Practical Living

Brian Enos has distilled the lessons of a lifetime of Zen practice into this collection of concise and often delightful meditations. A physical object, a book, can anchor us in the present, a fine antidote to the digital flood of information that distracts us from the world at our fingertips. In an era of scroll and consume, Practical Living offers the opportunity to pause and reflect, to smell the ink as fingers stroke paper before turning a textured page. It is a book of lessons and parables, with certain passages destined to be read, re-read, and dog-eared as a reminder to return and review.

As a professional mountain climber I lived in the immediate, attentive and aware, never thinking about what wasn't happening or what might. Who I was with and what we were doing were all that mattered. When I retired from the heights I returned to the valley where the frenzied pace and pressure of everyday life caught me up. Thinking and worry concretized daily life to the point of paralysis. I lost access to the flow I discovered up there. Brian told me that it is impossible to think one's way out of moments of confusion or unhappiness, and observed that over-thinking had created the personal reality in which I was stuck. I asked how one might live without thinking.

"Awareness and attention," he replied, "live like it’s always now." This resonated, but in the mountains risk and consequences had always enforced my presence and I wondered how I could live in the now without that pressure. Brian's answer came in the form of a slim but heavy volume of lessons he'd written, ideas inspired and practiced over time by philosophers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Lin-chi, Huang Po, Shunryu Suzuki, Robert Adams, John Cage and Nisargadatta Maharaj. These meditations read easy but live a lot harder. Recognizing and unwinding one's habits of thought and action takes practice, and presence, and more practice, perhaps with a guidebook to show the way.

Often, after reading one of Brian's lessons, I feel a profound calmness; time stops and the ruckus flows past without pushing or pulling me in its wake. I notice the sun on my skin, my lungs expanding then breath flowing out. I watch the cat silently jump to the windowsill and feel the paper bend as I turn the page. In this awareness everything is ... just as it should be."
—Mark Twight, author of Kiss or Kill and Extreme Alpinism