg Running Co, Healdsburg, CA. 6 pm.
Wednesday 5/8: Tattered Cover, East Colfax Ave, Denver. 6 pm.
All events are free and open to the public + books will be available for sale and signing!
In other news, it was a true honor to give the dharma talk at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe this past Wednesday. It will go up on Upaya podcast early next week. I hope you’ll listen!
BONUS! I just released my Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World playlist on Spotify. Great for running, walking, writing, hanging out, and driving! Songs match the chapters or play on shuffle!
I can’t wait to see you on book tour!
Be the flashings, xo
katie