I rushed to hear monks talk about slowing down
Buddhist monks walked 2,300 miles from Texas to Washington, DC to raise awareness of mindfulness. It’s harder — and easier — than it seems.
Twenty-three hundred miles. One hundred eight days. That’s how far a group of Buddhist monks walked before arriving in DC this week radiating the peace they'd been preaching since Texas. They had come to model calm in a country on edge.
And then there was me.
Running late. Irritable with a cold and too much to do. A civic resilience specialist in a hurry, elbowed in line at American University by a woman bearing flowers on the hunt for a better seat.
Thousands of us packed our nervous systems into the school’s basketball arena to watch in silence as 19 monks wearing saffron and maroons robes padded in. Some of the monks had walked barefoot throughout the journey from Fort Worth. One lost his leg in November when the vehicle accompanying them was hit by a truck. He rejoined the sojourn in a wheelchair in early January and rolled into the arena Tuesday with the rest of his crew.
Their leader, Vietnamese-born Bhikkhu Pannakara who studied in Texas and previously worked in IT, led with Aloka, a rescued dog he befriended in India.
Pannakara smiled as he spoke to the crowd. “Are we at peace right now?” he asked, looking around. He paused seeing a woman shake her head no. “Why did she shake her head?” he asked. “You’re not at peace? How come? Stress? Even in this moment?”
I couldn’t see the woman from where I sat, but I appreciated her candor. In fact, I loved that she named the quiet part out loud.
This work is simple, yet very, very hard.
Maybe she was the elbow gal. Maybe not. Either way, she gave voice to the tension in the room, in DC, in the country and in the world.
The same week the monks were walking by melting snowbanks on paths adorned with rose petals, members of Congress were holding hearings about deadly ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) operations and the global Epstein sex crime syndicate. The arena was full of people who had been laid off from their government and newspaper jobs, thanks to billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It also was packed with still-employed civil servants dedicated to the public yet morally injured by having to do the bidding of a corrupt president.
“You’re not at peace? How come?”
I could list a million reasons. I’m sure we all could.
”Stress? Even in this moment?”
Pannakara wasn’t talking about this big-picture moment in history (waves hands at proverbial dumpster fire). He was talking about the moment we were in right then, right there, surrounded by people craving peace, safety and compassion so much that we’d disrupted our routines to sit and breathe deeply with strangers.
He let us in on a widely known secret. “Unfortunately, if we are not mindful enough, we always live with stress,” he said. “Mindfulness is the key. Mindfulness is something that…we have to live with every second, every breath. Otherwise stress, anxiety and depressions will always be there with us. Will not leave us alone. It will chase us down.”
Then he offered the practice itself. It wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was maddeningly simple.
