There is a quiet assumption underneath most of how we spend a day: that the real part is the interesting part, and the rest is what you get through to reach it. Suzuki spends a whole short chapter refusing that, and the refusal is blunter than you expect from him.
“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
1970
The first line takes away the thing most people came for. If you arrived hoping for a state — clarity, calm, some experience worth having — he is saying that is not it, and that chasing the state is its own kind of restlessness wearing better clothes.
Living for the interesting part has a cost you can count. Most of a life is the usual everyday routine. If that is the waiting room, you have arranged to be absent for the majority of your own days, present only in the highlights, which do not come often.
Staying in the routine costs the excitement. There is no reward arriving, nothing to report, and the second line explains why it is harder than it sounds. You are an expert in your own routine. You have made that coffee, taken that road, had that conversation hundreds of times, and expertise closes down the possibilities. The more ordinary the thing, the more completely you already know what it is.
So what are we aiming at. We want to stop needing the day to be interesting before we will show up for it. That is not a lowering of standards. It is that the ordinary hour is where almost all of the time actually is, and being absent for it costs more than anything the interesting version could have paid.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Making the same drink in the same kitchen in the same ten minutes.
- The road you could drive without looking.
- The part of a conversation where you already know what they are going to say.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — whether you were there for it. Not whether you enjoyed it. Whether anything registered at all, or whether the time simply passed with nobody in the room.
You are not deciding anything, and you are not required to find the kettle fascinating. Notice whether you were present, and leave it as it is.