Not so long ago, in a place not so far away, a young novelist resolved to tackle her writer’s block by heading up to a monastery in the nearby foothills. The monastery received few visitors in those days, so once she had explained her predicament, she was welcomed in. All they asked was that she do her fair share of the work, and that she not make a nuisance of herself.
As she was about to accept their offer, but before she could, one of the monks off to the side added a third condition. “No writing until you can circle the monastery without thinking a thought.” That sounded hard, and mean-spirited, but she accepted anyway. She could always leave if she felt she were wasting her time.
She understood the essence of the problem before taking her first step. Just the act of asking herself “Am I thinking a thought?” was the thinking of a thought. Was she being asked to do the impossible? She felt like it required her to step outside of time.
After a few days of hard thinking about how to get started, she sought out the monk who had added this strange third condition. He was happy to entertain all her questions – at any time, he said – but then restricted himself to just four answers: “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, and “I don’t know.” His answers did help some, but only in the beginning. She was soon on her own.
Her first strategy was to stick her fingers in her ears and shout “la-la-la-la” all the way around the monastery. “Maybe,” the monk had answered before she had tried it and asked him if it would work.
It didn’t. The never-ending la-la-la-la chased its own tail and collapsed in on itself. Which caused her to notice that she was thinking a thought, namely, “This isn’t working.”
In the days that followed, strategy after strategy failed her, but she remained determined. She found that merely devising and testing the strategies each day felt like progress, despite the never-ending failures. It was forcing her to explore how her mind worked, which was something she thought a writer might want to understand, especially one with writer’s block.
Finally, after nearly two and a half grueling years of trying, she made it the whole way around the monastery without thinking a thought. What she experienced was a deep sense of satisfaction, not exhilaration. She had felt it coming on for some time by then.
She went straight back to the dormitory, laid on her bed, and started writing. Shortly thereafter, the third-condition monk walked by and did a double take. He stopped and asked, “You’ve circled the monastery twice without thinking a thought?”
“No. Once.” she answered.
“Oh!”, he replied, “It was changed to twice some time ago. Were you not told?”
So she got up off the bed and immediately circled the monastery twice without thinking a thought. When she arrived back at her bed, she found that a message had been written on her notepad, “The head monk has informed me that the monastery must be circled thrice, not twice, without the thinking of a thought, before writing commences.”
She smiled a full smile, and it stayed in place for a few moments as she stood there thinking. Then she started packing her bags. She had realized that this is how people who are both deeply kind and deeply wise tell you it’s time to go: they get silly. At the bottom of the page, she added these words: “Thank you all. I shall forever circle the monastery.” Then she tore the page from the notebook, placed it on the bed, and went home.