Brian Lesage: So Much of Life is Thursday

So once again, good evening everyone. Really such a delight to see all of you this evening. Tonight I'd like to center my reflections about Dharma practice through a poem. And it's a poem by William Carlos Williams. And the title of it is Thursday. So I'd like to share with you this poem. So it begins, I have had my dream like others and it has come to nothing so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky feeling my clothes about me. The weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose and decide to dream no more. I've had my dream like others and it has come to nothing so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky feeling my clothes about me. The weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose and decide to dream no more. I think one reason poetry can fit this spiritual practice Dharma practice so well is that it doesn't primarily give us new information. I think often it gives us another way of perceiving. And for me, I feel like this poem is inviting me to perceive and inhabit a way of living that doesn't depend upon the dream coming true. So I want to move through this poem slowly and I want to begin with the title, Thursday. What's up with that? When I first read this, it was probably the last word that would come to my mind if I just turned the line to the poem. I mean, it is such a unique title to a poem. And so when I slowed down with Thursday, like the feeling of Thursday, actually for me, Thursday is delightfully unremarkable. So Thursday, it isn't the weekend. It isn't Monday with its sense of beginning. And it isn't Friday with its sense of the end of the work week. And it's not even Wednesday right there in the middle. It's like Thursday's just Thursday. I could say it's perfectly ordinary. I think if you were to reflect on it right now, so much of life is Thursday. And I think most of our lives are not the moments that we've been waiting for. They're just ordinary like Thursday. They're not the amazing joy or the heartbreaking sorrow. They're not the huge crisis or profound revelation. Thursday is putting on your shoes. It's opening the refrigerator door. It's taking out the trash. It's answering an email, clipping your fingernails. Simply breathing. And the dreams of our lives, you know what they do? They turn all of these Thursday moments into, you could say, the mere hallway that connects one's seemingly significant room to another. So one question I want to offer you is, what happens to the life you're actually living when most of your life is perceived to be happening in the unimportant hallways while you wait to come to that door that finally opens to the life you've imagined and dreamed of? And I think all of this, for me now fits so well with the first line of this poem. You know, the poet says, I have had my dream like others and it has come to nothing. So when I hear that line and really slow down with it to really kind of feel into it, it brings to mind a period of my own life really when I was much younger. I did, I had a very clear dream about my life. You could say about my Dharma life, about my spiritual life. I wanted to live the Zen monk life. And part of the allure was that Zen, at least at that time in my life, seemed to me to contain everything I needed. And it was a beautiful dream. I could give myself to practice completely. I'd wake up in the morning and then have my whole life simply surrounded by Dharma practice until I went to sleep at night. And it is true, for about six years, I got to live inside that dream at a Zen center, at a Zen monastery. There is so much I loved about that life. I loved living in a world where the structure of it, Dharma practice encompassed everything. How I ate, how I walked, how I worked, how I spoke, how I moved through the day. And those years definitely shaped my spiritual life. But over time, things changed. One thing was just, it really was getting harder and harder on my body. It was a rough austere life. And things happening in that community increasingly made it clear that I couldn't stay. And I also began to sense that something was missing for me in that practice itself, that particular approach to Buddhist practice. And I remember when I had kind of was deciding this and it come to this decision, someone asked me why I was leaving. And I remember surprising myself of what came out of my mouth. I said something like, oh, my heart needs more kindness. And I hadn't planned that sentence. But in some ways it was, you could say, simply one sign that the dream was no longer able to hold everything I needed. And what made leaving difficult was that I wasn't leaving something I hated. I was leaving something that I deeply, that I loved deeply certain aspects of it. And I had to let go not only of that life, but also of the dream that I had formed around it. This dream that I'd finally found the form of living that contained everything I needed. And I think that was part of the pain. And I remember for quite a while after living, I felt pretty unmoored. I was just out there and really no idea what was next. I had day labor jobs, manual jobs, manual labor jobs. And of course my life looked nothing like I had imagined. But interestingly, the practice remained. This is one of the great things about getting on these manual labor jobs is like just simply feeling my body feeling my feet on the ground. My hands doing what they were doing, the movements of the body. That simple practice tethered me to the Dharma when so much else had come and done. And also finding community. Community was so helpful at that time. And it's interesting because there was something in that experience that I didn't fully understand at the time. And looking back on it now, I wonder if it has something to do with what the poet is pointing to when he says, I've had my dream like others and it has come to nothing. Because I think sometimes when a dream comes to nothing, it doesn't mean that what you lived was for nothing. I think this is really important. What comes to nothing is the dream you had placed around it. What you thought it would become or what you thought it would give you. I think this is so important to understand. And I imagine most of you know something about this. Whether it was around a relationship, a career, the family you thought you'd have, the body you thought you'd keep, retirement. Maybe what meditation would eventually become for you. And sometimes there comes that moment when you realize, oh wow, this isn't going to happen. The dream comes to nothing. Or perhaps more unsettling, it does happen. You get the job, the relationship, the thing you spent years trying to accomplish and discover it doesn't give you what you imagined it would. And in that sense, it still comes to nothing. And I think this gets very close to something the Buddha was pointing to. There's a verse in one of these early Buddhist texts that goes, don't run back to the past. Don't anticipate the future. What's past is left behind. The future not arrived. And I think this is more radical than simply stay in the present moment. I think it's about being careful about making your ability to fully inhabit your life contingent upon some dream being fulfilled. And when I point this out, I do want to be, I want to be careful here. The reason I want to be careful here is because there's nothing wrong with dreaming. There are beautiful and wholesome aspirations that one can have. I think the question is more subtle, which is, when does a dream cease to be something you move toward and instead become the oppressive condition you place upon being fully alive right now? It's like, when does some imagined future kind of quietly begin to whisper something like, you can't fully live until this happens or that happens. And maybe that's one of the reasons this poem I think is kind of unsettling. I've had my dream like others and it has come to nothing. Yet then the poet does something quite striking. And I want to point out what he doesn't say, because I think it highlights what he says. He doesn't say, my dream came to nothing, but I found another new dream. Instead he says, my dream came to nothing so that I remain carelessly with feet planted on the ground. It's like that little phrase, so that changes everything. Because in the poem, the coming to nothing of the dream seems somehow connected to what becomes possible. It's not simply something he has to recover from that he's lost a dream. The fact that the dream has come to nothing, something's opened up as a result of the dream coming to nothing. And maybe you remember what opens up, it's really quite simple. He says, I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky, feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hats, air passing in and out at my nose. And I think this word carelessly is important too, because he's obviously not careless in the sense of being inattentive. He is noticing everything in the here and now. So maybe carelessly means something closer to, for this moment, he's no longer carrying the burden of having to make his life become something else. Maybe there's nothing he has to get from this moment. And instead he could just be here for this moment. And this is where the language of the poem changes and maybe you heard this at the beginning, dream, nothing, and then suddenly feet, ground, sky, body, air, nose. It's like the poem comes down out of the dream and actually into this world. You can hear that. And what I love about this poem is the poet doesn't tell us be in the present moment. Rather he's revealing a world that was already there, but the dream was making difficult to see. And I think this is what feels so radical to me. The alternative to the dream is not a better dream. It's just ground, it's sky, it's body, it's air. It's breath. It's just Thursday. And I think maybe this is one way of understanding something in Dharma practice. You know, often freedom is imagined as something being added. Finally getting the right experience, right relationship, maybe the right state of mind, the right insight. But sometimes freedom has much more to do with something no longer needing to be there. And I think this is key to understand in terms of the kind of freedom the Buddha was pointing to. Maybe there's a way of living in which the ordinary doesn't have to justify itself by leading somewhere else. The ordinary can just be ordinary, it can just be Thursday. And then the poet ends the poem with this interesting line, and to decide to dream no more. And I'll be honest, when I first was reading this poem and I heard that line, it just... It sounded bleak. I tried. It didn't work. And I give up. But when I slow down, for me that's not where the poem has taken me. I really slow down with it, and maybe you're feeling that, oh it's taking me somewhere much different than it. Because by the time he says dream no more, he hasn't withdrawn from life. He is intensely here, his feet are on the ground. So maybe dream no more doesn't mean hope no more. Maybe it means I no longer need the dream in the same way. There's a Buddhist word that I was all teaching around that comes to mind around this. The Pali word, Pali being one of the early scriptural languages of Buddhism is nibbada, which is often translated as disenchantment. So disenchantment, as I mean it here in terms of this Pali word nibbada, it doesn't mean you were wrong to care deeply about what once mattered. This is important. It can simply mean that the enchantment with it loosens. The sense that this one thing has to be everything or has to finally make your entire life okay can actually drop away. And I think this is one of the sweet freedoms of disenchantment. It's like you can still give yourself deeply to something without asking it to be everything. Yet maybe you notice, like my mind does, our minds are always attempting this to find everything and just something. So I think from this perspective, you can still have aspirations. You can still care passionately about other people and other beings in the world. But perhaps you can stop asking a particular dream or even the future itself to perform an impossible task to finally make this life okay. Maybe the last phrase means that the dream is no longer where you live and instead you live here and your life is no longer postponed until the dream comes true. This brings me back to the title. I really do love this title. Thursday and at the beginning I said that Thursday is so perfectly ordinary. It's not the beginning, it's not the ending, it's not the weekend, it's not the middle, it's not the big day that you've been waiting for. It's just Thursday. It's just this ordinary life. And maybe just for a moment you can notice that even right now, you can feel your feet right now, maybe you feel the weight of your body where you're sitting, the air coming and going out of the body. And maybe there's a way of perceiving all of this in which it's not merely the hallway leading to some more important room, maybe this is life. So can you discover a way of living that doesn't depend on the dream coming true? And not because dreams are wrong, but because your life is already happening. It's happening right here and it's happening right now on this utterly ordinary Thursday. So the poem once again, I've had my dream like others and it has come to nothing so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky, feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose and decide to dream no more. Thank you. Thank you for your attention.