A BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE village was pregnant. Her angry parents demanded to know who was the father. At first resistant to confess, the anxious and embarrassed girl finally pointed to Hakuin Ekaku, the Zen master whom everyone previously revered for living such a pure life. When the outraged parents confronted Hakuin with their daughter's accusation, he simply replied "Is that so?" When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village.
They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility. "Is that so?" Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child. For many months he took very good care of the child until the daughter could no longer withstand the lie she had told. She confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom she had tried to protect. The parents immediately went to Hakuin to see if he would return the baby. With profuse apologies they explained what had happened.
"Is that so?" Hakuin said as he handed them the child. I have copied this story from John Suler's Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors, but I first read from it in Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. In Tolle's words, the Zen Master Hakuin simply did not want to "participate in human drama." As Tolle describes: To the Zen Master Hakuin, there is only this moment -- and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody's victim.
He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. His words to the grandparents of the child upon taking the baby from him was: "Is that so? It's good to hear this baby has his/her father." The moral of the story is simple: Things (or shit) happen -- and these are events and can only be "eventful" and not personalized -- but it's entirely your choice to choose to or not to respond to them.
You can dignify these events or, much simpler and therefore simply, see them as events that you have no role in being involved.
When you hear someone's honking a horn behind your moving car, as a signal of anger or whatever over your slow driving, you can also choose to hear them as the sound of a vehicle's horn, and adjust your speed accordingly so that your fellow driver could feel more at ease (with the potential but completely unnecessary road rage) or move to a slower lane (left or right side, depending on which side of the road that you are driving). Problem's solved.
Or, you can participate in this "eventful drama" by getting angry, upset, and disappointed by the impatience of your fellow driver. You might even stop the car and get down from your vehicle and have a verbal or fist fight with your fellow driver -- over a small event that doesn't have to be this caustic. You may even be able to bet that your fellow driver might not even think of it as caustic as you think. It's just noise for you him, but a "personalizable eventfulness" for you.
How fair is that to you, your mind, and your mental health? The lesson that Hakuin wants to teach us is simple: You don't have to "participate in human drama," no matter how much those who seem to associate you with such drama call for your involvement. In this story, instead of participating in the whole messiness that he was not even involved in, Hakuin has decided to give every one some time to see the situation in its clearest light.
He understood that such drama had already involved a large number of people, and in a situation like this, it would be difficult for him to try to come up with anything to exonerate himself from an already formed public opinion about him.
Like Seneca, the father of the stoic philosopher (about whom I wrote extensively in the Anti-Fragile Manifesto post, he simply used the time afforded to him (by not having anyone's visiting him) to write, think, and ponder over the knowledge and idea that he would like to finally form as the basis of what's later known as Stoicism. Seneca used his time wisely and that's why we today get to inherit his wisdoms.
Instead of spending time defending himself by the crime that he did not commit, he let the nature of time take it course, waited patiently, and spent every minute of his time making the world a better place through his influential writings, which, of course, only got widely read again after the daughter confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom and not Hakuin.
Exactly, Hakuin did what he had to do: There's a baby who needed to be supported, and he could support the child with his modest lifestyle; so, he did not hesitate to take the action to take care of the child while the problem was getting solved. He's the highest of the highest mind. "Is that so?" is a generic yet powerful response to any events. It's only your job to acknowledge them. The choice to get involved, however, is entirely yours. So, don't.
For that to take place, he gave everyone "time" to let the unserendipitous event naturally unfold. Meanwhile, taking the task at hand as a gift from afforded by the opportunity to have the time to engage in different activities, he engagingly learned how to take care of a new life, feed this baby, and provide this toddler with the warm and peaceful home. Essentially, Hakuin was waiting for the baby's biological family to, through time, realize how much this baby meant to its family.
Hakuin did what he could to give the precious time to the baby's family, while maintaining his love for the baby with the "approximate" distance so that he would not feel so sad once the baby was to be taken away from him. This was one of the stories that has, for some time now, gotten me thinking about how we human beings might be able to re-think how we deal with an event in life.
The reason for why event and incident like this is difficult to come to a conclusion quickly is explained by the design guru Don Norman. In his thinking about the "hindsight bias," he explains: This is why the best accident analyses can take a long time to do. The investigators have to imagine themselves in the shoes of the people who were involved and consider all the information, all the training, and what the history of similar past events would have taught the operators.
In his study of aviation catastrophes, he argues that "Hindsight makes events seem obvious and predictable." This notion of "hindsight bias" is accepted within the community of psychologists, risk management experts, managers, and beyond. It's true that we tend to overestimate our ability to plan (AKA "planning fallacy" ) and also underestimate our own tendency to try to work things backward to find a true series of causes that you could have prevented. In reality, there's no way no one could have done that.
As explained in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, t hese "black swan" events are improbable, unpredictable, and often yield massive impact. With all the information that one could potentially acquire before it takes place, there is no way anyone could have predicted it, so the "hindsight bias" only add to the frustration, and sometimes used as a tool for witch-hunting.
Don Norman continues: So, the next time a major accident occurs, ignore the initial reports from journalists, politicians, and executives who don't have any substantive information but feel compelled to provide statements anyway. Wait until the official reports come from trusted sources. Unfortunately, this could be months or years after the accident, and the public usually wants answers immediately, even if those answers are wrong. Moreover, when the full story finally appears, newspapers will no longer consider it news, so they won't report it. Is that so.
Hakunin is a Zen monk. Zen (or Chan in Chinese), needless to say, is one of the two branches of Buddhism (the other is Theravada Buddhism which is practiced in Sri Lanka and Thailand). In Buddhism, there is a similar way to thinking and dealing with events: In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by the historian Yuval Noah Harari, the author writes that Buddhist philosophy of "contentment" (not happiness) centers around the idea that you are not the events that happen to you.
What is the case is that you are also not the feelings you have. They are just feelings that naturally appear and disappear owing to their factors and causes -- these feelings are not to be confused with you. Thus, if you understand this, you can let yourself free from tying yourself to a event, and then keep chasing the need to feel good by making yourself "feel good" even though the feeling you have has nothing to do with you.
Those feelings are attached to the events, not to you. In understanding yourself this way, you can be content with your existence, focus on the task at hand, and free yourself from the inclination to dramatize ordinary events. Now, what do you do when you're in a difficult situation whereby you can't seem to hold yourself against the tide of an attack, event, or public opinion against you.
As you have learned from both Seneca and Hakuin, what's to be done is also very simple: Find your place in the "flow." Let me expand on that further here: "Flow" is a concept coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I first encountered this term from one of the TED talk videos I watched a few months ago with my mother. The concept appeared again upon my reading of Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (one of the 44 books that changed my life this year).
Before getting to understand what this state of flow is, I find another concept of "peak performance" by another psychologist Abraham Maslow to be quite similar. Maslow describes it as: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csiksze ntmihalyi_on_flow?language=en Peak experiences as rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter. It does sound quite awesome, doesn't it? How exactly do we get to that kind of state? Let's return to what Csikszentmihalyi means by flow.
It's the state of in which we realize that "the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times; instead, the best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." When you're "in the flow," you are so deeply engaged with a certain task at hand, to the point that you mind can no longer wonder elsewhere.
Such task, because it's not too easy for you to completely relax and too hard for you to have to think hard all the time about how to achieve it, you're engaging in what is "difficult yet worthwhile." That's when you're "in the flow." Seemingly important is this very concept of flow in the interactive design with everyday's tasks and objects.
The author of T he Design of Everyday Things Don Norman writes: Csikszentmihalyi has long studied how people interact with their work and play, and how their lives reflect this intermix of activities. When in the "flow state," people lose track of time and the outside environment. They are at one with the task they are performing. The task, moreover, is at just the proper level of difficulty: difficult enough to provide a challenge and require continued attention, but not so difficult that it invokes frustration and anxiety.
When in the state of flow, you will feel as though you are losing track of time -- as well as the outside environment. You are becoming one with the task that you are performing. I often get into the state of flow when I do what I like. And luckily these activities that I like are parts of my daily work.
So, personally, I get in the "flow" when I do the following: When I am on my bike, riding with a great podcast or audible at about 30 kms/hour; When I write something that I do not know how and where it's going to end (such as this blog post); When I get to talk, teach, conduct a seminar among people who are engaged in the similar interest and topic -- all my previous students know that my class/lecture can go on forever if I don't get stopped.
What these three things have in common is that these are things that, as Norman writes, "are at just the proper level of difficulty: difficult enough to provide a challenge and require continued attention, but not so difficult that it invokes frustration and anxiety." When I bike, write, or teach, I do not have a perfect goal that I want to achieve.
I know that these tasks won't be easy, but I know that I can perform it by keeping myself from any forms of distraction, and focusing on excelling my ability to be effective toward the task and the audience (i.e., students). These things get me into the flow, and keep me sane both when a pleasant as well as an unserendipitous event. In fact, as in the words of Hakuin, there's no bad (unserendipitous) or good (pleasant) event. Events are just events.
We human beings don't always deal with them appropriately, causing so many problems that sometimes a simple notion of time (to gather more information) and the tool of empathy ("imagine themselves in the shoes of the people who were involved and consider all the information," writes Norman) can simply do the trick. So, be like Seneca, and be like Hakuin -- when shit happens, think of them as events that need not be personalized by you.
Find activities that put you in the "flow" state -- by doing so, you won't be waiting for anything, you'd just be in the contentment.
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