Always remember, unless one commits, nothing changes for oneself.

 The mind may tell you, "If you don't make a commitment, then you haven't made a commitment" — but if you follow that and don't commit, you are committed to not making commitments. So not committing is still a choice. It just keeps everything the same.

Here's why. Without commitment, every discomfort tells you to stop or run. With commitment, that same discomfort just becomes information. "This hurts" stops being a command to quit — it's just a fact on a Way you already chose to walk.

The mind also loves to say, "I'll commit when I feel comfortable, or less scared or more ready." But that's backwards. Action doesn't follow feeling. It is the other way. Feeling follows action. Commitment doesn't wait for confidence — confidence shows up after you commit.

You cannot opt out of it. Not committing to early zazen means committing to your past oversleeping habits. Not committing to a relationship means committing to being alone. Not committing to a Way means committing to its absence. You are always committed to something. The only question is whether you picked it by your choice on purpose.

This is not abstract.

Every morning, a few minutes before the alarm, I wake in my room at the Zendo — a couple of metres from the forest, Perumalmalai. I can see the silhouette of that towering mountain through the window and a bit of sky. Also the rustle of the wind and singing of the waterfall. The temperature is in single digits during that time, most of the days throughout the year. And the same voice speaks within me, above the cacophonous symphony of the Tinnitus orchestra, without fail: Should I skip zazen this morning? I'm not feeling well. Shall I just message and go back to the comfort of the blanket. I know that voice. I have even named that part of my mind. I take a breath. A deep one. And then I chant Shiku se gan mon and then Enn mei jikku Kannon Gyo. And I rise. Every single morning. The chants do not suppress the voice with the name — they simply remind me of what I have already chosen. That gap between the voice and the rising is where commitment actually lives. Not in the dramatic moment of deciding, but in the cold dailiness of it.

So don't wait for that voice to vanish — for the fear and apprehensions to disappear. Those fears and apprehensions are not a sign you are wrong. They are a sign you are finally making a real choice. Real choices mean losing other paths. That loss hurts. But that hurt is small, and it is temporary.

The pain of non-commitment — the slow fading of what could have been, the quiet regret of the road not taken — that pain stays.

Scottish mountaineer W.H. Murray knew this. Scouting the Himalayas in 1950, he wrote: "Until one is committed, there is hesitancy... the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too." He paired it with a line he loosely rendered from Goethe: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." Murray's scouting of the southern approach through the Khumbu Icefall proved the route to Everest was viable — the blueprint that made the 1953 summit possible. He could not make that final climb himself, felled by altitude sickness. But his commitment had already done its work.

I had Murray's words on my desk for quite some time. I read them every single day — and then procrastinated. That piece of paper is lost now, swallowed somewhere in the tides of time. But I think traces of it remain, somewhere in the mind. Not in the part that voices otherwise.

Perhaps what quietly internalised all of this was Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Every step of it runs through my mind whenever I face a real choice. It begins with acceptance — meeting a thought, emotion, or feeling that is not comfortable, not convenient, and choosing to face it rather than flee. Being present helps enormously with that. Then comes defusion — recognising that the limiting voice in the mind is just that: a voice, a thought, not a literal truth. This aligns, in its own way, with Buddhist teaching. There is no single fixed self inside the mind. We are all, to some extent, a chorus of voices — the difference between those who suffer from that and the rest of us is only one of scale. What orients us is knowing what truly matters — that clarity sets the direction. And from that clarity, committed action becomes possible.

So committed action always begins in clear awareness. And it ends there too.

That daily, unglamorous, cold-morning repetition is the practice and the living itself — not preparation for anything else.

And after all this drama of mine — reflection, writing to the bone, blog, posting — when I reach the Zendo hall, Fr. AMA walks in for the early morning zazen without fail. We just celebrated his 90th birthday on 21 May. And for a moment I think: how manyth zazen sitting will this be for him — and what really motivates him.