~4,000 year old stone carvings of the Platonic Solids found in Scotland
When you actually enter the path of a meditation practice and go down the road a little way, you wake up one day and realize, to your surprise, that you’re actually committed to this. When that happens, a whole other life comes into view.
You find that you have formed your life, literally, around the practice, and you actually begin to forget about the life you thought you wanted, the life you thought you were making, the life you were hoping for, or the life you thought you should’ve been having. Instead, the practice becomes your life and life becomes your practice. Practice is no longer something you do to enhance your life or help it along, it is just your life. One day, you kind of realize this.
So you end up losing the life you thought you wanted, or the life you thought you had. But this is actually very liberating - this is really great - it’s wonderful to disappear into your practice. It’s wonderful not to have to worry anymore about being somebody, or something, which is such a struggle. And you no longer have to work overtime to avoid life’s difficulties. People work their entire lives to avoid life’s difficulties, and they are never successful at that. They never will be. So you can give up that effort altogether. You don’t have to defend or protect yourself anymore. This is great; I can’t tell you how great this is. It’s not dramatic. It’s not colorful. It’s not a big deal. It’s very subtle; maybe nobody even notices.
~ Zoketsu Norman Fischer, American Soto Zen roshi, poet and Buddhist author
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