124: Zen at Work

UnMind: Zen Moments With Great Cloud

ZEN AT WORK, AT HOME, AT PLAY

This segment of UnMind is based on some questions raised by one of the members of ASZC. While she moved out of the Atlanta area, she stays in touch through weekly participation in my Online Dharma Dialog program. As an aside, if you think you may be interested in establishing a dialog about your practice, let me know via email — you can find my address on the ASZC web page.

This person was not born in the USA, and so has the compound complications in her daily life of assimilating into a foreign culture, and communicating in a second language, much as Matsuoka Roshi had to do in bringing Zen to America back in 1940. Her questions are as insightful and revealing as Sensei’s choice of areas of life in America to relate to Zen in his dharma talks. We will be publishing many of them in a new collection called “A Pioneer of American Zen: The Wisdom, Warmth and Wit of Soyu Matsuoka, Roshi.” Keep a sharp eye out for it in June of next year.

Let us turn to her questions, addressing each of them from a perspective of Zen and Design Thinking. They are primarily about relationships with other people, and how they affect your relationship to yourself, if that is not too redundant. We will take them on in a slightly different order than submitted, beginning with those that have to do with the work environment, and the community of colleagues we find there. These work-related issues, taken together, come under the rubric of “Right Livelihood,” on the traditional Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism.

1. How does one practice being grounded, or doing the right thing, in a competitive world?

The answer to any such question, from a Zen perspective, will necessarily include taking the issue to the cushion, in zazen, and then bringing any conclusions and recommendations from what transpires on the cushion back to the office, laboratory, or whatever context in which you find yourself working.

Let’s contextualize this issue a bit to begin with, looking at the bigger picture before boiling it down to any personally actionable items. I think it necessary and reasonable to suggest, and to take into account, that the very nature of the zeitgeist of right livelihood in our times adds to the stress load that we are carrying on our shoulders today. This is not your daddy’s job market. And it certainly is not the one that Buddha confronted, nor any of the other Zen masters in the lineage from India, China, or Japan. The very scope of manifold options available today, choosing between jobs and side hustles that may seem to offer advantages in terms of flex-time or working from home, versus employer preferences for dragging you into the office — entailing social dimensions of in-person contact with associates and management — may simply add to the frustration of making the right choice of career, and its accompanying working modality, for each individual.

Choices between careers that allow for remote employment and those that don’t are becoming yet another factor in whether one chooses to train in various trades, or aspire to what used to be called “higher learning.” This so-called higher learning basically amounts to preparation for a professional trade, instead of one based on hands-on skills and hourly labor, quaintly referred to as “blue-collar” jobs, or the Hard Working Americans politicians love to talk about. As if they themselves are hard-working. Many are opting for the simplicity of the latter, where they may make a dependable living wage, in many cases higher than their counterparts, in what used to be called “white-collar” occupations.

Naturally, time-of-life considerations come into play, as articulated by those who research these kinds of issues, such as part-time student employment, married with children, empty nester, the “sandwich generation,” and so forth. Daily life is so complicated these days that we may need to develop the “Sixteen Noble Truths,” and the “Fifty-four-fold Noble Path.” One dimension being paying off student debt.

As testament to the scale of complexity of this question, if you search “being grounded in a competitive world,” you get:

About 688,000,000 results (0.44 seconds)

Somewhere in that virtual warehouse full of pages you may find the kind of advice that fits your situation, but it is entirely possible that you will not. Access to unlimited information is not necessarily a solution to this problem, or any other aspect of living a Zen life, in the midst of the chaos of modern society. More information just adds insult to injury. But from the perspective of Design Thinking and Zen, let’s consider just the single aspect of what we mean by “competition.” Here, let’s include a second, corollary question:

2. How to avoid harboring resentment when you are with the same people on a daily basis, and you have some history [of conflict].

I developed a couple of concepts for exhibits, working with some of the subcommittees and sponsoring corporations in the leadup to the 1996 Summer Olympics here in Atlanta, who were then marketing the event around the emergent issues of recycling, reusing, and repurposing of waste materials. The various Atlanta-based sponsors wanted to get credit for their efforts in this endeavor, for being “environmentally friendly,” touting its implications for the ecosystem, the “good citizenship” of corporations, and so on. In one of many meetings, it dawned on me, with startling clarity, that the seeming distinction between competition and cooperation is one without a real difference. That is, in team sports, such as basketball or soccer, the outcome is usually determined by which team manages to better cooperate amongst its members, beating those who are beset by individuals showing off, “hot-dogging,” “show-boating,” and often missing the play that another member might have made.

Sports that are more dependent upon individual performance, such as skiing, speed skating, or swimming, are less dependent upon collaboration. That is, until one takes into consideration the training process that leads to elite performance. The athletes’ collaboration with their coach or coaches, and their level of ability to take direction, as well as the wisdom of the coaching staff, become determinative factors in their success.

For athletes already at or near the top of their game, the coach does not have to move their dial very much, raising the bar as high as humanly possible. Think Michael Jordan, or Katie Ledecky. However, as in Zen meditation training, if the athlete is not willing to do the work, no amount of coaching, however skillful, is going to help.

Bringing it back down to earth, one thing to consider is a truism: the strongest competition is to be found in cooperation. Or, better, collaboration. And remember, the modern theory of collaboration is that it is only possible, or at least most doable, between two individuals. Think Lennon and McCartney. Or Lenin and Trotsky.

If you are suffering from “bad boss syndrome,” or feeling excluded from the good-old-boy network at work, try homing in on each of your apparent competitors — or, worst-case, enemies — one at a time. Get them alone in a private setting, non-threatening and away from the fray, off-campus and out-of-office. Interview them as to their aspirations, beyond the obvious goals and objectives in the company. See if you cannot find some common ground on which to build a better, more collaborative relationship, while still keeping it professional. Try this with all your co-workers. Begin with the least competitive to yourself and work your way up the ladder. Remembering the old nostrum:

Be kind to those you meet on your way up the ladder; they will be the same ones you meet on the way down.

On the personal front, remember to foster the “halo effect” of Zen, in particular the three dispositions of zazen, when you find yourself stressing out at your work station or in the board room. Assume the posture. Follow the breath, counting if necessary. Expand your attention to include everything, without bias. As the ancient Ch’an poem encourages us:

Move among and intermingle without distinction.

Your body and mind will appreciate it — including your neuronal networks, heartbeat, and endocrine system. So will your fellow workers. They may begin wondering, and asking, how you can be so calm? when everyone else is freaking out, usually over trivia.

Extensions of this approach include chanting on the commute, meditating while walking through the campus and buildings where you work, and treating the vicissitudes of the day as Dharma. Buddha’s teaching, and the practice of Zen, is only one thing. But that “one thing” is all-inclusive. The Yogi welcomes adverse circumstance as grist to the mill. “Through change, consume change,” as the ancient admonition has it. And change, after all, is all there is. You will never run out of it.

Next time we will look at other more personal aspects of relationships, expressed in other incisive questions from the same, sincere source. If you find such issues bubbling up in your everyday swim in the ocean of Samsara, please don’t hesitate to send them to me — again, you may find my email on the ASZC web page. And check out my two available books on this timelier-than-ever subject: “The Original Frontier”; and “The Razorblade of Zen” (see links in the post). Meanwhile, keep on sitting. Someday you will find your zazen to be “still enough,” and for “long enough,” to overcome all obstacles at work, at home, and at play.