There’s a story often told in Zen teaching that I shared with my You School class not long ago. It’s one of my favorites because it gets right at the heart of an urge that is so adorably human.
As the story goes, an earnest young student, bright and enthusiastic and feeling utterly desperate, approaches his teacher to inquire about how long his training will take.
“Master,” he asks. “If I work very hard and meditate every day, then how long will it take me to reach enlightenment?”
The teacher smiles and says plainly, “Ten years.”
The student is overwhelmed at the thought of having to wait so long, and knows that he can do better than that. “Master,” he asks again, “What if I double my efforts? I’ll meditate twice as long each day, plus I’ll read, do service, and dedicate every waking minute to this effort. How long will it take me then to reach enlightenment?”
The teacher looks at him lovingly, resting a hand on his shoulder. “If you do all that? Well then, my dear one, I’d say twenty years.”
If you’ve ever felt desperate for something to change, especially something inside of you, you can probably feel the sinking feeling the student must have had as his teacher gave him the news. When there’s something we want – especially once we can see it clearly and perhaps even see a path to get there – we tend to want it now. Of course we do.
Once we’ve committed to starting therapy or responding differently to that difficult person or kicking off that long-awaited project, we understandably want to see things move. Getting started in the hardest part, after all – right?
That can be true, but there’s another challenge that emerges once we’ve gotten off the starting block. It’s the realization that sets in that this is actually going to be a very slow process.
It’s almost countercultural to suggest this. No marketing expert would advise me to sit here and tell you what a long and winding journey good therapy is, for example. Promise results, they’d say – and not just results, but fast, rapid, big results. Results that surprise and delight and dazzle.
But change that matters – change that is real and solid and endures – that takes time. It’s not that it’s not dazzling, actually. It’s just that the dazzle more often comes in tiny glimmers accumulated over time.
Let’s talk about therapy as one vehicle of this kind of change. From my view, people tend to start therapy in one of two places. Either they are in some kind of emotional turmoil or crisis and need relief now, or they’ve been wanting to address something – an aspect of themselves or their relationships – for a long time and now feel ready. To be honest, even in the latter situation, something has almost always pushed them to the point of reaching out. There’s always an answer to why now?
In either case, the satisfying news is that there is often a burst of momentum and a deep relief that comes with starting the process. Early therapy is not without challenge, but it can feel enlivening. It can seem like you’re starting to ventilate a room that’s been closed off for years.
There may even be a breakthrough – a way of conceptualizing or seeing something that feels in that moment like it changes everything. I’ll be the first to admit, having been in both the therapist and patient chairs for these, they feel damn good. Even when it carries pain, a breakthrough is delicious. It can seem like what we’re here for.
But here is the thing. We can think of a breakthrough as walking through a door. It’s a door that we never saw before or felt completely closed off to us, so traversing it feels amazing. But walking through that door then puts us in a room that’s completely unfurnished. We haven’t lived in this new room, and nothing’s been built there yet. For a little while we might not mind as we wander around this bigger and brighter room, but soon enough we need somewhere to sit.
Walking through the door is great, but the excitement will wear off and we have to build a life there. That might be small daily behaviors that bring in some lighting. That might be shifting the dynamics of our relationships so there’s furniture to sit on. That might be exploring how we got here in the first place so we don’t run back through the door to the more familiar room that came before. We need art and books and music and color to make it all feel like home, like a place we can stay.
And here’s another reality that feels important to name. Most of us actually will wander back and forth between this new room and the one we came from for a good long while. We prefer to think that once we’ve committed to a change, we will stay put, but we also all know how rarely that happens. What’s more human is to run back through the door when things get particularly stressful or overwhelming. Someone once said, “Your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.”
I believe that’s true, until it’s no longer true. To support ourselves in not returning to the patterns and styles that became hellish means doing the slow, tedious work of building the new room. In the context of therapy, that often means returning week after week, even when it seems like we have already had the big breakthrough, or that we’re not even close to it. It means showing up when we’re feeling particularly bad and when we’re feeling particularly good. (I promise, sometimes the most meaningful sessions start with having nothing to talk about.)
Or maybe the path of slow change is meditating or journaling or a daily ritual with your partner. Or it’s trying again and again every time you lose your cool or abandon your needs. The change that emerges from our continued commitment to something slow and warm is often the sturdiest kind of change. The kind that builds the architecture to sustain.
Trungpa Rinpoche, a Buddhist master, reportedly always said that if you’re going from New York to LA, you should consider walking instead of flying. Flying will get you there a heck of a lot quicker, but walking will get you there too – but you’ll truly know the terrain.
We’re drawn toward the promise of quick fixes because, understandably, we don’t want to sit in the discomfort of an unfolding. But what if the unfolding is the whole thing? What if building the next room is actually our life’s work? Not living in it for too long, but the building of it. And then the next room… and then the next? Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to stay forever in any one room. That’s when a room becomes a prison.
That student, so eager for his enlightenment, was willing to work as hard as he could for the thing he most wanted. But the teacher knew that the student’s life was the work. Slow change is not dramatic, but devotional. It’s turning on one light at a time, in a room that starts to feel like home.
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Questions for Reflection
- Where might you be expecting faster change than the process actually allows?
- Can you notice ways you’ve already been quietly building something new, even if it doesn’t feel dramatic?
- What small, steady practices are helping you stay with something over time?
