Life Is Perfect Just As It Is
Image: Unsplash, Nathan Wolfe, fair use
By Jūken Zach Fehst
I have a tendency to rush. It’s not always outwardly evident. I may look like I’m taking my time, working methodically, but inwardly my mind will be counting down the time before I’m done with whatever it is, already reaching ahead to the next thing. I think this is because there are so many things in my day that I’ve decided in advance fall into the category of “have to do.”
One reframe that’s been helping me with this skirting-on-the-surface mind is substituting “I get to,” for “I have to.”
I don’t know what it’s like to be at death’s door, laid low by illness, as some in our community do. Unable to draw from experience, I use my imagination and try to think of my life from the perspective of 90-year-old Jūken on his death bed. I’m looking back, knowing the poignant beauty and perfection of each seemingly mundane moment. Just to be alive! At all! And to know you are! What a miracle! Running an errand, doing the dishes, laboring over a project at work—these are not things that I have to do in order to get to something else; they are things I get to do. The inexplicable gift of life is given to me in every moment.
Life, just as it is, is perfect.
The infinitely complicated web of life perpetuates itself in every form, emerging from every tiny opening, knitting itself together, being torn apart, reconfiguring, doing it again. Beginningless life, endless life. Timeless life, forever new, forever fresh. And because I am life, in every moment I can sip sweet nectar from the very source. Huangbo Xiyun, a revered Chinese ancestor, writes, “That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside.”
Someone might reasonably say, What can this mean, life is perfect just as it is? What about war? Environmental degradation? All the poisonous -isms and -phobias that infect our society?
To me, this points to the identity of samsara and nirvana. Life right now, just as it is, is perfect—and part of that very perfection is my moral indignation and my desire to change my own unhealthy patterns as well as larger unjust systems. External conditions will always be, from our ego-centric perspectives, unsatisfactory at best. Does it follow that continuous unhappiness is inevitable? No! It means that discovering and cultivating the love and trust of life must happen even in the midst of pain, refusing to allow perpetually unhappy conditions to make us perpetually unhappy.
Every moment the entire universe is working in perfect harmony as one great whole.
How could we worry about anything? What could there be but life triumphant, always? What greater trust could we have but this? With appreciation and humble gratitude for the incalculable gift of human birth, we can trust that our wholehearted action in each moment is whole and complete.
Yet how to experience joy in every moment without bypassing the suffering present in every moment? A paradox which is also the promise of the Way: by not shutting out the suffering or grabbing for the happiness—ah, there’s the joy.
That undercurrent of unease? The lack of naturalness that makes so many of our words and actions seem artificial, provisional, incomplete, askew? The itch and rush to do something else, go somewhere else, be someone else? That’s the result of a beginningless series of karmic events conditioning our habits. It’s not easily set aside (that’s what practice is for), but guess what? There’s no problem with that. We can sit with it, take care of it, even welcome it as a constant reminder to be mindful.
We can allow the unease to be there, sitting alongside the deep joy that comes with awareness that we are, for the briefest flicker, perfectly alive.
After first encountering the Dharma and beginning to meditate while living in South Korea in 2006, Jūken Zach Fehst entered the path of formal practice in 2014 as a member of Brooklyn Zen Center, and received jukai at Clouds in Water in 2022. He has worked as an actor and writer, and is now a public high school teacher and musical hobbyist. He has an abiding interest in all forms of spirituality and religion, and holds a Master in Theological Studies from Boston University. He is currently in training to become a priest at Clouds.