Take Your Time

by Eknath Easwaran

  And the mind would say, “I never got an education! I never got sent to school. Everybody says to me, ‘It’s a free world. Do what you like.’ ”

  That is why all of us have wandering minds: it is simply lack of training. But just as any great physical skill – tennis, soccer, gymnastics, skiing, skating – is acquired, through persistent practice under the guidance of an experienced coach, we can learn to train the mind.

  When we are listening to a lecture or reading a book on slowing down, how is it that strange, irrelevant thoughts arise – thoughts about a restaurant that has just opened, or the new swimming pool, or what we will do if we win the lottery? After all, what we want is to listen or read with complete attention; we’re not encouraging extraneous thoughts to arise. Nonetheless, here they are: thoughts of the most unexpected kind, barging in without so much as a knock on the door.

  To some extent, I absorbed the skill of one-pointed attention rather early in life. My grandmother, my spiritual teacher, was constantly teaching me in many little ways – especially by her personal example – to do one thing at a time.

  I will always remember sitting down one morning to my usual breakfast of rice cakes and coconut chutney, which my grandmother prepared to perfection. I was so partial to this combination that on one occasion I ate twelve rice cakes in a sitting.

  On this particular morning, however, I had got absorbed in a book by Washington Irving. I had discovered the delightful story of Rip Van Winkle, a fellow who could sleep for twenty years. I was holding the book with my left hand and reading while my right hand would take a rice cake, dip it in the chutney, and put it into my mouth.

  Even then, my capacity for concentration was rather good. And I loved a good book. So I must have been immersed in the adventures of Rip Van Winkle for some time before I noticed that there was nothing in my right hand and nothing was going into my mouth. I turned to look and saw that the plate was gone, the rice cakes were gone, the chutney was gone. I had just been moving an empty hand to my mouth.

  I was indignant. “Who took my rice cakes away?” I demanded.

  “You weren’t even tasting them,” my granny said. “You were reading. You didn’t even know I took them away. That is poor reading and poor eating.” She wouldn’t give me my breakfast until I had put the book away.

  Doing something else while we eat is such a common habit today that no one even questions it. If you go to a restaurant in the business district at lunchtime, you will see any number of hurried executives lunching off the Wall Street Journal. You can watch as one morsel of salad is consumed and then one morsel of Journal. That is poor eating and poor business practice, too. If I were to select a stockbroker, I would try to find one who knows how to keep his concentration on salad when he is eating salad and on the Wall Street Journal when he is planning my investments.

  Much more alarming, I see people talking on the phone while they drive. They say, “You can call me anytime, anywhere.” As if this were an advantage! Imagine, they never have a moment when they can be sure they won’t be interrupted – not while they are driving, not even while they are walking down the street. In fact, such inventions as cell phones and computers actually encourage our tendency to do two or more things at once.

  For students, the practice of one-pointed attention is essential. Complete concentration is necessary for learning. But go to any university and see how many students are doing two or more things at a time – listening to music, drinking coffee, smoking, talking, and then trying to study at the same time. When the time comes for a grade, they are likely to get Incomplete – a grade that seems perfect for divided attention.

  If you have a concentrated mind, you will find that you won’t need as many hours to learn new skills or comprehend difficult material. It saves a lot of time, and it will give you valuable self-assurance whenever you have to master something new.

  One-pointed attention is most rewarding in personal relationships.

  One-pointed attention is most rewarding in personal relationships, where nothing can be more important than giving complete attention to one another.

  This is particularly true with children. Children naturally ask all kinds of questions and take a long time to tell their ­stories, and in millions of homes the parents are doing something else as they reply, “Yes, yes, I see.” And in millions of homes, the ­parents are surprised when their children don’t listen to them.

  Those little bright eyes know when your attention is wandering. When they are telling you the news from school, give your full attention. Everything else can be set aside for the moment. You are teaching your children to listen to you.

  That is how I was taught by my grandmother and my mother. Every day, when I came back from school, my grandmother would say, “Tell me everything from the time you left home until the time you came back.” All my news was important to her. She gave me her undivided attention as I went through the events of the day from English class through the soccer game and the swim in the river after school. Children need this kind of attention, and we need time for listening to their stories. Our undivided attention is more precious to them than any gift we could buy them.

  Every conversation is an opportunity for learning to be one-pointed.

  In Zen, they say that when you are listening to the roshi, the Zen master, your eyes should not wander even for a moment. I think that is good advice for any occasion. When somebody is talking to you, give your full attention. Eyes, ears, mind, and heart should be focused on the person you are listening to. He or she can’t help responding to your wholehearted attention. Every conversation is an opportunity for training the mind to be one-pointed.

  I can’t help but notice how common the opposite is. Watch people at a social gathering. How many are really giving their full attention to the person they are talking with? There may be a lot of animated conversation and an air of conviviality in the room, but if you observe carefully, you will see that most people’s eyes are wandering – which means their minds are wandering too. If you can’t keep your attention in one place, how can anything not be boring? Nothing can be interesting, after all, unless you give it your attention.

  Effortless concentration is the secret of all personal relationships, whether it is with casual acquaintances, co-workers, ­colleagues, friends, or family. And when relationships are not particularly cordial, one-pointed attention is even more important. It is an exceptional person who can give complete attention to somebody who is being unpleasant, but when you can do this, you can slowly disarm even a hostile person simply by listening without hostility, with complete and even loving attention. In my own long experience, no thrill is greater than that of winning over a tough opponent to be an ally.

  Every time we are criticized, we have an opportunity to grow.

  In life we are going to come across opposition everywhere, especially when we are doing original, worthwhile work. Instead of becoming resentful or afraid, we can learn to look upon every opponent as a possible supporter and every piece of criticism as a way to grow. These are the challenges we need in order to learn how to win over opposition, to turn a difficult situation into an opportunity, and to transform our own negative qualities into strengths.

  I vividly remember watching one of the best tennis matches I have ever seen: a sustained fight in which every play was countered by one of equal skill. I kept telling my friends, “I don’t care who wins. It is of no consequence to me who gets the cup and who doesn’t. What I enjoy is seeing these great players equally challenged, because it brings out the best in each of them.” That is how I see life: not somebody winning and somebody else losing, but each of us growing as difficulties and challenges draw us up to our best.

  When you see opposition, therefore, do not get afraid. If you can keep your concentration unbroken, you can look on tough opposition as a challenge to test your capacities, so that through patience, courtesy, and the depth of your
conviction, you can win over even the fiercest opponent.

  All this takes time to learn. We have to be willing to work at developing these skills. Everyone admires the ability to stay firm, calm, and compassionate under attack, and everyone can develop it. Just remember that it doesn’t come easily; it requires time and practice.

  When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit. Don’t wobble.

  Everywhere, you can learn to focus your attention by doing one thing at a time.

  We used to walk past an eating place called Chat and Chew. I never wanted to eat there. When I am chewing, I want to chew; when I am chatting, I want to chat. If I am enjoying something delicious, I don’t want to discuss the weather, watch television, listen to music, or read the paper; I want to enjoy my meal. Even when I am having a cup of decaf, I prefer to enjoy my drink first and then give full attention to the conversation.

  The Buddha said, “When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit. Don’t wobble.” We need this advice today because we spend most of our time wobbling. We find it all but impossible to do just one thing at a time.

  Years ago I went to see Romeo and Juliet presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in San Francisco. I had been introduced to that play when I was about Romeo’s age myself, in my little village school. I knew every important passage by heart and was deeply moved by the Royal Shakespeare presentation.

  During the second act, I was thrilling to that paean to youthful love in which Romeo cries, “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun,” when I heard a soft female voice rather unlike Juliet’s implore, “Where’s the candy, please?”

  I didn’t remember teaching that line in Shakespeare.

  Then, with more urgency, the voice came again: “Where is the candy?”

  I looked around and saw two high school girls. My grandmother, who could be blunt, would have told them, “You don’t know how to enjoy a play, and you don’t know how to enjoy candy either.”

  Doing things with divided attention is just skimming the surface of life.

  When we do things with only a part of the mind, we are just skimming the surface of life. Nothing sinks in; nothing has real impact. It leads to an empty feeling inside. Unfortunately, it is this very emptiness that drives us to pack in even more, seeking desperately to fill the void in our hearts. What we need to do is just the opposite: to slow down and live completely in the present. Then every moment will be full.

  A one-pointed mind makes beauty more beautiful. Music becomes more beautiful; painting becomes more beautiful; colors are more vivid and tones more dulcet. There is an inspired passage in Western mysticism where Thomas Traherne tells us that in his eyes the streets appeared to be paved with gold, and the boys and girls playing there looked like angels. “All appeared new,” he says, “and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful.” That is the intensification of vision, the seeing into the heart of life, which one-pointed attention brings.

  Whatever you are doing, give it your complete attention.

  A one-pointed mind can be cultivated throughout the day by giving your complete attention to whatever you are doing.

  While driving, for example, I suggest not talking to the other people in the car. I once rode with a driver who had probably never heard about undivided attention. We were speeding down the highway when he launched into a heated discussion, taking issue vigorously with something I had said the day before. Naturally, I wanted to explain to him why I thought he had misunderstood. But when he took both hands off the steering wheel to emphasize his point, I immediately exclaimed, “Never mind. Whatever you say. Just keep your hands on the wheel!” I still think it saved our lives.

  On another occasion, when I was in Arizona to give a talk on meditation, I was enjoying a long ride through the desert with a friend when my eyes caught sight of a sign high up on a rock. It said, “You’re supposed to be watching the road.” Very helpful. While driving, our hands should be on the wheel and our eyes on the road – and so should our attention.

  Most of us can understand the wisdom of this when it comes to driving, but it applies in life’s less dangerous situations, too. In fact, it applies to the simplest of the routine activities that make up the day. In the kitchen, for example, the Buddha might say, “When you are cutting vegetables, cut vegetables.” Talking and looking here and there only teaches the mind to wander. If somebody tries to get your attention, you can stop cutting and then give her your full attention. Many kitchen accidents can be avoided by this simple practice, but more than that, you are teaching your mind to make one-pointed attention a habit in everything you do.

  Whatever job you are engaged in, I would say, concentrate on it completely. Give it your very best. That kind of focus will lift the burden from your shoulders, and you will find yourself doing much better work while enjoying it more.

  Similarly, when the day is done, leave your work at the office. When we put a leash on our work and bring it home like a pet poodle yapping at our heels, we are neither here nor there, neither at work nor at home – which means we are not going to be at home anywhere. “Oh, this is not an ordinary dog,” we say. “It’s my pet. I have to take it wherever I go.” But it is leading us instead.

  I knew a professor like this. If a friend met him at the market and asked politely, “How are you today?” he would reply, “Oh, I have been comparing the metric patterns of Virgil and Homer.” If you didn’t run away fast enough, you would get a dissertation on Latin and Greek prosody right there next to the cheese counter. This is what I mean by bringing the poodle home: it’s not just in your briefcase, but in your cranium too.

  It takes a lot of control to work with concentration for eight hours and then drop your work at will, but this is one of the greatest skills that one-pointed attention can bring. When you enter your office, you give all your attention to your job; once you leave, you put the job out of your mind. This simple skill guards against tension and allows you to give your very best. If you have given your best, there is no need to worry about the results.

  The amazing development of this habit of worrying is a significant comment on our times. I know people who put a great deal of effort into developing this habit. They practice it constantly. When they leave home, they worry about whether they have locked the door; they have got to go back and turn the key in the lock to make doubly sure. Then they realize they have left the key in the lock and have to go back a second time to collect it. They mail a letter and then worry about whether they remembered to write the address. If we lock the door and mail our letters with our attention on what we are doing, these little problems don’t arise at all.

  In fact, it is in these small matters of daily life that lack of concentration shows up easily. People worry because they don’t concentrate. Here the Buddha uses a word I like very much: mindfulness. Whatever you are doing, he says, do it mindfully. Give it your full attention. We can guard ourselves against ­tension by learning to be mindful in everything we do.

  The person who has control over his attention will always be mindful of what he is thinking, saying, and doing. Most of us, the Buddha implies, are not aware of these things at all. He compares our ordinary state of awareness to a dream: we are thinking, talking, and living in our sleep.

  This is a compassionate way of describing the kind of fragmented lives we lead. It is because we are not really aware, the Buddha says, that we say and do unkind things. When we are fully here in the present, we won’t say or do anything that is unkind.

  Through complete concentration, we can overcome the sense of separateness from the rest of life.

  When concentration is deep, we may forget our body completely. In fact, we may forget altogether about that dreariest of subjects, ourselves. This is the real secret of happiness.

  You may have noticed that when a lover of music is listening to a Beethoven sonata, you can tap her on the shoulder and she won’t
notice. All her awareness is on the music. Patanjali, an insightful teacher of meditation in ancient India, explains that this is the real reason for her enjoyment. Every ray of her attention is on the music, so there is no attention left for herself and her problems at all.

  Albert Einstein had such a native genius for concentration that he often forgot himself completely. One of the most delightful examples of this is a story about Einstein at a dinner party with friends in Princeton. The after-dinner discussion went on and on into the small hours of the morning, until finally Einstein got up and said apologetically, “I hate to do this, but I must put you out now because I have got to be on campus tomorrow morning.”

  “Albert,” his host said, “you are in my house.”

  This kind of absorption has its everyday difficulties, but it offers an extraordinary blessing. At a very deep level, people like this understand that the sense that you and I are separate, isolated creatures is no more than an illusion. Einstein called it “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.” To a great extent, he had lost any sense of being separate from the rest of creation. This awareness of unity is the distinguishing mark of spiritual awareness. Such people will consider you as part of themselves, and their welfare as part of your own. They will consider their “me” as part of “you.” They will never think to harm you, because they are part of you; they will always think kindly of you, because you are part of them.

  When attention is one-pointed, loyalty will not waver; love will not wobble.

  You can identify people with one-pointed attention because they will be loyal in all their relationships. Those whose attention wanders easily are not capable of lasting loyalties. This is one of the pervasive problems in society today, and the answer is simple: to train our attention not to wander. When our thoughts start to stray to fresh fields and pastures new, we can call them back to stay in their own field, which makes that field fresh and new every day.