Sitting judge: Retired Utah chief justice finds his way as a Buddhist monk

Mike Zimmerman is sitting in his back yard talking about the Buddha. The Buddha, he says, likened human suffering to a person shot with an arrow. In this urgent and painful situation, the Buddha said, humans ask the wrong questions. They want to know who made the arrow, who strung the bow.

Who created the universe, what will happen when I die — these are not the important considerations, says Zimmerman. The real question, he says, is "how to relieve the suffering mind." He reaches over and picks up a dead, brown leaf off the patio. Then he steps on it.

"You have to come to terms with loss," he says. "This leaf is not going to be green again. Get over it. That's its life cycle. People die. They get old. They get sick. That doesn't mean it doesn't make you sad. But to be sad about what is is kind of an illusion." Not that grief — his own grief — isn't real, he says. But to cling to it, to cling to the idea that the thing that caused the grief is unfair or wrong, as Zimmerman says, "from an existential standpoint," this is where humans get bogged down. The Sanskrit word for suffering also translates as "stuck."

We are, each of us, not separate from each other or the trees or the leaves, dead or alive. Deeply understanding that is the challenge, he says. A man can grieve and be happy, both. He can be a sitting judge, or a former judge who now simply sits. In this moment, nothing else matters.

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