We Are Ordinary and Holy

I find it challenging to go about my ordinary days, my ordinary routines, my ordinary life seeing the images of death and destruction in Ukraine. I want to not turn away, and at the same time not be consumed or hardened by the events of the world. I wonder how to not to turn away, to find some optimism, and a sense of meaning and depth.

In Not Always So, a collection of talks by Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki he mentions that there is a Japanese expression, a tamban-kan, as “a person who carries a board on his shoulder.” This is someone who understands things from a limited perspective, a person who holds tightly to a particular view. He is suggesting that you are such a person when you think you are only an ordinary human. When you remove the board you carry on your shoulder you can see, feel, and experience that you are also holy, sacred, connected to the cosmos, with vast abilities, including the ability to shape your reality.

You may think that you are an ordinary human being, with ordinary work, ordinary problems and possibilities, and an ordinary life. And this is true. We are all ordinary. We are all born, we work, we love, we struggle, get up, fall down, and we die.

More difficult to understand and experience is that you are anything but ordinary. You are not merely you. You are the result of an event from more than 13 billion years ago known as the Big Bang, followed by a most mysterious coalescing of matter and energy. Here on this tiny planet called Earth, in the midst of billions of stars and planets, we humans are the result of molecules forming complex structures beginning 3.8 billion years ago. We may not always experience it, or believe it, but we are a most remarkable work in progress.

Shunryu Suzuki goes on to say that during meditation practice you are both independent from everything and related, both, at the same time. “You are not just you. You are the whole world and the whole cosmos…when you sit you are not the same being as you are before you sit.”

As ordinary human beings we plan, assess, measure, love, hate, succeed, and fail. We can be confused, lie, hurt each other, even betray others. Within our organizations and beyond we are accountable for our actions and we hold others accountable for their actions. This is an essential part of living together, of working together, creating, innovating, and solving problems together.

As sacred, holy beings, we have the profound ability to literally feel the feelings of others. A friend was walking toward me yesterday and her foot missed the curb and she stumbled. My body ached from the pain of her stumble. We have the potential to misunderstand each other and destroy each other, or to be caring and curious, and see from other’s perspectives. We can help, comfort, and heal each other.

Experiencing ourselves as ordinary and holy is one way to not get caught by either being consumed by the world or turning away from the world. It’s a way of letting our heart’s break open, and remaining cautiously optimistic.

Here is a poem that also cuts through the duality of ordinary and holy.

The Way It Is, by Lynn Ungar

One morning you might wake up

to realize that the knot in your stomach

had loosened itself and slipped away,

and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart

had gradually, and without your really noticing,

been filled in—patched like a pothole, not quite

the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you

that your life, though not the way

you planned it, and maybe not even entirely

the way you wanted it, is nonetheless—

persistently, abundantly, miraculously—

exactly the way it is.