More Depth, Connection, and Meaning In Everyday Life

“Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life…

Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached
to an old erroneous interpretation of life…
You will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was,
and how much useless effort you had been making.”
— Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

• More Depth, Connection, and Meaning

• Zen Of Coaching

• A Poem

• What I’m Reading

One of the most beautiful and disorienting descriptions of our life comes from a simple moment. On his first visit to Yosemite, Shunryu Suzuki stood before the vast cascade of Yosemite Falls. Like anyone seeing it for the first time, he was struck by its scale, its power, its movement. But what he saw was not only a waterfall. He saw our everyday lives.

From a distance, the water at the top of the falls appears as one continuous stream—whole, unified, without separation. Then, as it reaches the edge, it breaks apart. The single stream becomes countless droplets, each moving on its own path, falling through space. In that falling, something appears: Individuality, effort, struggle, and feeling. Each drop seems to have its own journey. This is our life.

Before the Fall

Before the water goes over the edge, it is not divided. It is one river. Suzuki points to this as a way of understanding what we are before birth—not as something separate entering the world, but as part of an undivided whole. There is no boundary, no distinction, no sense of “I” and “other.” There is just water.

The Falling

Then comes the moment of separation. The water spills over the edge and becomes droplets—distinct, moving, seemingly independent. And Suzuki observed something subtle: Only when the water is separated does it begin to have difficulty. The fall is not smooth. It is turbulent. It takes time. It is filled with movement, resistance, and change. This is our human life.

We experience ourselves as separate beings:

· with identities to maintain

· relationships to navigate

· fears to manage

· outcomes to control

We feel the effort of falling. We feel the uncertainty. And because we experience ourselves as separate, we also experience fear: fear of losing what we have; fear of the future, fear of not knowing what happens at the end of our fall.

The Return

At the bottom of the waterfall, the water gathers again. The droplets return to the river. The separation dissolves. Suzuki imagines this moment not as loss, but as relief:

“How glad the water must be to return to the river.”

Nothing has been destroyed. Nothing has been taken away. What appeared as separate has returned to what it always was.

The Delusion of Separation

The difficulty is not in the falling. The difficulty is in the belief that we are only the drop. We live as if birth begins something, death ends something, and life exists in between as a fragile, isolated span.

This is the delusion. Not that we are individuals—we clearly experience ourselves that way—but that individuality is the whole story. Water is water—whether it appears as a river or as droplets. Our life and our death are not separate events. They are expressions of the same process.

What Changes

When this is understood—not just intellectually, but felt—something shifts. The urgency softens. The grasping loosens. The fear begins to thin. Not because life becomes easier, but because we are no longer holding it in the same way.

We still live as individuals. We still feel joy and loss. We still move through uncertainty. But we are less confined by it. There is a sense, however subtle, that we are not separate from what is happening. We are part of it.

It is easy to talk about this. To say: Life and death are one continuum. We are not separate. Everything returns. But to feel this—to live from it—is not easy. Because it asks us to loosen something we hold very tightly: Our sense of being a separate, enduring self.

The practice is not to believe this teaching. The practice is to explore it, and to live it.

To notice our feelings and patterns, where we cling, and where and when fear arises. The practice is to notice and be curious -- in what ways is this, our birth, life, and death all part of one river?

The practice is to remember, in your heart and in your bones that you are a drop and not only a drop. You are also the river.

Reflection Practice

Where in your life do you currently experience yourself most as “the drop” — separate, striving, afraid of falling? What would it feel like, even briefly, to sense yourself as the river?

Think of one person in your life — someone you love, or someone you struggle with. Can you sense, even faintly, that they too are a drop in the same river? What changes when you hold them that way?

Zen Of Coaching. An Online Course, beginning October 23rd

Zen of Coaching is a transformational program for executive coaches and leaders who want to deepen their presence, expand their impact, and build a coaching practice rooted in wisdom, not just performance. Blending Zen principles, mindfulness, and real-world leadership experience, this course—created by Marc Lesser, the Zen teacher and CEO who helped bring mindful leadership to Google—supports you in cultivating stillness, navigating complexity, and coaching with greater authenticity, clarity, and purpose.

A Poem: If You Knew, by Ellen Bass

What if you knew you’d be the last

to touch someone?

If you were taking tickets, for example,

at the theater, tearing them,

giving back the ragged stubs,

you might take care to touch that palm,

brush your fingertips

along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase

too slowly through the airport, when

the car in front of me doesn’t signal,

when the clerk at the pharmacy

won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember

they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.

They’d just had lunch and the waiter,

a young gay man with plum black eyes,

joked as he served the coffee, kissed

her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.

Then they walked half a block and her aunt

dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume

have to come? How wide does the crack

in heaven have to split?

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time?

What I’m Reading

Leading In Chaos, by Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox - Leadership as a practice of developing more presence, awareness, and deep connection.

Warmest regards,

Marc