Willie Grieve

A few weeks ago, I went on a cycling trip with a friend across Scotland, from west coast to east coast. There’s a pleasing simplicity and clarity about these trips: you start at A and finish at B. The tradition is to start with your back wheel in one sea, and finish with your front wheel in another. You know the trip will last for C days, and each day you know you’re committed to cycle D miles, given that you’ve booked sometimes hard-to-find accommodation in advance for each night.

My friend had diligently trained for the trip, building up his cycling legs and endurance. I hadn’t, due to other priorities, but felt fairly confident as I had been on similar trips before without much training, and trusted that my legs would prove strong enough.

The first day we cycled over 50 miles and reached where we were staying without incident. A good start: we both felt quite exhilarated, and agreed we could easily have cycled another 20 miles. The rest of the trip would be straightforward, we thought, and we looked forward to the following days with anticipation.

Day 2 proved a very different proposition. 10 miles in and I was feeling out of sorts, possibly a residue of tiredness from the previous day, and my body complaining about the treatment it was being exposed to and for which it was unprepared. The exhilaration of the previous evening had wholly disappeared. We came to a hilly section, and one hill in particular was unrelentingly steep and long. By the time I struggled to the top, I was trembling with exhaustion, my heart pounding, panting for breath, on the edge of hyperventilation. I felt a weakness upon me, and I was overcome by a conviction that I couldn’t carry on. It was just too much.

From the vantage point of the top of the hill, I could see the miles ahead were far from flat. There would be many more hills, many more challenges; day after day of it. Away over the horizon lay the other sea, our destination, impossibly distant. My legs were trembling. My friend was away ahead, unseen. I had a sudden sense of panic: I couldn’t carry on, and yet it seemed impossible to abandon the trip. I would be letting my friend down: how would I get home in any case? We were in the middle of nowhere. What would I do with my bicycle? My panic began to spiral, worsened by indecision and doubt, self-judgement for not having prepared properly, and gripped by a corrosive sense of physical weakness I had never experienced before.

Can’t go on. Can’t not go on. As I stood, tendrils of anxiety flickering, and locked into the apparent insolubility of the situation, a thought came to me; a thread of calmness, and the words which formed in my head were something like: give to the situation in each moment what it asks for, to the extent that you are capable. No more, and no less. Each turn of the pedals, each moment, just that.

I waited until my breathing returned to normal and my legs stopped trembling. A sip of water, a few nuts & raisins. A deep breath. I began to cycle on, slowly and deliberately, each turn of the pedals, measuring my effort with exactly what seemed to be needed, to the best of my ability, but not allowing my breathing to become more than measured. Slowly the miles passed. I stopped myself from counting, measuring, assessing.

As the hours went by, I began to study the movements of my mind. I found that all too easily I could be taken out of that hard-won place of simply giving what was needed in each moment. On the one hand, I could find myself making too much effort, trying too hard, and disproportionately tiring myself out. (“My friend is miles ahead, he’ll be getting impatient” “I should be doing better than this” “There’s a long way to go, I need to speed up” “I used to cycle much quicker than this” “what’ll that car driver think of me crawling along?”). On the other hand, I could find myself going slower than I was capable of. (“Why did I agree to this trip?” “I’m too old for this”… “my heart condition…” “What’s the point of this anyway?” “Why can’t he slow down? Well, to hell with him racing ahead, showing off”.)

But in the awareness of those thoughts, I would be able to bring myself back to just this, responding to what was being asked of me, no more, no less.

Arriving some days later at our final destination, I had the sense that I had learned something important, not just simply a technique for coping with unfitness and physical weakness on a cycling trip.

Some days later I was rereading the transcript of Rev. Master Haryo’s talk, ‘The Vessel and its Contents’ and came on this section:

(In our Sōtō tradition) we don’t give people a koan, so there’s not that sort of focus that you bring yourself back to. Our koan is noticing what’s getting in the way of just doing what needs to be done; what gets in the way of just walking; your doubts, your criticisms of other people – that’s the natural koan. Which can become quite extreme. And it’s not uncommon in the life of a meditator to come to where those sorts of things that get in the way can take on quite a powerful and obstructive appearance – should I continue on? What’s this all about? This isn’t getting me anywhere. It’s usually some form of doubt, or criticism; or doubts of others. And that’s the koan when it really has arisen in the way we mean when we talk about the koan arising naturally.¹

So perhaps as an urban-dweller leading a largely non-physically demanding life, the situation in which I had found myself had provided me with the opportunity to experience in a particularly vivid way the koan appearing naturally in daily life.

I have a deep sense of gratitude for what felt to me an important lesson.

Notes

1. Rev. Master Haryo Young, The Vessel and Its Contents, an edited version of a transcription of a talk in Portobello Priory Newsletter January – April 2018 and published in the Winter 2018 issue of this Journal.

https://journal.obcon.org/files/2018/12/Winter-2018.pdf

Issue: only available as part of Journal, Winter 2019 pdf to download

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