Diligence

I've written before about our bondage to our habits, but habits can be freeing as well. They free us in simple ways. I have a habit of wearing the same outfits each day of the week--green pants/black shirt for Monday, sweats for Tuesday (yoga day), blue pin-striped shirt/khaki pants for Wednesday, etc.... It's not profound, but it saves energy when I don't have to plan my wardrobe.

Habits can free us in more profound ways, though. I've talked about living mindfully, attending to the present moment, opening ourselves to the grace at hand. If we have to constantly remind ourselves to live mindfully--if mindfulness is a repeated conscious act--then we're not really being mindful. We're attending to mindfulness, and not the present moment. Our minds are having to constantly recall our need to be mindful, and soon this too will exhaust us. We are truly mindful, we have opened ourselves to grace, only as we have made a habit of this. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this reprogramming ourselves for the habit of happiness.

Diligence is a key component of this reprogramming. It's the intentional farming of our attention, weeding out those things that distract us from the grace of the moment and nurturing what opens us to that grace---weeding out an overriding concern for how much we have or how successful we are, for example, while we nurture simple awareness. Thich Nhat Hanh offers a couple of thoughts I find helpful on this. ("Buddha Mind, Buddha Body")

First, he urges us to organize our lives in ways that don't encourage the distractions. We need to be serious about nurturing a habit of happiness, and we do this by taking seriously what gets in the way and avoiding it. Too many days, I wake up, come out, and turn on my computer. Then I'm surprised that I spend more time than I want in front of it, neglecting deeper, richer things. Maybe if I just didn't turn it on for a few hours....

Second, he reminds us of a practice called "changing the peg." It's carpenter's practice of driving out a rotted peg in a structure by driving in a new peg. So too, one way to drive away distractions is to not merely shoo them off, but to replace them with what's rewarding. I don't just turn off my computer, but I turn and ask my son to work a puzzle....

I want to spend more time thinking about how to nurture a habit of happiness--of simple awareness.