Right Concentration is not escapism. That sounds obvious, but it’s actually pretty easy for us to mistake absorption into a task or experience as concentration. If we do that often enough, we get into a pattern of avoiding the stuff that actually helps us stay present.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “When you use concentration to run away from yourself or your situation, it is wrong concentration. Sometimes we need to escape our problems for relief, but at some time we have to return to face them.” It feels important to stay mindful about this, because we happen to be in a situation where the desire to escape our problems and our situation is so high. While we want to give ourselves so much compassion about that, we also don’t want to find that we’ve avoided every possibility for awareness, for openness, for growth, because we’ve been masking our escapism in practices that make us feel self-righteous.

In Right Concentration, we remain open to the world as it is. We stay with this very world, flawed and beautiful. We see its colors and we see its poisons. In a time of unprecedented global suffering, meditation cannot be for us a way to retreat. It can be for us, instead, a way to stay in it. A way to keep returning to our lives and be present to them. Meditation helps us show up. It’s never meant to give us permission to drop out.

I think one of the reasons Right Concentration is taught last is that Right Concentration has a sense of wholeness and totality to it. It’s hard to sense that if we haven’t done some work elsewhere first. If we haven’t learned to see with Right View, which reminds us that life is, for everyone, unsatisfying at times. And clinging to a desire for our lives to be what we want rather than what it is only makes things worse. We’ve got to spend some time thinking about how to practice Right Intention and Right Action. We notice what seeds we’re watering in our proverbial living rooms.

All of this cultivates in us an expanded awareness. And it’s this awareness we bring to Right Concentration.

So many of us are experiencing very different social distance environments. Some are working still, on the front lines, exhausted. Some have littles at home, and are juggling work and parenting and all the rest. This may not be a post for you, if so. We send prayers and well wishes for perseverance and a whole host of gratitude for you. If you happen to be someone who has found more time in your daily margin, more quiet (at least in theory) to your day, you might have the bandwidth to pay attention to the danger of escapism. You also might have the opportunity to use this time of comparative quiet to allow real concentration and clarity to draw nearer to you.

My Buddhist teacher once said, “Just taste the flavor of your own self-deception this week.” What a powerful way of saying: pay attention to your motives. Don’t escape when you mean to concentrate. Don’t use these practices as a cover instead of an invitation. Maybe this week, you can bravely taste the flavor of your self-deception.

This post belongs to my series on practicing the Eightfold Path. Read all my posts on Right Concentration here.