Book Notes: The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh
The little book that has stayed on my desk for ten years and still has more to give.
I have owned three copies of this book. The first I lent to a friend who never gave it back, which is how I knew the friend had needed it more than I did. The second I underlined into uselessness. The third — the one currently on the desk — is mostly clean, because by then the book had moved into me and the underlines were elsewhere.
The book is short. The translation is plain. The teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, was a Vietnamese monk, a poet, and a quiet revolutionary who taught that the simplest acts — washing a dish, drinking tea, walking from the train to the office — are full meditations if you let them be.
The central instruction
The whole book turns on one sentence, which I have rewritten in my own notebook a dozen times: Wash the dishes to wash the dishes.
Most of us, washing the dishes, are not washing the dishes. We are thinking about the meeting tomorrow, the message we should send, the trip we are planning. The dishes are getting cleaned, but we are not there for it. The hands are doing one thing; the mind is doing another. By the time the last plate is in the rack, the act has happened to us; we did not have it.
To wash the dishes to wash the dishes is to feel the warm water, watch the soap film catch light, hear the small clink of the cutlery. It is to be present at one of the most ordinary acts of a life — and in doing so, to recover one of the moments that would otherwise have been lost.
Walking meditation
The other gift of the book is its description of walking meditation. Most of us walk to get somewhere. The point of walking meditation is to walk in order to walk.
You match the breath to the steps. Two steps in, three steps out, or whatever rhythm feels natural. You walk slowly enough that you can feel each foot meet the ground. There is nowhere to go. Even when you are in fact going somewhere, the act of arriving is not the point.
I do this almost every day, on the route between my flat and the small grocery I pass on the way to work. It takes four minutes longer than it would otherwise. Four minutes is a small price for arriving at the day already steady.
What the book leaves out
Thich Nhat Hanh does not promise transformation. He does not sell anything. There are no thirty-day plans, no advanced techniques, no levels to attain.
He simply repeats, page after page, a single quiet point: the practice is what you are doing right now, if you do it with attention.
Ten years on, I find this more useful than every other meditation book I own. It is also the one I most often give away.
A line worth keeping
He writes, somewhere near the end:
The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.
That sentence has changed how I drink water.