Responding beyond reacting
The story is told of a Zen Master who led a group of students into a forest. The students were charged with listening to the crunch beneath their feet as they walked mindfully on paths strewn with pine needles. Suddenly the little expedition stopped. Before them was a huge boulder, only part of which was still above ground. It was directly in their way.
The Zen Master considered the rock, then asked his disciples “Is it heavy?”
“Yes,” they all replied, “it is heavy.”
The Zen Master smiled at them and said, “Not if you don’t lift it.”
Much as this may seem like a nonsense joke, this story has a serious purpose. The students on this trek in the woods were following a Master in hopes of finding their way to enlightenment. They were being taught to see things clearly and without illusion. The moment they came upon the rock, they instantly concluded the right answer. No extended contemplation was required. Of course, the rock was heavy. They reacted without seeing a challenge in the situation or a test in their teacher’s question.
For the Master, however, the situation asked for more than a simple reaction to a simple situation. The Master was seeking not a reaction but a response. This story survives as a teaching moment that helps to distinguish one from the other. Reactions and responses are two different things.
The clue to the distinction is to be found in the word “reaction” itself. In English “to react” means literally “to act again.”
That is what we do when we react to things — we do what we have done before, what is familiar to us and
expected of us — for reactions are predictable. They conform to our personalities when we face something unexpected or out of the ordinary. Reactions allow us to assert ourselves — our values and personalities — in ways that are continuous with how we have acted before.
Reactions are quick and may come forth without reflection even as they will expose our deepest value commitments. They announce how we think a conflict should be settled, for reactions, especially in a conflict situation, reveal our view of what is right or wrong, good or bad, familiar or strange. Moreover, reactions are observable and express character.
We come to anticipate people’s reactions to certain things as we come to know them better. Are they by nature optimistic
or pessimistic, prone to humor or overly critical? As we come to know people more intimately, we come to have some sense as how they will react to new situations, new challenges, and new questions.
The Zen Master knew all these things, which is why he created an opportunity for a new thought in a situation that seemed too ordinary to allow for one. In seeking a response beyond reaction, the Master wanted the students to lay aside the obvious, not to invoke a theory or plant something obtuse or complicated, but to entertain the idea that as true as their “yes” was, it did not exhaust the possibilities for response. The Master then gave them one of those possibilities.
Responses require openness to possibilities. They are many-sided. They invite
reflection, thoughtfulness, and operate on a delay switch. They may indeed affirm what one knows — the rock is heavy — but they will also hold open some unexplored avenues to truth on the assumption that all is not known. The fact that the Master opened such an avenue with a quip that seems like a joke is instructive, since humor requires seeing through the obvious and confronting meaning possibilities one had not expected.
This is why really good comedians are in some sense good philosophers. They draw distinctions, pay attention to language, and approach the ordinary from unusual angles to show — to our amusement — deeper levels of meaning that ring true beyond obvious meanings. The surprise they create is designed to make us laugh.
Deepening one’s spirituality requires learning to react in ways that create a “new ordinary.” This is hard to do. Spiritual response requires us to question what we know and what we think we know. This is a thought Augustine must have had in mind when he wrote, “If you understand it, it isn’t God.”
Jesus certainly knew that people react typically to a strike on the cheek with a desire to inflict an “eye for eye” retaliatory strike, but he offered a different response to conflict: Turn the other cheek, offer forgiveness, try to understand the enemy so that the very idea of an enemy disappears.
If one works at it and tries always to respond from such a teaching, returning love for hate may become a habit, something
second nature, and a new ordinary. One can learn to turn the other cheek without having to think in every instance that doing so is a proper and preferred response — it can become one’s reaction. Learning to act out of love over and over again can lead to a new ordinary, a new expectation, a new way of reacting, a centering of the personality on love.
Reacting and responding are different, yes, but learning to respond differently to the many things that come our way — to respond with care and compassion and sympathy for others ultimately leads to spiritual transformation in how we react to all we encounter in life — even a heavy rock.