Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.

Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.