You are sitting with the intention to be still and the mind is producing the inventory. This is the inventory you know from three in the morning, the one that catalogues everything that is wrong or might become wrong, but now it is arriving in the middle of what was supposed to be quiet. You have been told that this is normal, that the mind does this, that the practice is simply to notice and return. You notice. You return. The mind produces another item for the inventory. You notice. You return. And something in the repetition of this is clarifying: the mind is not doing something aberrant. It is doing exactly what it has always done, which is to scan the environment for threat, which is to reach toward what would resolve the unease and push away from what would deepen it. The Buddhist traditions identified this movement twenty-five centuries ago and called it by its precise name. The cushion did not create the movement. The cushion simply made it visible.
The mechanism the Buddha identified as producing dukkha is tanha, usually translated as craving or thirst. Tanha is not simply desire, which is a neutral characteristic of the living organism. It is the grasping quality of desire, the reaching that is organized around the conviction that the current state of affairs is insufficient and that obtaining the thing being grasped for will produce the relief and completion that the current state does not provide. The not-choosing loop, viewed through the lens of the Pali analysis, is a sophisticated and persistent form of tanha: the grasping after the self that is not quite yet present, the life that is not quite yet being lived, the version of the self that would be adequate to the conditions of its life if only the right amount of work or insight or waiting had been completed. The loop positions the adequate self and the adequate life perpetually in the future. The grasping toward them keeps them there. The distance between the self and the life maintains the grasping. The grasping maintains the distance.
The Zen tradition’s contribution to this analysis is characteristically direct. The sixth patriarch Huineng challenged the understanding that enlightenment or liberation is something that must be achieved through progressive purification and practice. His approach pointed toward something that is already present, already complete, already here, that the accumulating practices and the progressive achievements are obscuring rather than approaching. The ordinary mind, in the famous formulation of Mazu Daoyi, is the way. The life that is already yours is not at the end of a path that has not yet been completed. It is here, in the ordinary present moment, which the monitoring and the managing and the assessment are preventing from being fully received. The Zen pointing is not toward a special state that is available after sufficient preparation. It is toward the state that is already here, already available, perpetually overlooked by the mind that is perpetually somewhere else preparing for it.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing, which is the Mahayana understanding of interdependence expressed in contemporary language, names what the loop costs the web of relations rather than only the individual running it. The person who is not fully inhabiting their own life is not only failing to live the life that is already theirs. They are failing to be fully present to the interbeing, to the network of relations within which their specific presence is an irreplaceable contribution. The Anishinaabe concept of mino-bimaadiziwin, often translated as the good life or living well, carries a similar understanding through a different tradition: the good life is not an individual achievement but the expression of the self in right relationship with the web of life that includes the human and the more-than-human world. The person running the loop is not only failing themselves. They are failing their relationships, their community, the specific contribution that their specific way of being alive is meant to make to the whole.
The Mahayana tradition adds a dimension to the Theravada analysis that is particularly relevant. The bodhisattva ideal, the aspiration to remain in the world for the benefit of all beings rather than withdrawing into personal liberation, carries within it an understanding of suffering that is both individual and collective. The person who is running the loop is not only failing to inhabit their own life. They are withholding from the collective the specific contribution that only their life, fully inhabited, would produce. The tradition understands this withholding as a form of suffering not only for the individual but for the web of relations within which the individual exists. The unlived life has a collective cost. The tradition points toward the inhabited life not only as the condition of personal liberation but as the condition of the bodhisattva’s genuine usefulness to others.
The contemplative dimension of the Buddhist traditions on this point is the development of metta, loving-kindness, which begins in the tradition not with others but with oneself. The standard formulation — may I be happy, may I be well, may I be free from suffering, may I live with ease — is directed first at the self precisely because the tradition understands that the capacity for genuine compassion toward others is contingent on the genuineness of the compassion toward oneself. The person who is running the loop, who has organized the self around the management of other people’s comfort rather than around the genuine care for the self’s own wellbeing, is not being more compassionate than the person who chooses the self. They are being less compassionate, because the compassion they are offering is being offered from a depleted source rather than from the genuine fullness that the inhabited life generates. What the tradition points toward is unambiguous: begin with yourself. The rest follows from there.