Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I think that for me, the thing connecting all of those is some sort of submission and disappearance into something, right? It’s the total submission to someone else’s body, really, in your baby, you know? That, I found there’s no other word for it and to their bodies needs and to the mess of it and the — yeah, there’s no other word.

And it also feels the same way with the parts of parenting that are, in fact, tedious and repetitive and so mundane, which is often the exact same stuff, right? Like wiping a butt over and over again and wiping spit-up from somebody’s mouth and washing tiny, little hands, right? These things are so often tedious, and they are holy. And the thing that connects them both, it’s submission…

I think that when I had my first kid, the thing that I found most difficult, but now I think I’ve smooth-brained my way into finding really pleasurable is that when you’re with your kids, at some point, you just have to completely surrender to not — the time just really can’t — you can’t really do anything else, you know? You are just going to — this is your weekend now. This is what weekends are going to be like now.

And there’s a removal of choice in that that is the thing that I was afraid of and I think a lot of people are afraid of, but also the thing that is arguably the most freeing. I remember also, I had read “How to Do Nothing” right around. And I was like, yeah, this might be a shortcut to the kind of outside the clock time, where you are just not being useful to anyone but the people in front of you, this thing that I was trying so hard to do in other ways that now I have to do every single weekend, whether I like it or not.

And I no longer feel that as a loss, I’m realizing. I used to. I used to think, oh, I could have done so many things with these weekends. And now I’m like, oh, it’s time to go to the playground, you know. Time to go to the playground again.’ (from the New York Times)

This is from the same interview I posted from three weeks ago; it got me thinking about the nexus of selflessness, attention and meaning that underpins a heightened sense of purpose or fulfillment, and that I could same the same thing about monastic practice.