The Art of Zen Living

“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.”

- Shunryu Suzuki

We set goals every day.  Some small (I’ve got to run to the store and get milk today) and some big (I’m going to go back to school and learn how to write).  I’ve read a lot about how to set goals, how to achieve goals, and the importance of setting specific goals.  I’ve seen very little written on the topic of setting good goals.  What is a good goal, anyway?  Goals are as different as the people that set them.  If you want to be rich, then your goals are likely to be very different from the goals set by someone that wants to be raise a large family.  But what is a “good” goal?  From a Buddhist view, a “good” or skillful goal would be one that, when achieved, reduced the suffering (or, if you prefer, enhanced the happiness) in the world.  The tricky part is in looking at all the ways we’re connected, and making sure that you aren’t enhancing your happiness at the expense of enhancing someone else’s suffering. So how do you do that?

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I came across this line during a dialog earlier today:

“research consistently shows that there is at least some correlation between having money and being satisfied with life.”

Can someone point me to that research? My experience and my observation in life has been that if you have enough money to meet your basic needs (food, shelter and clothing) then happiness depends on having enough money to meet your wants and desires. You have two choices - learn to make more money, or learn to want fewer things.

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“Smile, breathe and go slowly.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

“Multitasking” is a buzzword we’re all familiar with - it (theoretically) means the ability to do several things at once. What it usually means is the ability to have several things going on at once, none of which get done as well as they should, and some of them get left half finished and forgotten.

What most people I come across seem to lack completely these days is the ability to single task. As a society, we’re always ready to answer the phone, respond to an e-mail or IM, listen to the radio or have the TV on while we do other things. As Yoda would say “Never our minds on where we are, on what we are doing!”. He’d be right.

My challenge for the week (feel free to try this with me) is to take at least one task a day - be it brushing my teeth, baking a loaf of bread, doing the dishes, washing the car or cooking dinner - and concentrate on only that task. The idea is to do that one task slowly, deliberately, in a focused manner and to do it completely - I’ll turn off my phone, mute the computer speakers, turn off the monitor, whatever I need to do to not be distracted, and I won’t allow anything to interrupt me until my task is complete.

The idea is to connect with the “now”, at least for a time, and use these tasks as a sort of meditation in mindfulness. I’ll post here in a month and let you know how it went, and what my impressions are.  If you try this, even once, I’d love to hear your impressions in the comments!