Another thing I’ve learned over the years is the richness and freedom of experimentation. There’s no limit.
I used to think of this in terms of travel, books, cooking. Then I truly understood it through repetition.
I do many things in a cyclical, almost ritual way. I wake up early, prepare the same porridge, ride more or less the same roads, sit zazen on the same cushion. The days look alike. But I don’t.
In repeating, I discover that nothing is ever truly the same. The form repeats, but the attitude changes. My gaze changes. My body changes. My breath changes.
So it’s no longer monotony. It’s practice.
Even the simplest gesture can become a mirror. Every climb on the bike, every slow morning, every silence in zazen becomes a way to observe myself from a different point of view.
It’s as if repetition carves a groove — not to confine, but to open. To open the space of presence.
Freedom isn’t in always doing new things. It’s in seeing the new within what repeats.
That’s why Zen, to me, isn’t about being still. It’s about being there, while doing. Even when climbing, heart pounding, legs burning.
I usually return from my bike rides at the same time — nine o’clock. I put the bike away, take off my helmet, have breakfast. From there, a routine begins again — always the same, always different. Replying to emails, tidying the house, listening to a familiar voice on the radio, doing laundry, hanging clothes.
A bit like the movement of the sun, the moon, the Earth itself. Always the same on the surface, but never identical. No two sunrises or sunsets are ever the same.
And so I notice that in repetition, life renews itself.
Same road every day. New step every day.
Sometimes, though, I also feel the need to get lost. To be swept away by something completely new. To travel. To walk through a city I don’t know, observe faces, smell the air, listen to languages I don’t understand.
Without thinking about anything.
Just being there, whole, with everything that arrives.
That too, in the end, is practice.
Not the depth of the groove etched every day, but the raw openness, with no handholds.
Another way of being.
Perhaps freedom needs both: the familiar road that is never quite the same, and the road I have never travelled before.
In both, the invitation is simple.
To be there.
