Why did you become a monk?

While I was in Kauai and Fiji, it was quite evident that I was losing my Buddhist path. You may have questioned my writings and said to yourself, “Is he really going to follow through with this monk thing?” You may have asked this question once or twice, but let me tell you that the question has plagued me throughout the entire trip.

So the story…

When in Fiji, I was in the ocean showing these two travelers how to play “Shark Attack” and “Whale Breaching.” “Shark Attack” is a simple game where you pretend that a shark is eating you alive, like a scene from the movie “Jaws.” Each person takes turns trying to perform a more realistic or humorous shark attack. In “Whale Breaching,” you jump out of the water and then flops onto your side just like a whale would do during mating season. These are some of my favorite games to play in the water, and they surely kick butt over the usual “Swim to Nowhere” or “Marco Polo.”

After returning from the water a few hours later, I looked at my wrist to find out how much longer we had to wait until tea time and noticed my watch was missing! It seemed I had lost it while playing “Shark Attack.” A member of my “Shark Attack” audience said they saw something fly off my wrist as I submerged and waved my hands for help during my Oscar performance, “The Fijians Are Not the Only Ones Who Eat Humans.” Unfortunately, that audience member passed off my airborne watch as seaweed and did not mention it to me. OOPS!!!

I immediately got some snorkel gear and started searching. It was not to be found. After dinner, when it was low tide, I decided to take another look… Still no watch. I told some Fijian kids I would give them lots of money if they found it. They looked around for a few minutes and gave up, thinking it was silly to look for a watch after it had been lost in the ocean for four or five hours.

Losing the watch was quite symbolic for me since it was most useful for waking up early at the monasteries and timing my meditations with its countdown timer – that is, whenever I reserved the time to meditate. The frequency of meditation sessions during my trip had quickly dwindled, and so did my Buddhist path. Losing my watch was a big message for me. I wondered if it was possible to recover what I had lost… and that ain’t the watch I’m talking about either!

Later that very night I had trouble sleeping. I happened to wake up as the sun was starting to rise. The sky was red, the beach was empty, and the water was low. As I was walking, I asked myself, “I wonder if I can find my watch this morning?” As I approached the shore, I thought about how impossible it would be to find a watch lost in the ocean for a whole day and a whole night. I said to myself, “If I find my watch, I will definitely become a monk! No more games – I will really do it.” Almost immediately from the distance I could see something flip-flopping as the calm morning ocean waves lapped the shore’s edge. As I walked closer, I saw that it was the black Velcro strap of my watch floating with the face half-buried in the sand. The water was still passing over it. I hesitated for a moment, smiled, and felt something like a defeat or possibly a surrender. There were no more games I could play to excuse myself from ordaining.

Standing in front of my watch, I thought of the impossible “If I find my watch…” promise I’d made, which I thought I would never be held accountable for. Nobody would ever know if I just kept on walking, but finding the watch was just too much of a coincidence to let this moment of truth simply drift away. I lowered myself down to pick up the watch. I had to be true to who I was, or what I was to become.  As I picked it up, I felt it was one of the heaviest things I had ever picked up. Change and destiny, especially my own, bore a lot of weight. After this, the only question was when I would become a monk, and that was only a matter of time.