50. Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step

I’ve been practicing mindfulness in a small way since the beginning of January, mostly by practicing guided walking meditation, and I realize I’m at the very beginning of understanding it. I’ve learned from those guided meditations, and from podcasts, but I haven’t read much about it, and since reading is the primary way I take in information, that’s a significant problem. For that reason, on the train to Ottawa yesterday I opened the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. I thought it would help me understand more about mindfulness, and it did.

Born in Vietnam in 1926, Hanh became a monk at the age of 16. He came to the United States in the 1960s as an anti-war activist. The Vietnamese government wouldn’t let him return home, and he established the Plum Village centre in France. Peace Is Every Step is a collection of published and unpublished writings, lectures, and informal talks, edited by Arnold Kotler and others. It probably shouldn’t be read in one go, as I did; instead, it should probably be read one chapter at a time, like a daily devotional text. The advantage of reading it the way I did, though, is that it might be easier to take in what makes sense and leave the rest out. At least, that’s my claim.

Peace Is Every Step is organized in three sections. The first, “Breathe! You Are Alive” is like a mindfulness primer, with short chapters on breathing mindfully, walking meditation (I’ve been doing it wrong by walking too quickly, although I’ve found it helpful anyway), and approaching other daily activities, like driving, cooking, washing dishes, and eating, in a spirit of mindfulness. The second section, “Transformation and Healing,” considers personal development, with a particular focus on dealing with anger and other difficult emotions by accepting them with love and compassion, and then looking to find their root causes. It’s good advice, and it echoes the way some psychologists, like Tara Brach, suggest that we recognize, acknowledge, investigate, and nurture ourselves and our emotions when we are in the grip of powerful feelings, instead of taking them out on ourselves and those around us.

The final section, “Peace Is Every Step,” applies mindfulness to larger social or political issues, such as the environment, war, and various forms of inequality. There, Hanh advises readers to carry themselves according to their political goals, so that people advocating for peace ought to avoid anger or hatred, and people advocating for sustainability ought to focus on the interconnectedness of all things. “Our body is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin,” he argues; it includes the air we breathe and the sun that allows everything on this planet to live. “There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us,” he writes, “from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean, to the movement of a galaxy millions of light-years away.” That emphasis on relationship reminds me of the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means something like “kinship relationality,” although that dry phrase misses all of its nuances, including the way it suggests a physical attitude of walking while bending over towards the earth’s living creatures. I’m not claiming any stronger connection than what my mind creates, and I’m aware that my interest in both wâhkôtowin and mindfulness could be written off as a form of appropriation, even though I think both might help us avoid destroying the world around us and, thereby, ourselves. I saw parallels between Hanh’s discussions of dying rivers and Robert Macfarlane’s recent book Is a River Alive? If a river can die, then it must also have the capability of being alive, too. It only stands to reason.

I’ve picked up other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, mostly (like this one) with titles that suggest (literally or figuratively) walking, and now I’ll make a point of reading them. I also want to thank my friend Roberta Laurie, whose Facebook posts about Hanh introduced me to his thinking. Imagine, social media as a force for good! Don’t tell the techbros, or they’ll block the word “mindfulness” the way they’ve blocked links to Canadian news media.