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Doing One Thing At A Time and Consistency

Good morning again. I'd like to talk about two principles for practice that can really allow this Buddhist practice, or mindfulness practice, to develop and to grow. They can be done in such a way that how we live our daily life actually supports the growth of the practice.

I spent ten years of my life living in monastic Buddhist settings. These were very important times for me. I mention it now because I want to say that during those ten years, I didn't study Buddhism much. I didn't change, grow, or develop in the practice much through study. The primary benefits that came from those years came from my doing what I did: the activities of meditation, certainly, but also the activities of monastic life. I had the ability to approach everything I did throughout the day in a dharmic^[1] way—doing it mindfully and with presence. Through the activities of doing, something began opening, releasing, freeing, and growing inside of me. So, doing rather than studying—learning by doing.

There were two things that I learned that really made this "doing" of practice in everyday life powerful and really added value to it. It has to do with how we do things. These two things are doing one thing at a time, and practicing with consistency, or constancy.

Doing One Thing at a Time

A representative story of this for me was when I was practicing in a monastery in Japan. One of the more senior monks was in the kitchen chopping vegetables one evening. I had a question that I wanted to ask him; I don't think it was particularly important. He was there with the knife, chopping vegetables at a cutting table, and I went over and asked him my question. He put the knife down, looked up from the vegetables, and just answered me directly. He was fully there to answer me. When he finished, he picked up the knife and continued chopping.

I asked another question, and he put the knife down, turned to me, and was fully there to answer my question. He wasn't going to do two things at a time. He wasn't going to chop and talk; he was going to just be there to answer me. That was nice. He finished and again started chopping.

I asked again. I hadn't really noticed what he was doing or what was happening; I was just more interested in the conversation, I guess. So the third time, he put down his knife and said to me, "Gil-san, I'm here to chop the vegetables, maybe for tomorrow's meal, and I can't really do my work if you keep asking me questions." He was only going to do one thing at a time.

Then I understood what he was doing. I understood that he was doing one thing. If he was going to talk to me, he was going to talk to me, but if he was going to chop, he was going to chop. What I was talking about was not that important, but the chopping was, in a sense. I don't know if it was important or not in that exact moment, but an important thing for him was that he was there to practice. For him, practice meant to be fully there for the activity and not to be split. I was kind of splitting him away from his job.

This idea of really being present for what we do—I also learned a lot about that for myself when I was working in the kitchen at the monastery. I had never really worked in a kitchen before, so it was all new. Learning to chop was new, and there are certain skills to chopping and cooking. But when I first came into the kitchen, I wasn't really that interested in being a cook. Chopping five gallons of onions or carrots was not my idea of a good time.

Before I got into the kitchen, I picked up a spiritual book on a bookshelf in a bookstore, and I opened it at random to see what it said. I read a sentence that was something like, "The problem most people have is not participating fully with what they're doing." I closed the book, and that sentence rang in my mind. It stuck with me for a long time.

When I was working in the kitchen, that sentence was still there: "The problem we have is not participating fully." I started paying attention to this, and I noticed that I wasn't fully there with the carrots. Physically, I noticed that my body was actually half-turned towards the door, as if I really wanted to leave. I was not really wholehearted about it; it was like I was kind of putting up with it.

I noticed this about myself, so then I practiced turning back to just be with the carrots and fully be chopping carrots. Not too long afterwards, I'd find my body would turn away again, and my mind would drift off. There were other things I had in mind. This was kind of boring, just doing carrots. I came back to the carrots. Those carrots became my teacher; the vegetables became my teacher. I learned so much about myself, and I learned about turning back and just doing one thing at a time—being fully there for that.

With time, I learned to enjoy chopping vegetables quite a bit. It wasn't so much the vegetables, maybe, but what I enjoyed was the wholeheartedness of just being with the vegetable. Just chopping, just this activity. Giving myself over fully to one activity, not being distracted, not being split, not being resentful, and not resisting what was happening. I was giving myself fully to this activity that I was supposed to be doing anyway, so I might as well do it fully.

I learned a lot about the value of just really being with one thing. I also got to be fairly good at chopping vegetables. I noticed that when I practiced that way, sometimes after a session in the kitchen, we'd go back up into the meditation hall to meditate. If I was fighting being in the kitchen and not really there for what I was doing while I was a prep cook, when I sat down to meditate, I would actually be distracted, and it would take a while to settle down. But if I was really present for the carrots while I did the carrots—present for the activity that I was doing—when I went back to the meditation hall to meditate, I would already be concentrated. I was non-distracted, and I could settle really fast. It was also like washing dishes; we had to do a lot of pots in the kitchen. If I just did the pot washing and practiced that way, I saw the benefits of really doing one thing at a time.

To this day, I see how easy it is for my mind to start being more split in the activities that I do. Even earlier today, I was doing one thing: I was moving through to go somewhere, and doing that on purpose. My mind started thinking, "Oh, just do that, do this thing on the way," or, "Wait a minute, maybe go over here and take care of this right now." There are these forces pulling me away, all of which were innocent. But the joy, or the value, was saying, "No, this is what I decided to do. I'm not going to let myself be pulled aside by these other things which don't have to be done right now. Let me just stay with this." And in that moment, it was staying with walking to this next activity that I had to do. I could feel that it put me into a groove, or a delight, or a settledness: "This is what I'm doing."

If in the course of the day in lay life, outside of a monastery, you start practicing more often just being with one thing at a time, it doesn't have to be all day long and continuously. But I suspect that there's a lot of room to add this into your day. Even if you do it for one percent, or five percent, of the activities you do throughout the day. When I'm doing this, I'm just going to do this. I'm not going to have the radio on. I'm not going to have the TV on. I'm not going to be listening to a podcast. I'm not going to carry on a conversation. I'm not going to be thinking about things that are elsewhere, planning tomorrow.

When I'm cooking, when I'm sweeping the floor, when I'm brushing my teeth—whatever it might be, it does not have to be big, dramatic things. "This will be the place. This is my monastery. This is a time where I'm going to give myself fully over to just this."

As you do this, you might find protests. You might find your mind is impatient, feeling this isn't so important. "There are more important things to think about and do." "This is boring, this can't be that important, and I might as well think about more interesting things." Don't listen to those protests. If even just one percent of the activities of the day you give yourself over to doing just one thing, you'll still have lots of time to entertain yourself with other things.

But to start getting a feel for just being here—letting the impatience, the boredom, and the resistance fall away, learning how to let the powers of distraction settle or be put aside, to develop the skill, the interest, and the love of just being there for one thing at a time—you'll start feeling the benefits of it. You'll start feeling the joy of it, the pleasure, the delight, the opening, and the freedom that can come with that.

If you do that one percent of the time through the day, or five percent of the time, you will start developing some of the benefits that come from living a monastic life or living on a meditation retreat. One of the advantages of being in a monastery or on a retreat is that we're reminded to bring this attention to what we're doing many more times than people are in lay life.

So if you can find some way to really do one thing at a time, maybe choose certain activities through the day that are your monastic activities, your dharma activities. Let's just do this now; just brush my teeth, whatever it might be. That's one way to really develop the practice and grow in it, so it kind of integrates with your whole life.

Consistency in Practice

The other principle of practice is consistency, or constancy. It means you just have a consistent thread, or some threads that grow through your life that are always there reliably. You have a certain commitment to doing them that you're not going to waver from. A variety of benefits come up from that, and I'll use the example of meditation practice.

To have a consistent meditation practice means to have a constancy, a regular ongoing practice that you're committed to without exception, unless the house is burning down or something. It might be seven days a week, it might be six days a week, or it might be weekdays. Every weekday you're going to meditate, no matter what. There is some consistency and some commitment.

Then what happens is that because you're committed to it without wavering, you get to see yourself in new ways. You get to see all the different forces inside of you—all the different debate teams that come into play that are explaining why you shouldn't be meditating. "I'm too tired," "I don't have time," "There are more interesting things to do," "I have commitments," "I'm bored," or "I'm excited about something else." All these things are quite normal. But if the through-line, the thread that goes through you, is that you always meditate, you get to see how these forces pull you around and change what you're doing. And you learn to let go of them for that period of meditation.

Both those learnings are really powerful. Because unless you learn what pulls you away left and right from what you're doing, you won't see how you're not free. And if you learn to let go of those to really be fully present for the meditation—without letting them continue to bite at your feet, or bark at you, or insist that you should be doing something different—then you're also learning how to be free. You're learning just to be here for this. You both learn something about yourself, and you learn a skill of letting go to be fully here.

Also, with that consistency of meditating regularly, you get the chance to see yourself in many different ways of being. Sometimes you're happy, sometimes you're sad, sometimes you're tired, agitated, content, or discontent. Sometimes you're overwhelmed, and sometimes you're underwhelmed. We go through all these different changes and ups and downs. Because you have this commitment—no matter what, whether you want to or not, you sit down to meditate—you get to see all those different ways of being, and you get to develop a different relationship to them.

One way is that because you have a commitment to meditation, you learn how to be free from giving in to any of them, giving them too much importance, or letting them influence what you do and how you are. You also learn to be more equanimous^[2] around them. We're more relaxed around them because you learn, "Well, as important as they are, they're not that important compared to this half-hour period of meditation. I'm just going to do my meditation."

Also, because of the regularity of meditation, you see these things come and go. One of the characteristics for many of us is that whatever we're thinking or feeling in the moment, we can lose perspective of the full spectrum of what's happening in our life. The thoughts and feelings of the moment can seem like the most important thing. But if you have this through-line of meditation through your life, and you see these things come and go—one day you're happy, one day you're sad, one day you're irritated, another day you're bored—after a while you say, "Wait a minute, these things just come and go. I don't have to take them as absolute, give so much authority to them, or invest myself in them. They're just like the weather that's coming through." I don't have to be upset about the weather or get involved in it. I can just sit here in the shelter of my meditation and let the weather do what it does.

We learn to take things less personally, less reactively. We start becoming freer and less caught by the ups and downs of our life.

This through-line of one thing, like meditating every day, can apply to the first principle: just do one thing at a time. So maybe some of the things you do through the day are, "I'm just going to brush my teeth," or, "I'm just going to sweep the kitchen floor." Whenever you do that, because you're only doing that, it has the same benefits of meditating every day. You see yourself in ways you learn how not to be pulled into your thoughts and feelings, some of which are your ruminations. You get to step out of the stuckness of our life because, "Here, this is what I'm doing now. I'm just doing this." And if you do that consistently over days, months, and years, a tremendous amount of learning can go on.

So, two principles: doing one thing at a time, and being consistent in what you do. This could also be things like the precepts, or having a consistency with Right Speech^[3]. For example, I might make that a theme for a year, where I focus on my speaking. Maybe not all day long, but there are certain places through the day, like at work or at meetings, where you say, "Okay, now I'm going to really practice with this." Or when you first come home, remember for the first ten minutes: Right Speech. We have these practices that we do consistently so we can see ourselves and the situations we're in through the vantage point of those practices and precepts.

It could be loving-kindness^[4]. We practice loving-kindness for a while, and we do it consistently. We see all the ups and downs, all the protests, all the ways we get pulled away from it, all the doubt, the impatience, and all kinds of things. We get to see more clearly what's happening because of the consistency of this one thing that we're doing.

I had this thought when I was thinking about these topics for the talk: a Sunday morning talk is really important; it's a showcase time for teaching the dharma. I have to really come and show up with something profound and big, and just talking about doing one thing at a time and consistency seems like a small thing—not so weighty, serious, or important. That thought went through my mind for a moment, and I thought to myself, "No, Gil, it might seem that way, but that's a mirage. That's a trick of the mind."

This is actually a huge, important dharma topic that is hugely valuable in our lives. To practice from time to time through the day—it doesn't have to be all the time, but periodically—learning to just do one thing at a time, and just do it fully. Learn what it's like to do something fully with embodied presence, with full attention, gathered in a kind of oneness with a carrot. Become the carrot. Become the chopping. Be as fully there for that as you would be fully absorbed in reading a really good book. And consistency—keep it up, keep doing the practice day in and day out. Just keep that going.

I'll finally end with a little inspiration around consistency. The consistency of small steps of mindfulness, small movements of practice throughout the day where you pick it up and come back, is like two parallel lines. If two lines go off parallel for infinity, they will never get further away or closer together. But if you take one of them and just gently nudge it in one direction—it can be just barely perceptible—because it has this long timeframe and distance to go, that little, almost imperceptible different angle means that over time they get further and further away until their distance is huge.

There are two different lines for the trajectory of your life. There's the way you're going without practice, and the way you're going with the practice of mindfulness and Buddhist practice. If you can just nudge the practice a little bit more, just give yourself a little bit more fully to it, you might not feel the difference today, tomorrow, next week, or even next month. But eventually, the line will go off more and more, and the difference between living your life as you normally do and living your life with practice will become clear. Eventually, you'll see, "Wow, this has become two really different things," and you'll be so glad that you nudged yourself more and more in the direction of practice.

Even if you nudge yourself to do one thing at a time more often and be more consistent, the line towards freedom will grow.

Thank you all very much, and very nice to be able to share this with you.