Recalculating

Last night I went to the Zen Center to answer questions after the Thursday night Dharma talk. When I’m the one giving the Dharma talk, I plan a rough outline in my head of what I want to say, with some sort of theme and a handful of stories to illustrate that theme. But when I answer questions after someone else’s talk, I just show up, letting the questions themselves guide what I say.

When I was younger in my practice (and just younger in general), I got nervous before answering Dharma talk questions, worrying that someone would ask a question I couldn’t answer. Nowadays, though, I am more secure in the realization that answering questions isn’t about saying the right thing but about being genuinely present. You aren’t trying to impress everyone with your Dharma knowledge; instead, you’re trying to listen deeply to what a person is asking, then articulate whatever response appears in that moment.

Most folks at Dharma talks don’t ask the kind of question you have to “know” the answer to: nobody has ever asked me to enumerate the Eightfold Path or recite Buddhist texts from memory. In most cases, folks want to hear a Zen teacher’s take on something they’re experiencing in their life. Often these questions are some version of “Is it normal to experience X when you’re going through Y,” and in most cases, yeah, I’ve experienced something similar. In cases like this, my “answers” are simply reassurances that what you’re going through is normal and everything will be okay eventually, even if it’s difficult right now.

In many cases, simply hearing someone say “Yeah, that’s really difficult” in a gentle and nonjudgmental way is enough. In my experience, most folks know what they need to do in Situation X, but they want external validation that what their gut is telling them is okay. Truth be told, I have no idea what any particular person should do in Situation X, Y, or Z…but I can confidently tell them to follow their conscience, then clean up the mess later if the path they chose is the wrong one.

Many of the folks who ask me questions in Dharma talks are stuck because they want to choose the right path–they want to do the right thing–and they are paralyzed at the thought that they might make the wrong choice. One thing I always try to emphasize is that with a few exceptions, there is no wrong choice. Assuming you’re not contemplating murder or something similarly illegal or unethical, it doesn’t make a huge difference if you choose this path or that. Both paths will lead you somewhere other than “stuck,” and if you eventually realize you’re on the wrong path, you can turn around and take a different path, having gained wisdom from the detour.

Nearly everyone wants their life to spool out smoothly and in a straight line, without mistakes or missteps, but I’ve lived (and practiced) long enough to know that avoiding detours is impossible. We all screw up. We all make stupid choices. We all do things that hurt ourselves and others. The best we can do is to try our best, then try to repair whatever damage we invariably cause.

It’s perfectly natural to want our lives to follow a predictable path from here to happiness, as if guided by a GPS that never fails. But in reality, most of our lives are spent–and most of our wisdom comes from–taking the wrong turn then recalculating our path. In life as in writing, we often do things wrong the first time, then we revise.