It's been an ordinary week: Three important personnel meetings about intractable problems; meeting an excited couple, planning their wedding service; grading final papers for my eighty-five students; planting the final summer plants in their hanging baskets; e-mails and administration; a twelve year-old's major meltdown (replete with words a sailor would be proud of, and animal noises a feral cat would be hard to challenge); two meetings with Deans of school; "exit interviews" with students who have finished their majors and minors in philosophy; speaking with engaging inquirers about our secular monastic community; planning the summer traveling with Jane; taijiquan meditation and double bang routine each morning; two sessions of marshaling at the college's commencement ceremony; rejoicing with former students completing advanced degrees (two new JDs and one MS); and in between all the bits and pieces trying to complete our book on loving nonviolent (re)parenting.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing too taxing. A few challenges. A couple of low points. A couple of high points. Mundane. Much like most weeks. Much like most of life.
The challenge of ordinary life is to return again and again to the central idea: connecting the inner life and the outer appearance; seeking to fully develop the true nature of the self (the soul, the atman); being sincere and truthful at the core; being on the inside what I appear to be on the outside; allowing the outer to conform to the inner.
In taijiquan it is sometimes said that good taiji is ninety percent inner and only ten percent outer. When you watch the exquisitely graceful movement of a master, what you see is only the tip of a large iceberg. The outer form corresponds to the inner development of qi. It's why, when you observe a beginner, there is little gracefulness. All is outer. When you observe someone who has been a taiji player for some years, there is some gracefulness, but not like the master—possibly fifty percent inner, fifty percent outer. The various forms are "correct." The routine is complete. But the inner has not yet developed. The outer reflects the inner.
As in taijiquan, so in life. The challenge is to develop the inner, the core.
This development takes place in the everyday, in the mundane.
A false strategy is to try to escape the mundane. We can wish life away looking for the something else, the something more, the something bigger or better, someone else's life.
The most difficult and challenging journey is the inner one, not the one across country, or around the world. I suspect that sometimes the longing to go somewhere, to change circumstances, or to find the new, might well be an escape from the more important inner journey.
So, I am glad for the ordinariness of last week. I will be glad for the ordinariness this week too.
All is secular. All is spiritual.
+Ab. Andy