July 25, 2010
Talk Given by Deokwun Russell Pitts
13 Minutes
When Sunim contacted the three of us and asked us to talk a few weeks ago I thought, “Oh, what does an old fart like me have to say? Realizing most of you, if not all, are younger than I am.”
Two things happened to me that helped me come to some idea of what I wanted to share with you. My wife called me up on the phone and told me that she was sitting with a gentleman who was diagnosed with a bad disease. He has a complicated job, he’s panicing, and he’s a mess. Will you talk to him? And I thought, “why does he want to talk to me?” Shouldn’t he see a doctor or a therapist? My wife said no, because she told him about my life, and he wanted to talk with me.
I agreed and I sat down with the man to talk and he was clearly a mess. He was completely exhausted. When we met, I asked what could I help you with? The man said that he heard I had twice lived a very complicated life and that twice I walked away. I asked him what else she had said. “Well, once you did it well, and once you didn’t.” I told him that was true. Once I went from complicated to more complicated. Instead of from complicated to less complicated. I asked him what it was that he really wanted. He told him his doctor instructed him to simplify his life. The man said he had to quiet down everything. I asked him what he intended to do. He had this list, and he went on and on, and on. I told him, “You realize how active that is going to make you? You’re going to be doing this, and doing this, and doing this.” He looked at me and said, “I never thought of that.”
I asked him, if you could have something happen in the next 48 hours that would help you, what would it be? He thought about it for a minute and he said, “I would love a good night sleep.” In the back of my mind I remembered there is a sutra somewhere that translates into, ‘An Excellent Night’. It goes like this:
Let not a person revive the past, or on the future build his hopes
For the past has been left behind, and the future has not been reached
Instead with insight let him see each presently arisen state
Let him know that, and be sure of it, invincibly and unshakably
Today the effort must be made, tomorrow death may come, who knows?
Nobody with mortality can keep him and his hordes away
But, one who dwells thus, ardently, relentlessly, by day and night,
It is he the peaceful sage has said, who has a single excellent night.
So I came back to the man, and I said, “So you want to simplify your life?”
What’s the simplest thing you do each day? He didn’t have a clue. I told him, Do you realize you can go 30 days without food, 4 days without water, but you can only 4 minutes with breath. The most simple thing we do every day is breathe. It’s where everything begins. That’s what we just finished doing. When you calm down, and you center and you just take a breath, your body and your mind comes back into balance. So when this man says he wants to simplify his life, he really wants to get his body and mind back in balance. He wants his mind to settle and rest, so his life can settle and rest for him. So instead of having this list of things to do, I suggested to him to find a couple of times a day, and no matter what you’re doing; whether you’re casting stuff off, or worrying about something, if you you just took a couple of minutes, what would happen?
I thought back to what I did at those points in my life, when I was under complications. It was interesting that both times it involved breathing, but I didn’t realize it until I talked to this guy. The first time, I was in the Navy. At that time I was living in Sardinia, and, you couldn’t tell my looking at me now, but back then I was an international marathon runner for the Navy.
Everyday for a year, I ran past this little stone cottage. This old man would come out with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and he’d just look at me. One day, the old man walks down this path, stands at the gate and makes a hand gesture to wave me over. I go up to the gate, I notice there is a donkey, a couple of chickens and a turkey. If you know anything about Italy, they know nothing about turkeys. The turkey comes screaming out of the corner, approaches me at the gate, feathers flying, runs over to a enormous boulder, and starts humping it. The man says to me, “Where are you running to?” I said, “Over there.” The man then asks, “Where are you running from?” I said, “From back there.” The man asks, “Where from there all the way to there?” I didn’t have an answer. He asked me what I did, I told him. He said, “You need to be like the turkey. The turkey doesn’t worry about anything. He comes around here, eats, goes over there, then goes to sleep. He’s happy. Be like the turkey.”
I thought that was an interesting image, but it stuck with me. 9 months later I left the Navy. Which I had planned to make a career. The guy in the cottage said, you need to stop right here and take a breath. So I tried to impart this to the gentleman I was talking to earlier. The cornerstone of what we do is just stop, and breathe, and the rest will follow. It was a reminder to me to get back to the core, the center, the focus of our practice. And that is, just be still, and the rest will follow. I want to leave you with a quote,
“If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure.
Abandon this fleeting world, Abandon your self.
Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the way.”
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