This week I am looking after two small dogs for family members who are on holiday in Egypt. I live in a small two-bedroom apartment which is not the ideal environment for them, but am fortunate that the apartment is set within open land which allows them to be outside at times, at least *looks pointedly outside* when it isn’t raining!
The dogs are Shih tzus and have a tendency to bark at people who pass by the glass door where they tend to sit for much of the day, and also at cats, squirrels and, most of all, other dogs. In their usual house they seem to have a good idea of what is their territory but here, the whole apartment block is considered theirs to defend.
During the day this barking is mostly okay, and I often have them on weekdays, but at night I worry about it waking others and becoming a nuisance to my neighbours. This can happen if people are coming back from a night out and the dogs hear them.
Anyway, last night around midnight there were sounds of another dog from within the block, men’s voices shouting and door banging. As you might imagine, this set my dogs off and they leapt off my bed where we were all sleeping and started barking and howling in response.
After this didn’t abate for several minutes I started to experience anxiety myself that there would be complaints from my neighbours about the noise and I ushered the dogs back to bed and tried to calm them down.
I was incredibly tired having been woken from sleep and watching my mind I could see myself already picturing scenarios in which this could be going on for a considerable time, and causing more and more disruption with my dogs and the other dog responding to each other in turn.
Taking a deep breath or two, I recognised similar circumstances in sitting practice or experiencing pain during which I have learned to worry about how long the situation was going to last but just do what was needed in each moment, breath-by-breath and bark-by-bark.
So, I hugged my male dog tight to reassure him and shut the door to my bedroom so that we were all confined in there and the sound of the barking in the apartment black was reduced. Each moment became the feel of his soft fur, the cool night air, the barking and the quiet spaces in-between, with nothing beyond that. It felt like there was no sense of time and we could have carried on like that for as long s was necessary..
The disturbance lasted some 20-30 minutes and eventually I heard a car leave about 12.30 in the morning. We all settled back down to sleep.
Our human brains are incredibly powerful tools for assessing situations and making predictions about the future based on past and current events. That mental acuity has doubtless led to the success of our species relative to other primates but, as I imagine you will know yourself, the scenarios we imagine in our head are not always right or helpful.
Sekishi recently reminded me of the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) which translates as ‘one time, one meeting’ and means that each moment is unique and will never be replicated as all are a particular combination of causes and conditions. Increasingly, I see Zen practice as learning to trust our ability to respond to each unique moment based on an intuitive assessment of what is going on. Some things we can just allow to unfold as they are, on other occasions we need to take action.
This is not to say that the predictive and planning capabilities of our brains are not super useful at other times. I am a big maker of lists to make sure that I do not forget important tasks, and household budgeting is a good thing to do for most of us. However, for much of our life, we can just meet the moment where it is and that will serve us well.
The dogs are Shih tzus and have a tendency to bark at people who pass by the glass door where they tend to sit for much of the day, and also at cats, squirrels and, most of all, other dogs. In their usual house they seem to have a good idea of what is their territory but here, the whole apartment block is considered theirs to defend.
During the day this barking is mostly okay, and I often have them on weekdays, but at night I worry about it waking others and becoming a nuisance to my neighbours. This can happen if people are coming back from a night out and the dogs hear them.
Anyway, last night around midnight there were sounds of another dog from within the block, men’s voices shouting and door banging. As you might imagine, this set my dogs off and they leapt off my bed where we were all sleeping and started barking and howling in response.
After this didn’t abate for several minutes I started to experience anxiety myself that there would be complaints from my neighbours about the noise and I ushered the dogs back to bed and tried to calm them down.
I was incredibly tired having been woken from sleep and watching my mind I could see myself already picturing scenarios in which this could be going on for a considerable time, and causing more and more disruption with my dogs and the other dog responding to each other in turn.
Taking a deep breath or two, I recognised similar circumstances in sitting practice or experiencing pain during which I have learned to worry about how long the situation was going to last but just do what was needed in each moment, breath-by-breath and bark-by-bark.
So, I hugged my male dog tight to reassure him and shut the door to my bedroom so that we were all confined in there and the sound of the barking in the apartment black was reduced. Each moment became the feel of his soft fur, the cool night air, the barking and the quiet spaces in-between, with nothing beyond that. It felt like there was no sense of time and we could have carried on like that for as long s was necessary..
The disturbance lasted some 20-30 minutes and eventually I heard a car leave about 12.30 in the morning. We all settled back down to sleep.
Our human brains are incredibly powerful tools for assessing situations and making predictions about the future based on past and current events. That mental acuity has doubtless led to the success of our species relative to other primates but, as I imagine you will know yourself, the scenarios we imagine in our head are not always right or helpful.
Sekishi recently reminded me of the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) which translates as ‘one time, one meeting’ and means that each moment is unique and will never be replicated as all are a particular combination of causes and conditions. Increasingly, I see Zen practice as learning to trust our ability to respond to each unique moment based on an intuitive assessment of what is going on. Some things we can just allow to unfold as they are, on other occasions we need to take action.
This is not to say that the predictive and planning capabilities of our brains are not super useful at other times. I am a big maker of lists to make sure that I do not forget important tasks, and household budgeting is a good thing to do for most of us. However, for much of our life, we can just meet the moment where it is and that will serve us well.
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