The Track

It really is all about trusting the process, a process that can’t be found by reading about others’ processes but only through continued experimentation (you can use the processes of others as a template, but you have to add your own thing, your own elements…) and being unafraid to change it up when it isn’t working – but still giving it the time to work in the first place and recognizing the difference between momentary frustration and genuine need for change (which often reveals itself only in hindsight).

Danger lurks: the search for a working process can be so consuming that it becomes a distraction – I speak from now-decades of this exact distraction –, looking at the tracks on your day’s journey, when all you need to do is ride the train, when all you have to do is to take your path and find your single-minded way.

Suzuki, on this: 

“The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track: beginningless and endless track. There is no starting point, no goal, nothing to attain. Just to run on the track is our way… But when you become curious about the railway track, danger is there. You should not see the railway track. If you look at the track you will become dizzy. Just appreciate the sights you see from the train.”

Shunryu Suzuki, ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND, p. 54

Somewhere in there’s a point to all of this, but I’ve lost the throughline. Bottom line: find your track (process), trust your track (process), and try not to think about it while you’re riding it; that I’m writing about it this morning should be ample evidence of my present capacity to follow my own advice, advice which, like all advice, is 99% useless.