All is a Miracle: How Thich Nhat Hanh Changed My Life
When I was in college, one of my sociology professors assigned us The Miracle of Mindfulness. At the time, I was steeped in the dense dialect of academia, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s straightforward language seemed far too basic. I was not impressed.
Your breathing should flow gracefully, like a river, like a watersnake crossing the water, and not like a chain of rugged mountains or the gallop of a horse. To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds.
Breathe like a watersnake? I’d never bothered to pay attention to my breath before. When I did I felt that it was shallow, constrained, caught up in swirls of anxiety and tension that never seemed to abate. But why did this matter?
Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
Nothing seemed miraculous to me at that time. I felt that I would never gain enough knowledge, that I was inadequate to becoming an adult, woefully unprepared for life. And, yet, he was saying exactly the opposite: There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.
I ended up underlining many of his passages and then putting it aside as a curiosity next to the “real” academic thinkers. Still, Thich Nhat Hanh’s book stayed on my shelf and his wisdom echoed in my mind. His message was one I could not yet understand, but somehow knew to be true.
There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become.
When I left for the Peace Corps in Guyana two years later, his book was one of the few I brought with me. And soon, face-to-face with poverty, oppression and chaos, I turned to his words for solace: The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind.
Here, in this foreign place, where none of my college learning seemed remotely relevant, I leaned on the one teaching that made sense of the immense suffering around me. I planted with all my heart and mind, and I found joy here and a kind of unexpected peace that sustained me. But how? I couldn’t say.
I made my first gestures at meditation in Guyana, largely futile attempts to quiet my chattering mind. But when I landed in New York City a few years later, I found the Zen Mountain Monastery where I’ve been practicing for the past twenty years.
Though my meditation practice has changed over time, I still think of The Miracle of Mindfulness as the seed that started everything. And as I re-read it now, I recognize that the words are indeed simple, but certainly not simplistic: Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.
How many of us actually live this way? And how would the world change if we did?
