The Big Leap
Six years ago I moved from Houston, where I had lived for 16 years, to a small town on the Big Island of Hawaii called Kailua-Kona. This was a momentous move for me at the time. I had visited Kailua-Kona a few months before the move and knew it to be an appealing town. Nevertheless, the move was a leap into a virtual unknown. My wife-to-be made the same leap to come to Kailua-Kona shortly afterwards.
Now I am about to make another leap. My wife and I need larger living quarters than we have now. Since the cost of homes is so high in Hawaii, to find larger quarters we need to move back to Houston, where property values are quite reasonable.
I have a good deal of apprehension and sadness at the prospect of leaving Kailua-Kona. I have good friends associated with the local Zen Center, I have appreciated being able to publish some of my essays in the Center’s newsletter, and there are clubs in town where my wife and I have frequently enjoyed dancing. I have an emotional attachment to Kailua-Kona that makes leaving difficult.
Nisargadatta, the renowned teacher from the Hindu tradition, says that we do not live our lives, but that they are lived for us. He says that the truth of our lives is “that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but one is made to do.[1]
I have indeed felt that way about my life for many years, that I am not the mover of it, but the moved. I suspect that all long-term zazen practitioners come to this sense of things as well. I have made many major relocations in my life, Chicago to small-town Indiana, Indiana to California, California to Texas, Texas to Hawaii. With each relocation, I have felt that I was a propelled figure.
Although there has always been a sense of loss in connection with the locations I have left, the new locations have always brought gains. If propelled from one place to another, that has always been, following Nisargadatta, in line with the truth of life, and the moves have always been fortunate. I trust that the coming big leap will be fortunate as well.
Footnotes
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine, Berkeley, 1994, p. 97.