Soji: Zen Housework without Hope

(The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise every month. This article is part of a series. In the previous episode, we explored Spinozist Mindfulness & Loving Kindness)

For the month of April, I practiced a zen ceremony called “Soji”. Here’s how it was explained to me:

“In many Zen temples, there’s an activity called soji, a period of about 20 minutes where the whole community participates in cleaning up the temple and its grounds. It usually happens right after a bowing and chanting service, marking the end of the morning meditation schedule.

The premise is simple. You are assigned a simple cleaning task (rake the path, dry the dishes, sweep the hallway), which you do silently and without ambition to finish. In other words, there’s no ownership of the task: Just pick up the broom and do the best job you possibly can sweeping the hall until it’s time to stop.

After about 20 minutes, the work leader walks around ringing a bell that signals the end of soji. When you hear the bell, you simply stop what you are doing. If the hallway is only half swept, if there are still dishes to be dried, if you only polished 12 of the 15 windowpanes—it doesn’t matter. Just put away your tools and move on to the next thing. (In the case with most temples, this would be breakfast!)”¹

It is difficult to perfectly recreate that ceremony at home. Some aspects of this I chose not to do because they were not practical: it was not practical to have someone pick the task for me, and it was not always practical to stop and drop everything before having finished (since it sometimes created clutter in the middle of the room that had to be dealt with). Nonetheless, I recreated the conditions of the practice as best as I could. There’s always ways to make it as close to the original ceremony as possible. Which is important, since those conditions are the things that impart interesting lessons.

Even by recreating that practice imperfectly, it’s not hard to get a hold of some of its lessons. The point is very clearly this: “there’s no ownership of the task”. It’s about relaxing a lot of the emotional baggage that comes with a task like this and that has to do with your ego and its aims.

I was drawn to this practice because of the idea of doing a chore “without ambition to finish”. I was very excited when I heard of this principle. I immediately translated it in my mind as “without hope to finish”. It is only today as I write this blog post and find the exact quote again that I realize that I immediately interpreted the phrase and added the notion of hope. This is because Spinoza was fresh on my mind from the month before. Spinoza talks about a kind of anxious hope, which we must get rid of. Hope is an inconstant joy. The fact that it is inconstant matters more than the fact that it is a joy, and makes it something we should be wary of. Hope and despair are fundamentally two sides of the same coin: to accept one is to be bound to the other. As an anxious person, this is something that I feel very deeply. Hope is torture to me, and I stress out about the chores a lot. The idea that I could do the chores without hope promised a lot of relief.

I’m glad to say that it delivered on that promise! The exercise worked as intended. Finally, I could focus on the task at hand without being irritated by that nagging hope: hope of finally being done with the task, hope of doing the task as fast as possible, hope of being on top of my To-Do List, hope of being a good person, the kind of person that does good things and should be proud of doing good things. All of that emotional baggage: despair, despair, despair. Despair about the task ahead, about being late, about not being able, about being clumsy, about things not working out.

The exercise allowed me to be very attentive to the difference between two ways my body can move through space:

ON THE ONE HAND

my attitude when I’m hoping “to just be done with something”, to “get it over with already” = the abrupt and expeditious gestures. The way my present circumstance, drained of joy, voided by contempt, becomes nothing but a stepping stone towards an allegedly more interesting future.

ON THE OTHER HAND

my attitude when I perform a long task “without hope” = settling into it, admiring the view ; wandering through it, as if the series of things to be interacted with is the terrain on which I have a pleasant walk, not rushing to a predetermined destination, but instead, with an eye on the open horizon, experiencing the freedom of exploring that space in any which order I choose. A relaxed demeanor, not of mechanical gestures, but of exploratory gestures.

I really need to be attentive to that difference. I need to feel it in my flesh and bones. It is a matter of life or death. Every morning I wake up faced with a similar challenge, which is a microcosm of my life: I either surrender to the anxiety elicited by the work that needs to be done on my computer, and experience the entire space that separates me lying on the bed and me being on the computer (meaning: going to the bathroom, having breakfast, walking to the computer, waiting for it to be turned on… etc) as a lifeless chasm, void of meaning and joy, a bothersome chore that I “just want do be done with” OR I refuse to let my computer drain all the colours from the world around and hoard them for itself, and I move through the space as if to explore it. Without hope or ambition to “just be done with it”, and instead with a complete surrender to every step. I then feel the pull towards the window to look at the cool birds outside. If you try to “just be done” with life, as if it were a chore, pretty soon you will get your wish fulfilled, and that is very sad.

All of this gave me some insight as to how I should tackle the tension between wanting to be productive & get stuff stone VERSUS wanting to not rush things & smell the flowers. The insight is this: you should give yourself as much leeway as possible when it comes to exploring the place you’re in. Exploration should feel chaotic, as it does not follow very orderly plans. It loathes very neat plans. So you can pause, you can go backwards, you can do detours, you can repeat steps, you can take the scenic route. Whatever! Whatever you feel like doing is what you should be doing. However, you should carefully pick the space you decide to explore, and not leave that space for a while. This is similar to a writing technique Neil Gaiman talks about where he will go to his desk, and allow himself to not write at all, but not allow himself to do anything but writing. You can sit there and daydream, write or not write, explore that space all you want, but you can’t pick another space. With Soji, you can pick the pace (pace, not space) that is most natural to you, you can feel like a living being again, not a cleaning robot, but you have to commit to not leaving that situation for a while.

For all of these lessons, I found that dust was the best of teachers. While practicing Soji, I loved cleaning the dust, befriending the dust. Removing dust was the one task that encapsulated the spirit of the exercise the most. I could not possibly hope to be done with it, since it always came back, and it is always everywhere. I can make progress, but I cannot beat it. I can deal with it however I wish, as long as I make progress. It’s not rocket science, it’s just dust.

One thing the dust made very salient is the difference between the “present instant” and the “present moment”. One way to describe Soji is to describe it as an exercise where you focus on the present (the process) and stop thinking about the future so much (the end result). But the complex phenomenology of time can sometimes get oversimplified. Here, with this exercise, I found it interesting that I was not focused on the present instant. The present instant is that infinitesimally small slice of time that you are currently living. It is the thing that makes Marcus Aurelius say that you can tolerate any pain, since you always have to endure that pain only for a fraction of a second; that’s it. It is also the thing that makes Alan Watts say that, if you think about it, you always have to wash only one plate when you do the dishes. There is always just the one plate in front of you. Focus on the present instant is a good short-term coping mechanism to endure something very unpleasant. But in the long term, if you treat a task as torture to be endured it will really feel like torture to be endured. I do not recommend it for chores. You need to allow yourself to see that there is never just one plate. A single plate has the weight of all the ones that tired your arms before, and it has the meaning of all the ones that are to come. It isn’t so bad if you’re not trying to win a war. To be focused on the present moment, which includes the past and future, is to clean the dust with the knowledge that the dust will come back, that you cannot win because this is not a battle. And this is hopelessly joyful.

Pierrick Simon

07/05/2024

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

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Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1Found on https://citydesert.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/housework-as-a-spiritual-discipline/ accessed in April 2024 ; Adapted from: Dana Velden “Finding Yourself In the Kitchen”, originally published on Rodale Wellness, September 4, 2015