A young monk travelling in China found an old cook out in the yard in the middle of the day, spreading mushrooms on the ground to dry. He asked him two plain questions, the kind anyone would ask. The answers he got back he wrote down years later and put into a book of instructions for cooks. Here is the exchange.
“Why do you not employ postulants or laborers?”
“They are not me.”
“Why are you doing this now?”
“What time should I wait for?”
Both questions assume the same thing. They assume the job is a quantity of work to be got through, and therefore that it is movable — to another pair of hands, or to a cooler part of the afternoon. The cook does not argue with the assumption. He does not hold it. For him the mushrooms at that hour are the day itself, and there is no other version of the day going on somewhere else that he is currently missing.
The young monk’s position is the comfortable one and it costs something specific. If the task in front of you is the wait before the real thing, then the real thing is always one task away, because the next task gets treated the same way. That is a day with no hours in it.
The cook’s position costs the postponement. That is a real loss. “I will be properly here once this is out of the way” is what makes a great deal of ordinary life bearable, and he does not get to use it. What he has instead is the mushrooms.
So what are we aiming at. We want the thing in front of us to be the thing, rather than the gap before the thing.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The dishes after dinner, with the evening waiting on the other side of them.
- A phone call you are getting through so that the afternoon can start.
- The last ten minutes of a walk, when you are already back at the house in your head.
In all three the thing to watch is one question, and it has two answers. Is this what I am doing, or is this the wait before what I am doing. You can usually tell by where the attention is pointed — at what is in your hands, or past it.
You are not deciding anything in that moment, and you are not trying to make it come out the first way. Watch which one it is, and leave it as it is.