JANUARY 25, TUESDAY

CONCENTRATION

Long ago I saw a film on Buddhism, I forget the name, I think it was on PBS, but what I remember most distinctly is a section in which a Buddhist monk did a kind of walking meditation in which he very deliberately took one slow step followed by another slow step, barefoot, up and down a sandy red path. He was meditating, but meditating more with physical concentration than mental concentration.

Also, I remember, long ago when Warren Wilson teachers were expected to spend one vacation week during the school year and one month in the summer on the college work program, both to give supervisors of student work crews a break and also to affirm the importance of physical work and the importance of honoring all work, teaching or manual labor, as being equal, I was expected to do the same. I wanted to teach, and got no pleasure from manual labor and resented working with my hands. But I did it. One summer I worked in the college garden for a month. It was very hot and the work was tedious. But I remember with great clarity a woman student, Dorothy Easley, now a go get ‘em lawyer somewhere, telling me that the way to enjoy working in the garden was to space out, to fully concentrate on what you were doing, and not to think of anything else, and in no time the work would be done and you could go home at peace with yourself. It didn’t work for me. All I could think of was how much time I had left before quitting time. But I’ve never forgotten what she said whenever I can’t avoid doing hard manual labor.

And then I think of Mahatma Gandhi, who believed in manual labor and as his form of manual labor spent time every day, spinning the thread for his khadi clothing. Homespun, home made, khadi clothing became the symbol of the Gandhian movement. There are still khadi stores across India and good Gandhians still wear khadi. Spinning your own clothes also had a political purpose because it was a way of refusing to be part of the British industrialization of India. And when I think about it the demand that all work be treated as being equally valid was also a Gandhian ideal and was way of creating a community at Warren Wilson in which we were all equal. I have visited Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram where he spent hours sitting on his porch spinning on his manual spinning wheel and where everyone, including Gandhi was equal.

The goal of Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka which I visited a number of times with students was for everyone in a socially stratified village to work together on building a road or a school. The motto was, “We build the road and the road builds us.” The best village development was not clothing factories where people had to leave home and work 8 or more hours a day with sewing machines piecing clothing together for export to the GAP or Karstadt, but working together by hand to build a communal village where the whole village would gather to listen to music or to dance and to celebrate each other.

But while all of these ways of encouraging community through manual labor are very important I think there is another side to the careful steps the meditating monk was making, to shutting off all thoughts as we worked in the hot garden, to working together on a road and most of all with Gandhi’s hours of spinning. Hand spun cloth is not an efficient way to cloth people, although Gandhi wore only a loincloth and so was easy to clothe. But the repetitive process of spinning was very important for Gandhi.

What I want to wonder about, and I am just beginning to wonder about because this idea has been creeping up on me for some time and actually seems a little strange to me, is about concentration.

The Buddhist monk was not concentrating on conscious, deliberate walking to get somewhere, or even to free his mind to think about other things. The concentration on his careful steps was good in itself. And maybe what Dorothy was suggesting was not that shutting off all thought and concentrating on weeding was a way to get through a hot afternoon, but that the concentration itself was good and that she went home tired but in another way rested. And it seems pretty certain to me that the reason Gandhi was so dedicated to spinning his own khadi clothing was not primarily to oppose the British, which he did in other ways, but because he needed the hours of concentration that spinning brought him in order to center himself and to be clear eyed in his political work. He enjoyed doing it.

But I actually get to Gandhi and Dorothy and the monk through starting with my own experience and wondering if I have happened by accident onto what they so purposefully have discovered.

I like sitting here and writing. When I am writing I don’t think about anything else. I don’t think about loneliness, I don’t think about what I would rather be doing, I don’t think of what I am going to eat for lunch, I am centered in some way. Maybe I am coming to writing from a different direction when wanting to say something and I am beginning to wonder about that.

Since nothing that I say is that significant, and since very few people pay any attention to what I say, I am not under the illusion that what makes me write is in order to amaze or even touch anyone else. Most of the time I’m talking to myself alone. Once I realized this then I began to think that maybe it is simply the process of writing that makes me feel alive. Maybe the strange way words, without a though in my mind, appear on the page is a pleasant process. How is it that my mind, which feels blank, produces words on the page that come out in complete grammatical sentences (usually) and these turn into paragraphs and finally are focused (more or less) on some point? Maybe this process is for some reason a pleasurable active, at least for this human, and maybe for others. Why else would I write in my journal for four or more hours a day and have done so for 40 years, a journal that no one else reads and that has already disintegrated in abandoned computers or is scattered on hard drives, words that no one else looks at and I never look at again. The only explanation is that the process of writing somehow makes me feel good.

But then as soon as I began paying attention to the monk, and Dorothy, and Sarvodaya and Gandhi’s spinning a much simpler explanation came to me. It could be that it is simply concentration that is pleasurable. If this is so then there is no difference between the monks careful concentration on each footstep, not loosely walking, but concentrating on each step, and my concentrating on the process of words coming out which requires concentration for them to appear in sentences, paragraphs and little posts like this one. Concentration feels good.

Maybe it helps to have the sun hot and sweat dripping from your body because the effort of shutting these out and shutting out thoughts of time or anything else forces complete concentration, and concentration itself feels good.

And I can’t think of a better form of concentration than spinning in which you can’t let the thread get thin and break or too thick and be lumpy. You have to concentrate intensely. Knitting, which Kathe did for hours at a time, produced beautiful sweaters, but it also required intense concentration, concentration that a knitting machine, which would have been faster but not as creative, wouldn’t have required. Designing and producing beautiful cloth sewed into beautiful clothing requires the same concentration, but it has to be done by hand. Carpentry and car repair and creating a flower garden or creating art require concentration. So does plowing a field or stacking bales of hay. So much work allows concentration, even repetitive mindless work if you concentrate and block out everything else. Housework and nurturing children allows concentration. Maybe one of the reason that travel is so stimulating is that you have to concentrate on what is happening because everything is new and strange.

Maybe one of the many things embedded in our DNA is the will to concentrate, even delight in concentration, a delight that can make us miss meals, ignore sexual attraction, not mind aching muscles, not even need to get paid because we are concentrating on some task and concentration feels really good in itself.

So that brings me to the end of this period of concentration. There has been no purpose in it, you don’t have to be moved by it, I’m not going to get paid for it, it doesn’t matter even if anyone reads it. It is enough that I was able to concentrate for an hour, to put one word after another, to put one foot in front of the other, to carefully spin, to shut out discomfort of any kind by sitting here motionless. And I feel good because of it.