c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Les Kaye is the abbot of Kannon Do Zen Meditation Center in Mountain View, Calif., and author of”Zen at Work.”He is the founder of Meditation at Work, an awareness training program for businesses.)

UNDATED _ I had lost track of him. We had not seen or spoken to one another in many years. So I was surprised on a rainy March afternoon by an unexpected letter from an old friend.

An unusual buoyancy indicated he had discovered how to put past difficulties behind him. He had a new job, a new family, and a different way of seeing himself. One memorable line in his note precisely and poignantly encapsulated the human condition:”I know now that life is rich and full of opportunities to learn, if only I can just get out of the way.” Reading his honest revelation, I wondered if anyone experiencing this understanding for the first time could avoid feeling remorse over lost opportunities and adrift about how to go on.

How do we”get in the way”of our own life? What do we mean _ what is it that we sense _ when we say such things?

Like a river or lake cut off from its source and stagnating, it is the feeling that,”My life is not flowing; something is in the way.” Growing up on the crowded and noisy streets of Manhattan, I looked forward to the monthly Sunday train ride from Grand Central Station to suburban Port

Chester to visit Grandma. She was spending her remaining years with my aunt and uncle in a nondescript, two-story clapboard house whose grandeur, I felt, was right up there with the Taj Mahal.

Best of all, it had an attic, sheltering treasures and relics of the past _ turn-of-the-century appliances, furniture, tools, books, photographs, clothes _ that once had a life but were now at rest. I found a curious solace rummaging in the dusty world of dim old things whose original meaning I could only imagine.

Attics have that kind of magic.

However, as my mother’s scolding voice reminded me _”What are you doing up there? Come down for dinner right now!”_ we have to come down from the attic; we have to let old things be old things and pay attention to things of the present. By remaining in the crowded attic of the past, the mind creates its own stagnation, limiting life by continuing ancient habit patterns.

Sifting and sorting, always reviewing antique material, foraging in the stuff of the past, we may feel nostalgic and comforted. But it is a dusty, boxed-in place where nothing is new. Staying stuck in the dust, our sense of our life becomes,”I am my past.”It gives the sensation of being in the way of oneself.

My friend’s letter graphically illustrated the suffering inherent in the painful recognition of feeling”stuck”in life. But after the recognition appears, then what? What do we do when we become aware of our own suffering?

Almost mysteriously, a second letter, closely following and much like the first, from another friend who I also had not heard from in years, provided part of the answer.

He wrote,”I have to be vigilant that I do not fall into my karmic pattern.”He is right; letting go of old habits does not come automatically, without the work of paying attention.

The vigilance my second friend writes about is not the usual armed, on- guard watchfulness associated with early-warning detection of the enemy”out there.” Instead, he is referring to a softer, inward awareness of the tendencies of our own mind, the meditative spiritual practice that enables us to leave the attic by bringing mindfulness to the present moment.

In their own ways, my two friends discovered that meditation practice is like opening the windows of a dusty attic to let freshness flow in.

When the mind does not refresh it becomes stubborn and biased, making us feel that we are”in the way.”It is like water that does not move _ becoming stagnant and poisonous _ where nothing lives and nothing grows. Moving water is always refreshed; its flowing nature supports life.

The meditation practice that has been steadily gaining interest in this country for the past forty years emphasizes maintaining awareness of the continual coming and going of our flowing breath. And that specific, simple, quietly observant activity opens the door to the more boundless awareness of flowing life.

When the mind is always present in that universal flow _ when we are down from the attic _ we can never feel”in the way”of our self.

DEA END KAYE