Ode to the Water Start

When you feel disagreeable it is better for you to sit. There is no other way to accept your problem and work on it. Whether you are the best horse or the worst, or whether your posture is good or bad is out of the question. Everyone can practice zazen, and in this way work on her problems and accept them. . . The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. This is the point you will realize by zazen practice. In continuous practice, under a succession of agreeable and disagreeable situations, you will realize the marrow of Zen and acquire its true strength. - Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Day 267. I wonder what the opposite of "peak experience" is? Would that be a "valley experience"? The state of equanimity I rather boastfully alluded to recently was transient and fleeting. Bummer. It was good while it lasted.

I feel extremely disagreeable. The fact that I feel disagreeable because I am steeped to my eyeballs in Zen makes it particularly difficult to comply with Roshi's advice that it is best for me to sit. To my mind, hair of the dog has never been a logical remedy. It seems crazy to feel solid and grounded in my practice one day and erratic and uncertain the next. My usual panacea for the contradictions in my practice - "Such is Zen" - offers no solace tonight. Efforts at applying Zen during my daily existence, with all of its trials and mundane redundancies, have resulted in little other than a heightened sense that the world at large is a ridiculous and trying caricature of chaos. Few people seem to be adhering to the rules by which I am attempting to live. Makes me want to chuck it all in the recycling bin and drag it to the curb.

I am reminded of learning to windsurf. In the early 1980's, I was among the wetsuit clad pioneers frequenting Point Four at Lake Hefner with our short boards. Amongst the twenty or so guys who regularly sailed, there were three girls: me, Fran and Teresa. For several consecutive seasons, as the number of boy windsurfers increased exponentially (and our short boards got lighter and faster), there remained three girls. Me, Fran and Teresa. I think I know why.

Learning to windsurf at Lake Hefner is not fun. The wind blows hard and gusty. Balancing on a teetering piece of fiberglass in choppy, unpredictable water as I tugged on a rope hand over hand to bring up the sail that a gust had just ripped from my grasp and dumped me in the lake demanded a level of perseverance I hadn't demonstrated since my brief stint of untangling Slinkies when I was seven. The booms and sails on the boards of the '80's were heavy, and dragging a sail up by the uphaul - time after time after exhausting, infuriating time - was grueling. Particularly when there was a high likelihood that the reward for my effort would be to move no more than two yards across the water before wiping out and starting the entire process over again. The ratio of strenuous energy expenditure to wind-in-your-face planing across the water was, in the beginning, about 44,000 to 1.

Most sports have their turning points. That specific milestone that distinguishes the beginner from the intermediate, the novice from the experienced, the worker from the player, the "This sucks, why would anybody do it?" from the "Oh, my God, what a blast, I Rock!" In cycling it is when you can ride clipless. In water skiing, maybe mastering the slalom. In snow skiing, probably learning to parallel. In windsurfing it is the Water Start.

A successful water start means that all the upper body agony of hauling up your sail and balancing precariously on a wobbly board while you slowly, carefully, reach for the boom and sheet in the sail is replaced by the exhilarating feeling of sliding your feet snugly into the foot straps at the very back of the board, lying beneath your sail, lifting it up so that the wind slides underneath, and - Whoosh! You are lifted onto the board by the sail, and away you go! Skimming along the waters' surface at breakneck speed while the shore blurs behind you. Once the water start is mastered, the sport is never the same. The impossible becomes the sublime.

The promise of the water start holds little meaning when you haven't yet experienced its thrill. Few women are willing to endure the agony of the prerequisite skills that culminate in it. There is no shortcut. Those of us that crossed over all paid our dues. You begin with uphauling that frickin' sail. Over and over and over again. Until your hands are chafed raw and the muscles in your back and forearms scream for mercy. The initial effort and pain, in the absence of any discernible payoff, deters most females (because we generally have proportionately less upper body strength) from advancing to the best part of windsurfing. They get discouraged and give up. Tragic, indeed. In 1982, the phrase "Paying it forward" hadn't entered mainstream consciousness. So the inescapable requisite suffering at the outset of learning to windsurf deprived countless women of the bountiful glory awaiting on the distant shore. The one that could only be reached through a water start.

I am approaching nine months of sitting zazen every day. So many times sitting on that cushion feels exactly like precariously balancing on a teetering piece of fiberglass. I've discovered that vast amounts of effort at not efforting must be expended, at least during the beginning (which, for me, appears to constitute upwards of thirty years). Fairly often, my psyche and my ego and my Mind Monkeys scream for mercy. Mostly, there has been no discernable payoff. Clearly, I haven't yet mastered the zen equivalent of water starting. Yet every once in a while, I glimpse its marrow. Beckoning from a distant shore.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc