The Button Jar

What a Buddhist Nun Taught Me About the Present Moment

I love Pema Chodron.

Pema is a Buddhist nun, writer, and teacher. I’m reading her new book right now, and it reminded me of the first time I encountered her.

Her advice was so simple, but so revolutionary: begin where you are. No need to optimize or self-improve. In fact, the worse you feel, the better a candidate you are for enlightenment.

Sign me up.

You can be miserable, angry, grieving, shameful. When you try to escape those things, you flee from the present, and then all that builds up inside and you move further away from who you are.

But if you can sit in your own shit, surrender your expectations, the false self falls away, and what you meet is closer to your essential nature.

When I read these words, I was sitting in my backyard in New Jersey. I wanted to be anywhere else. The grass was so green, I hated it. I missed the desert, though I was not ready to admit it. I felt claustrophobic, unable to see the horizon or watch a sunset behind mountains.

But I breathed through this thought and I stared at the flagstone under my feet and noticed how the grass grew in every crevice.

Life wants to live.

I looked closer. I put my hand on a dog lying next to me and breathed even deeper into my body. There were ants crawling by my feet, alive in their own mysterious existence, working, struggling to survive. Somewhere, a horn honked. I sank further.

If you’ve endured loss, trauma, or just the general experience of being an adult with too much on your plate, you know that sometimes your higher cognition flees to the upper chambers of your brain, maybe even out of your head, and floats above your body.

(I stand by this scientific description.)

But I listened to Pema, and breathed back into my body.

It was as if I were standing on a cliff, the space beyond me obscured by fog. I jumped, expecting endless air, water, or oblivion, but what met me felt more like psychological jello.

(Sometimes I worry I’m still trapped in the jello, just sank far enough in that I don’t recognize anything but, like a fish doesn’t necessarily understand water.)

Buddhism is rooted in the radical acceptance of impermanence, which is why its ultimate goal is presence. The self we think of as fixed and permanent is actually nothing but a conditioned state of consciousness. It rises and falls based on external stimuli, like all of our other senses. We see when there is something to see. We hear when there is something to hear.

Everything external is impermanent, yet we cling to it. Circumstances change. We grow, move, and evolve. All living things emerge and then disintegrate. Our clinging creates our suffering.

So the “self” I spent so much energy defending wasn’t nearly as solid as I imagined. Even my personality seemed to shift depending on sleep, grief, fear, joy, or who happened to walk into the room. The permanent “me” I clung to turned out to be far more weather than bedrock.

In a fallen world, clinging is like tethering a boat to a rotted dock. Sooner or later, time, entropy, and a strong gust will come, and you will be set loose—not into open water, not into freedom, but into something thicker. Something that doesn’t let you drift so much as hold you in place while everything you thought was solid dissolves.

Or, in psychological jello.

Zen Buddhism rivals modern psychological understanding of human cognition, and understands trauma processing. But I could never quite settle there, because when I dove into that presence, I wasn’t alone.

I didn’t experience pure bliss or emptiness or absence of form. Instead, following Pema’s advice led me to the quiet presence that somehow holds everything together, and while I still have no answers, almost ten years later, I ended up placing all my questions at the foot of the cross.

Someone once asked whether this feeling of Presence is nothing more than an evolutionary adaptation—a trick the brain performs when suffering becomes unbearable.

What if it were? Wouldn’t that be even more evidence of a loving creator who says, “Things may get so bad, let me hardwire a fail-safe.”

The movement of fully inhabiting your body, life, and the present moment is an act of trust and love. When I was younger, I thought surrender would meet me in a grand moment, where the atoms in the universe reorganized themselves before my eyes, so suddenly the mystery of everything was no longer hidden.

Like many things, I was wrong about that.

Instead, what I’ve found with time, loss, change, and a pathological commitment to returning to the present, is that peace is found in what seems to be ordinary.

The grass in the sandstone cracks. The cacophony of bird sounds in the park across the street. The smell of coffee brewing and the gurgle of the coffee pot.

My most prized possession is my Grandma’s button jar. I took it from her house after she passed away. I didn’t want anything else. It’s a World War II era honey jar with a yellow lid. It sat in the spare bedroom closet throughout my childhood. An image of my grandma unscrewing the lid, placing a button in there, closing it again, is a core memory.

Each time I moved, I’ve wrapped it in bubble wrap, inside a box, carried it with me in the car, and taken it into hotel rooms every night.

I’ve never opened it. The thought of doing so is abhorrent to me. To do so would disturb the order of the buttons as they were placed. Layers of time. A shirt purchased in 1945, another in 1952, perhaps another in 1975. Moments when my Grandma tended to her world, mind somewhere else, or fully present, who knows.

But inside that jar is evidence of time and a life lived, present enough to collect buttons, stacked one on top of another. Perhaps begun with scarcity, having grown up during the Great Depression, but becoming something entirely different over time.

This morning, the light from the window cast a line of sunlight across the jar. I stopped and stared. I saw them not just as buttons in a jar, but as evidence that what remains is what is sustained through care, attention, and tending to what is right in front of you.

Pema’s surrender was never about fleeing from the ordinary. It was about seeing the present in all its radical glory. As humans, it’s natural to want more, to think we know better, or strive to order the world according to our own limited vision. We are such impossible creatures, our desires are in direct conflict with what is often best for us.

Paul wrote, in Romans 7:15,

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

Talk about someone whose neurosis pointed the way to awakening. But Paul has just touched the same thread of human neurosis Buddhism is pointing us away from.

Paul sounds surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s spent time with Buddhist teachers.“I do not understand what I do…” He’s describing the divided mind—the strange experience of watching yourself reach for the very thing that hurts you. Buddhism offers one way through that paradox. Christianity agrees, but tells a different story about what—or rather, Who—meets us in our descent through the jello.

But the most surprising gift of presence wasn’t divine understanding of the cosmos. It was the realization that a beam of sunlight falling across my Grandma’s buttons was enough.

Ordinary things had been carrying the weight of eternity all along.