Brian Enos — Practical Living

On the good days I write. On the other days I wait for the Muse to come or I try to force it, which rarely turns out well. Earlier this year, when Brian Enos asked me to write the back cover text for his new book I agreed immediately but couldn't produce. I made notes. I read the book and re-read various chapters. I wrote test paragraphs but couldn't even imagine what the whole might look and read like so I waited, and Brian did too. Quite suddenly on June 3rd the first draft spilled forth and once in the flow I worked feverishly to write well and short. Still, it became something of an unusual back cover; it reads like a Foreword and yet we believed it perfect for this particular book, which was published on July 17th. It is the long-awaited compilation of Brian's best Zen essays.

In a world of scroll-and-consume a physical book offers the rare opportunity to pause and reflect, to smell inked paper and turn an actual page, to dog-ear the important ones so we may easily return to them to read and read again. This is our defense for having spent a lot of time and money and energy to publish our own books and zines — in our opinion analog matters, and going against the grain has always been worth the cost.

But in this era we are sold the convincing idea that technology and access are gateways to awareness. I believe these apparent shortcuts—these hacks—are barriers to the deepest aspects of Self or perhaps more accurately, the map they draw is misleading. Tech and access steer us away from the true understanding of Self that allows real, meaningful growth and expansion — tech closes instead of opens while genuine awareness opens instead of closes. It isn't easy, nothing effective is.

We chase awareness because we heard that we should but often run from the result because it is difficult to see things truthfully. Sensitizing oneself makes one, umm, sensitive, and even though this is a natural state, we aren’t ‘built’ or conditioned for sensitivity by a world that oversells ‘how to’ and ‘hacks’ and, “buy my program to shortcut the work and go directly to enlightenment,” as if store-bought enlightenment illuminates anything at all.

The essays in Practical Living are concise and evocative and as I wrote below, the words read easy but live a lot harder. It is a book that may literally change your life.

“Practical living is a way of life that does not rely on thinking.”

Brian Enos has distilled the lessons of a lifetime of Zen practice into this collection of concise and often delightful meditations. A physical object, a book, can anchor us in the present, a fine antidote to the digital flood of information that distracts us from the world at our fingertips. In an era of scroll and consume "Practical Living" offers the opportunity to pause and reflect, to smell the ink as fingers stroke paper before turning a textured page. It is a book of lessons and parables, with certain passages destined to be read, re-read, and dog-eared as a reminder to return and review.

As a professional mountain climber I lived in the immediate, attentive and aware, never thinking about what wasn't happening or what might. Who I was with and what we were doing were all that mattered. When I retired from the heights I returned to the valley where the frenzied pace and pressure of everyday life caught me up. Thinking and worry concretized daily life to the point of paralysis. I lost access to the flow I discovered up there. Brian told me that it is impossible to think one's way out of moments of confusion or unhappiness, and observed that over-thinking had created the personal reality in which I was stuck. I asked how one might live without thinking.

"Awareness and attention," he replied, "live like it’s always now." This resonated, but in the mountains risk and consequences had always enforced my presence and I wondered how I could live in the now without that pressure. Brian's answer came in the form of a slim but heavy volume of lessons he'd written, ideas inspired and practiced over time by philosophers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Lin-chi, Huang Po, Shunryu Suzuki, Robert Adams, John Cage and Henry David Thoreau. These meditations read easy but live a lot harder. Recognizing and unwinding one's habits of thought and action takes practice, and presence, and more practice, perhaps with a guidebook to show the way.

Often, after reading one of Brian's lessons, I feel a profound calmness; time stops and the ruckus flows past without pushing or pulling me in its wake. I notice the sun on my skin, my lungs expanding then breath flowing out. I watch the cat silently jump to the windowsill and feel the paper bend as I turn the page. In this awareness everything is ... just as it should be.

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Link to the Amazon page for Brian's new book

You can check out Brian's profile here

And listen to Episode 20 (recorded in 2018) of the podcast here

Brian Enos grew up in Park Layne, Ohio. In 1978, friends who had recently relocated to Arizona sent him several compelling photographs of the Sonoran Desert and invited Brian to join them out west. They assured him that a job was waiting for him at the Arizona State Prison so at the age of twenty-two, Brian packed his wife, their two-year old daughter and all their possessions into a 1966 Chevy pickup and, with a Datsun 510 in tow, set out for Arizona. They arrived in Florence with only $50 in cash.

Brian competed in his first pistol tournament at the prison and immediately knew where his life was headed. A student of Zen since his teenage years, Brian’s studies steadily merged with his competitive shooting career. His ability to be present for every moment, with attention the basis of each precise movement, allowed him to win a variety of national championships over the next two decades. His first book, "Practical Shooting, Beyond Fundamentals", is often heralded as “Zen and the Art of Competition Shooting”, and is still selling well three decades after its publication in 1990.

Brian retired from professional competition in 2000. His commitment to moment-to-moment attention led to "Practical Living", in which he applies and describes the principles he mastered as a successful competitor to daily living.

The cover image was painted by Brian’s daughter, Joni.