What are you waiting for?

Can we be happy with how we are, what we are, where we are, and what we have, at this very moment?

Sep 25, 2024

Lately I’ve been listening to talks by the late Zen teacher, Charlotte Joko Beck on the Waking up app and I am drawn to her message that our everyday ordinary life is our practice.

You know that moment when someone says something so profound that hits you directly and literally jolts you and wakes you up from a dreamlike state? Well that happened to me as I listened to this quote by Charlotte Joko Beck.

“We’re always looking for something, waiting for something—for the time which will be perfect, peaceful, better, different, happy,” she says. “But we’re not suddenly going to find some mysterious place where all our troubles disappear. Our great life truly is just what we are at this very second.”

And then she asked the audience, "What are you waiting for?"

I posed this question to myself to bring those things that have been hovering in the background and I have been accepting as truth, but I never really identified and questioned such as:

As a parent, for the next stage in my kids' life and things will be easier.
As a designer, once I have a better job and more money, I will be happeir.
As a runner, once I have achieved my goal of running a 50k I will be fit in better with my running group.

Just by writing them out I realize how silly they sound.

Instead of waiting for the perfect moment or the next stage in life, can I be happy and content in this moment exactly where I am as a parent, designer, runner, or in any other part of my life where I am waiting for something else.

Instead can we be happy with how we are, what we are, where we are, and what we have, at this very moment? That is the practice for us all.

So I pose the same question Charlotte Joko Beck asked for you to reflect on…