Meditative Work
The other day, picking up trash in the library parking lot, I wandered slowly and deliberately, a path that tiled the ground with my gaze as best I could. I was seeking trash, but seeking is perhaps too strong a word. I had set my mind to the pattern of human garbage and stepped out of the way, neither hunting for it nor hoping I wouldn’t find any. When my mind identified an empty bottle or a candy wrapper, my body would move it into the garbage bag I held. Moving at the pace of my visual processing, thinking of nothing in particular, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to rush to ‘finish’ walking the parking lot and buildings in the allotted hour. I reasoned it was better to be thorough and cover as much ground as I did, no matter what that was. I am generally results-driven, but this made sense to me in a simple way. If I cleared only one parking spot of trash, that would be a job well done.
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A thought intruded, “like meditation”, and pieces of mental formation snapped into place, electricity flowing across them at last. I have practiced sewa and been introduced conceptually to meditative work — the practice of doing work as a process of the present moment rather than as the prerequisite to a goal, which you fixate on the entire way. And I had heard of the link between such selfless work (selfless in that the self does not do it, it is simply done) and meditation.
The meditation that I practice these days is always siting and often breath-focused, hence ‘goal-less’. I’m not rushing to count a certain number of breaths, I’m not even striving for an amount or percentage of time without moving attention. I’m just doing the best I can to focus on my breathing until the timer runs out. Life is like that as well. We do the best we can until our time runs out, there’s no particular goal, no real penalty for getting it wrong or right except for how we feel, our heart experience of our lives.
Making that connection in the parking lot between meditation and picking up trash was a flash of grace, and incredibly valuable. With that realization, we can truly start integrating these ‘different’ kinds of activity. Practice in meditation becomes practice for external work, and vice versa. And both become practice for life.
