Do not rush

Okay. So I've learned this so many times that's it feels like a joke. But a few new examples from the last few days have helped to get me to finally try to get this post out (it's been here as a draft for months at this point. I guess I could say at least I wasn't rushing on it... actually it's now been a couple more weeks, so the examples aren't that new, but keep accruing.)



There's a famous Tea/zen line that the Midorikaisei enjoy very much:

壷中日月長　(こちゅうじつげつながし)

Inside the tea jar, the days and months are long.


But much as we like the poetry of that statement, inside our tea jar, the days and months are exceedingly short. We are constantly having to accept the fact that we can't do all the things we want to. Even the serious study and practice things we want to do just can't be fit in the day (or the night). We have 10 hour days and then we are trying to shove all our studying and prepping and planning and relaxing and having lives outside the tea jar into a couple more hours and then trying to make sure we get enough sleep (actually, looking at the clock, I should be in bed. Awhile ago.)



Time is a big issue here. For one thing, everything is coordinated very delicately and we are expected to be everywhere 15 minutes early. Here is a true joke we tell each other: Ten minutes early is five minutes late. Although in Tea itself we are most concerned that timing be perfectly not-too-early and not-too-late, in Gakuen life, early is the only choice if you are the subordinate person. This means, as the students who believe ourselves the lowest ranked students (and the ones with the most to prove, due to our intractable and incurable foreignness), we are trying desperately to get everywhere before the teacher. Also, we aren't really supposed to leave before higher ranked people leave. That leaves the hilarious problem from time to time where we need to wait for a teacher to leave, then run like crazy people to be able to wait around for 15 minutes before the next authority figure arrives. We need to get all our preparations for classes and events done beforehand. We are in school from 8 to 5 and then eat dinner in the shokudo (dining hall) and then 1/2 to 3/4 of the time we have toban (rotating duties) for cleaning after that until about 7. So, a lot of time is already gone. And a lot of time is rushing to make sure everything is done.

And yet, we should not rush. You should never look like you're rushing in the tea room, and yet we often set a goal of completing a larger-than-easy-to-complete procedures per afternoon lesson. We want to make sure everyone gets to do a temae (procedure) and we want even to do two if possible. We rush. But we shouldn't rush, because when we rush is when mistakes happen.

Sometimes the mistakes are a natsume tipping and tea getting everywhere. Sometimes the mistakes are forgetting to put on your fukusa or prepare the sweets because you feel rushed to get started. Sometimes they are just getting corrected by the teacher on style points because of course I was concerned with feeling like I was late instead of bowing as elegantly as possible and fully inhabiting the moment. That is, huh, it seems like rushing, as much as it's clearly *about time* is actually about being OUT of time. Both lacking the time we believe we needed and must do without AND being in syncopation with what's going on.

Timing might be the koan of the entirety of Midorikai. Well, one of them. Chaji are about timing-- about how to time everything not too early and not too late that guests get hot food and see wet stones instead of drying ones, so that fires are hot and sweets are moist, and we get done fast enough that we can still use our feet, but not so fast that we feel pushed back out the doors. 

Not rushing here is about realizing that we can do it all, we can't get everywhere or do everything and that some doing nothing is actually necessary to staying alive and sane, and then it's learning to be graceful about that bitter realization. Not rushing is about somehow miraculously figuring out how to get done what must must be done, and realizing which things were not so necessary after all.

Someone told me that not rushing isn't about how much time you don't have but how you use the time--that not rushing doesn't mean not moving fast, but lies in having a calm attitude toward what's going on.  Since I can't figure out a way to have more hours or fewer things to do, I'm supposing it's my only choice right now: trying to move fast but without losing my concentration on the thing at hand.

It's already more than halfway over. Two of the three terms are over. The new ichi-a's are coming beginning on April 3. We have been saying goodbye to the old ichi-b's.  We have had event after event. There hasn't been an unscheduled day yet this whole "break." A bare fraction of the things, both studious and leisurely, that I've wanted to do have gotten done. I have lost time dreaming of the things I imagined I would have time to do and will not.  And yet what we do--each of the tiny fraction of things we WILL get to do-- these are pretty great. And now I'm just looking for a little more time to document them, to tell you about them, to digest them, and to do a few more.