You Can’t Plan It! Zen and Blocked Toilets

I had a quick surf around the internet and realised just what a lot of time you could spend, if you were so inclined, reading tips on how to prioritise, streamline, simplify, and link up the things you do every day with your goals in life. In fact someone like me could use these tips as a handy feel-good tick list (“Know that! Yes, of course!”), and simultaneously it would work beautifully as a procrastination device.

I had a free hour this morning, which had been carefully organised and planned. I had a quick surf around the internet and realised just what a lot of time you could spend, if you were so inclined — if you, indeed, had the time — reading tips on how to prioritise, streamline, simplify, and link up the things you do every day with your goals in life. In fact someone like me could use these tips as a handy feel-good tick list (“Know that! Yes, of course!”), and simultaneously it would work beautifully as a procrastination device which could stop me actually using the precious time I had allocated for something else.

Anyway. I was feeling superficially inspired. I was all ready to sit down and write, when it turned out that the toilet was blocked.

And then I remembered the Zen Buddhists who say that enlightenment is a simple matter of eating your rice and washing your bowl. And thought: I did wash up after breakfast! Why does this have to happen right now? I only have an hour to get ready for work, cook dinner and write this wonderful blog entry on time management!

After overcoming some fairly significant resistance, I just got the rubber gloves on. And afterwards I felt strangely relieved. In fact, so much knowledge, most of which is intuitive, about how best to live our lives, can be used just like anything else: to get in our way and stop us just living. And ‘just living’ is not only a question of tasting the coffeeness of the coffee and slowing down to appreciate playing with the kids. It’s also illness, irritating clashes of schedule, of needs, of endless numbers of everyday things which have to be done. It’s about jumping between the unexpected and the banal without wasting energy by thinking about it, let alone measuring it against the perfect lives we imagine the people who write these tips have. It’s about realising the obvious every so often, and cleaning the toilet, whenever it gets blocked.

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