Training Wheels
It's been so unseasonably nice out everyone's doing things that just don't belong in February. The woman who cuts my hair is teaching her kid to ride a bike. The parking lots are clear, the weather is warm, you can't go sledding. It's a no-brainer.
But she's feeling guilty and stuck as a single mom. Last year she got him a bike. And training wheels. She said she looks at the bike and looks at the training wheels, but they need to be installed. She's not even sure of the name of the tool you'd use to install them. She considered giving his bike to a friend and buying one that comes with the training wheels already in place. It sounds silly. She's so close to a solution. One 5/8" wrench and ten minutes and she's set. But she can't see it.
She told me the story and it reminded me how many times I've struggled with a problem that seemed intractable until later I found the answer was so close it was comical. It happens repeatedly in my life and I watch it snare friends, my children, my spouse. I watch us spin, our eyes clouded with doubt, fear, confusion. And so many times, these riddles get unlocked by the simplest nudge from someone who knows we simply need a five-eights wrench and we're golden. It seems like magic.
Very early in my journey on the Path I was (and still am) reading so much about meditation and the nature of mind, mowing down everything I could find by the greats such as Tulku Urgyen, Chögyam Trungpa, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and Pema Chödrön. I remember sitting alone and feeling gratitude wash over me as I realized these people were kindly handing my mind back to me. They were saying, "Remember all that endless worrying, second-guessing and uneasiness you just assumed was part of the natural order of things? Oh, you don't need any of that. Just set it down."
Here were people who sat in introspection, looked deep inside their minds and reported back that the way forward wasn't this futile exercise of stacking up accomplishments, status and shiny objects in order to stave off those waves of unease that were always lurking. Instead, the solution was to recognize the whole charade for the needless battle it really was. It was like losing at shadow boxing. It was a gratuitous burden.
The folks who made up this great lineage had done the heavy lifting and were giving me, for free, the distilled knowledge from generations of careful inquiry. The answer was right there all along and I just needed a friendly voice to point me to the obvious and untangle a lifetime of confusion. Tim often shares a potent saying by Tilopa that reminds us how quickly and completely that can happen.
“One single torch can dissipate the accumulated darkness of a thousand eons.”
I'll be forever grateful I landed here. I'll marvel at the causes and conditions that brought me these splendid training wheels that helped me finally to find a way to balance after nearly 50 years of struggling to sort it out, not knowing the tool was right there all along.
Here's one of the first breadcrumbs I found, a passage I underlined in a copy of Mingyur Rinpoche's The Joy of Living that I picked up at a used bookstore in Santa Fe while walking to dinner with my wife: "All the qualities of your natural mind—peace, openness, relaxation, and clarity—are present in your mind just as it is. You don't have to do anything different...All you have to do while observing your mind is to recognize the qualities it already has."
