In Zen, There Are Two Things...

These days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The future is uncertain, the news delivers us fresh horrors every day, and anxiety feels like an unavoidable part of daily life. Of course you’re anxious. How could you not be?

There’s a Zen proverb that has helped me tremendously at times like this. It says:

"In Zen, there are two things: Sitting and sweeping the garden: It doesn’t matter how big the garden is."

Anxiety often makes the "garden" of what we must tackle for happiness, safety, and justice in the world to feel impossibly vast—too tangled, too overgrown to ever manage. But Zen reminds us that no matter the size of the garden, our task remains the same: sit with what is, and tend to what’s in front of us.

Maybe your anxiety feels enormous right now. Maybe you're caught in a cycle of worry, trying to control the uncontrollable. But what if you didn’t need to clear the whole garden at once? What if all you needed to do was take a breath and focus on the next step—the one thing you can tend to right now?

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