There’s a popular canyon about a mile from my front door. I walk Beefy there once a week. We hoof a gradual incline of streets and sidewalk right up to the entrance. Beefy’s an exceptional dog and we’ve made amazing progress with on-leash walking, but at this particular canyon people take their dogs off-leash and let them run amok on and off trail and among all the hikers, some of which have dogs. We’ve gone a number of times and it requires a vigilant eye on my part, some pre-emptive route changes, or even shouted requests to other dog owners to maintain their dogs as we pass. It’s not the most relaxed walk I go on with him, to say the least.
As an alternative, we’ve found a side street that climbs up a similar incline, except it winds a paved, neighborhood road off to the west. This route has more shade and less people and at the top there’s an entrance to a wild trailhead that’s narrow, overgrown, but seems hike-able, something that would be really fun to hike with some friends. But because of the season (it’s summer), it feels less ideal for Beefy and I for the moment; rattlesnakes are out, foliage has sticky, prickly, whatnots all around, and since it’s almost two miles by the time we reach the top the heats usually got him near exhaustion. So, we sit in a shady spot to catch our breath, drink a little water, then head back down the hill through the urban neighborhoods we’d passed through previously to end up back at my front door. It’s a great walk, but how many times can we do this same route over and over again (with a dog, many times apparently…)?
I had my birthday recently and I took ol’ Beefman on an early morning hike to thinking I could beat the crowd to the aforementioned, unleashed-dog canyon, in hopes of changing up our routine. But I approached the entrance only to find everyone and their dog had the same idea. It was 4th of July… What was I thinking? So, instead of risking a stressful hike, I headed west to our old route up the neighborhood street. On our way up, we ran into another dog owner who I’d seen on our walk to the canyon entrance moments earlier He told me that he works my same strategy: skip the crowd and takes the neighborhood street instead. But then what he then what he told me changed everything…
At the top of where we’d walked a hundred times, what looks like a private road entrance to someone’s gigantic estate actually has a door in it that I could have simply walked through at any time. It’s not private property, after all, and it’s not trespassing, he said. It’s public. He told me if I were to walk up that road (which up until now I had thought was a driveway), at the end, there’s an entrance to a canyon, a different one, one that has some beautiful, carved trails, but that’s far less crowded.
I took his word for it. Beefy and I hiked to the top where we’d been a so many times before, but this time we followed his instructions. Lo and Behold, in the black, wrought-iron gate, there’s a door that’s always unlocked. We went through and started up the road. Not only were there some of the most beautiful houses I’ve seen in LA, but some of the nicest views of the city that I could see from the street. And when the road ends there is, in fact, a park entrance to an entirely new canyon. All this time and I had no idea. It made me think — how many other things exist that are just past the limits of my habits and awareness?
I tell this story because to me it reminds me of both sitting meditation practice and the creative process (both of which I’m consistently engaged in). When creating or sitting, you tend to feel as if you’re doing the same thing over and over again, time after time. Eventually, not only do you get bored, but also you start to question whether or not you’re doing it right or well enough or if this will ever amount to anything? But then, one day when you least expect it, some line of thinking you’ve been following all along, over and over, reveals something to you and a whole new world opens up. Your inner world expands and the joy of discovery and creativity revisits you. You feel a sense of irony, progress, and the pleasure of possibility — i.e. limitlessness.
The joy of sitting in meditation is like this. You sit and sit, over and over again, and everything feels common, redundant, finite. But when it opens your sense of it’s worth is renewed. You might find yourself wondering what conditions allowed this new perspective to take hold so that you can replicate it every time you sit, but the truth is — all the sitting, all the boredom, all the squirming, doubting, helplessness, and urge to walk away — all of it brought you to this new place. All of these things were the conditions that actually caused it to open. It’s the process. And going through it, seeing all the uncomfortable conditions that caused it gives you a new appreciation for what you’ve been doing: walking the path, day after day, sit after sit.
If you’re a painter putting paint on the brush and hitting the canvas, if you’re a writer putting pen to paper, if you’re a musician, practicing the same scales or the same songs over and over until it opens up and newness and expression emerges, then you know of what I speak. The practice of creativity is yeoman’s work they say. But everything is. Sitting practice, relationship, maturing. Even simple things, like walking a dog.
