3. Everyday Life is the Path
A Zen tale is told of a student who wondered how the path should really be practiced. He went to the Zendo and asked the old master:
“Master, what is the path?”
The master looked the student straight in the eyes, and in a calm, measured voice, he answered:
“Everyday life is the path.”
The student seemed perplexed, but - in classic Zen fashion - the master said no more and bid him farewell.
What is the real meaning of this tale? And what about us on the Stoic path? When and where do we practice the path of Philosophy, the path of well-being?
Just like the old master says: everyday life is the path. This is a profound truth and one that is far more deep than the Zen tale reveals upon first glance - hence the master bidding the student farewell, for what he is really telling him is to go meditate, at length, on the teaching. There is indeed a form of kōan or riddle in this story, and it contains real philosophical depths.
Why is everyday life the path? Because our striving to be good people and to lead virtuous lives - the core of Stoicism - is a noble endeavour, and one that, in reality, we are engaged in every single day. We are not striving after well-being on just Mondays and Wednesdays. We obviously should strive to lead good lives every single day, as hard as that may be sometimes ... If you wish to live well in your daily life, then it necessarily follows that you must actually practice the art of living well, or philosophy, on a daily basis.
What we are saying may sound so obvious that it seems almost ridiculous to spell it out like this. Alas, what is most obvious is often poorly understood, neglected or overlooked ... And to prove our point, ask yourself, honestly: do you actually practice every day? And do you know many people who practice a philosophical path every day?
For most people, the answer to this question, for a variety of reasons, is No. No I don’t practice every day. I generally practice a couple of times a week, sometimes three if it’s a really good week.
The truth, however, is that if we really wish to lead good lives then we must practice the game when it is actually taking place. The game of life does not happen on Mondays and Wednesdays, but every day of course. Then why do we so often only show up on Mondays and Wednesdays, and on top of it, expect to become excellent players?
Nothing is to be had for nothing. And where is the wonder ... Will you, then, employ no expense and no pains to acquire peace and tranquillity, to sleep sound while you sleep, to be thoroughly awake while you are awake, to fear nothing, to be anxious for nothing?
– Epictetus
The key question of course is: why, why do we not practice every day? What’s standing in the way? If we can understand the real reasons underlying our lack of daily practice, then we can address those barriers, and show up for the game of life every day.
When people are asked to inquire into the obstacles to regular practice, the most common explanations are as follows:
Time scarcity: I do not have the time to practice more.
It’s hard to institute changes in my life, or to develop new habits.
I lack certain qualities, such as will-power, commitment or courage.
These are the three great Guards that stand firm and block our entrance through the great gate marked “Daily Practice,” past which lie the lands of greater well-being.
So how - concretely - do we overcome the three guards at the “Daily Practice” gate? The first guard - Time Scarcity - is the biggest of the three, and the one that haunts the most people, given our hyper-busy times. “I do not have the time” - how often have we told this to ourselves? How often have we heard others say it?
“Look I commute, I have a full-time job, I have financial obligations, a family to care for, I just don’t have the time. Mondays and Wednesdays, 6-7pm, is really all I can do. That’s just the reality of the situation.” Sound familiar? Have you heard someone saying something like this before? The argument is so convincing, so powerful, there’s a reason it’s a fierce guard after all.
The deeper truth is that the argument is actually a sneaky lie or an illusion, and the aspiring philosopher must really see through it. And it is precisely because this line of reasoning is so persuasive - yet misleading - that it constitutes an illusion.
The illusion has us so convinced - in theory and fact - that there is no time, that you come to live accordingly and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The key to defeating the guard lies in not falling into the rote approach to time, and time management - and, incidentally, how revealing the wording of this concept is! If we look at our lives as a series of limited time slots to be filled, then it is very easy to fall under the sway of the illusion - there is no time - and to tell ourselves that we can only practice on Mondays and Wednesdays, for say a 30-45min slot (of journaling, meditating, whatever the practice may be).
If we conceive of our lives this way, there is indeed very little time ... and this conception lies at the heart of the whole illusion. There are only so many time slots in life, and given that, realistically I can only allocate two to three slots per week to practice the philosophical path. This is the approach of the “To Do List,” of productivity, of efficiency, time management etc. etc. And when we really take it on for years and years, as we’ve all done, it ends up becoming an actual way of life, which greatly reinforces the power of the illusion and makes it so iron-clad.
The key is not to engage the Time Scarcity enemy on its own terms, which is to say to fight it in its own conceptual framework or mental battlefield. Many an aspiring Jedi has done this before - indeed it is an inevitable rite of passage - and the outcome of the battle is always the same: you lose. You lose because you are fighting the guard - Time Scarcity - on the battlefield, and in the parameters, of his choosing. Indeed, it is precisely the nature of the battlefield, the way it is inherently set up, that guarantees defeat - no matter how ardently or valiantly you fight. Within the time management view of reality, the illusion always win, while of course throwing you some crumbs - a few time slots here and there - and giving you a semblance of progress.
To defeat the guard, you must transcend to another conceptual dimension, wherein the enemy is taken over from within - the higher dimension - and exploded, Matrix-like, into a million pieces. And, just like Neo, all aspiring philosophers remember very well the day of profound reversal when they combatted the “Time Scarcity” Agent on a dimensional battlefield, for which he was simply not trained; and for the first time ever you see - incredible sight - an Agent run for his life!
With regards to “Time Scarcity,” the dimensional shift is to realise that life should not be conceived of, and lived, in terms of time slots, but rather in terms of a much higher whole. The realm of practice is in fact everyday life and the whole of life.
This represents a revolutionary change in that we are shifting our entire approach, and existential perspective, to a noticeably higher plane. And once we engage in this revolutionary process, in earnest, it literally changes not only our whole practice, but our whole life itself.
There are two basic components to the dimensional shift: the first is insight or intellectual understanding (theory) and the second is the actual implementation of the shift in our daily lives (practice). As always, both theory and practice are needed.
Let us illustrate with a concrete example the enormous difference between the “time management” and the “whole life” approaches. Imagine for a moment someone who has trouble with remaining calm and patient in his or her life. Know anyone like that? And of course lack of patience can really impact our quality of life, and that of our loved ones.
Let’s say that our aim, in our practice, is more patience, incidentally an important virtue on the philosophical path. We know then that if we want more calm in our lives, we will necessarily have to practice it.
With the “time management” approach, we immediately run into a crucial, all-too- familiar limitation, which ironically is not at all calming: time in our lives is very limited, and at most we have only two or three time slots in a week to practice the skill of calming ourselves (say by doing a deep breathing practice or meditation). As we look at our busy schedules, trying to see where we can squeeze in a practice slot, we are already feeling dispirited, more stressed, and like we are always fighting an up-hill battle - there’s just never enough time! And indeed, we are always fighting an up-hill battle when we operate from this dimension.
Now contrast this with the “whole life” approach, where every day existence is the field of practice. In our example, we seek to develop the skill of patience, but this time we do not enter the Zendo for 30 minute sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays.
No, this time we enter the Zendo of Life. And when we do, we realise there is no more time scarcity. In fact, it’s quite the contrary: there is abundance!
There is abundance of time and abundance of opportunities for practice, so much so that it can even be dizzying.
It’s 6:30am, your alarm goes off, and you must prepare your kids for school - waking them up, getting dressed, breakfast, moving things along etc. Already there is your opportunity to practice patience. Then you must take your children to school, commute to work in rush hour, whether by driving or on transit ... yet another opportunity to practice, and the day has only begun! Didn’t do as well as you wanted with the morning routine, or didn’t really seize the opportunity to practice? Not to worry! Now you have arrived at work, and there is plenty to deal with ... colleagues, customers, deadlines, bosses. Why look at how many time slots, look at how many opportunities to practice patience!
And oh, just in case you didn’t get your fill of practice, there is always the end-of-day commute, your partner waiting for you at home, your evening routine with the kids, and on and on. What abundance, how many opportunities to practice!
And here we simply chose the virtue of patience, but of course we could select any of the virtues - courage, kindness, humility, discipline - and the same principle would apply. We could also choose other important practice modalities, such as deep breathing, physical movement, the Discipline of Assent, mindfulness, the Dichotomy of Control ...
As we face the guard of “Time Scarcity” on a plane for which he is wholly unfit, and wherein, with persistence, he will be fully defeated, we also become greatly empowered to handle the other two guards at the Gate - implementing life changes (or new habits) and developing key virtues. For the new Jedi skills that help us defeat “Time Scarcity” are simultaneously those that also help to bring down the other two guards. And eventually, with diligent practice, we become unstoppable and move fully through the “Daily Practice” gate and into lands of greater self-realisation and well-being.
We could be forgiven for missing the profound wisdom contained in the old Zen tale and the master’s laconic answer ... Everyday life is the path. For those who truly understand and practice everyday life, then the guards step aside - once and for all - and a gateless gate opens on to truly higher realms. The Zen masters of the East had gone through the gateless gate, of course. Gate because it is real, in our conditioned minds. But gateless because it is illusion - there is no more gate, once you learn to free your mind (as the teaching and the practice reveal).
Neither was this wisdom lost on the original Stoics, and their forefathers, including the most revered of them all, Socrates. Almost two thousand years ago already, the great Greek philosopher Plutarch spoke of Socrates, and ancient Western philosophy, in the following scintillating words:
Most people imagine that philosophy consists in delivering discourses from the heights of a chair, and in giving classes based on texts. But what these people utterly miss is the uninterrupted philosophy that we see being practiced every day ... Socrates did not set up grandstands for his audience and sit upon on a professorial chair; he had no fixed timetable for talking or walking with his friends. Rather, he did philosophy by sometimes joking with them, or by drinking or going to war or to the market with them, and finally by going to prison and drinking poison. He was the first to show that at all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us the opportunity to do philosophy.