Stagnant > Stillness

There’s an old story monks tell—not in meditation halls, but after dark, when the protocols soften and the truth slips through. Every monastery, no matter how disciplined, has a secret ladder.

Footholds worn smooth by the weight of escaped bodies. Branches bent into handrails by generations of seekers who needed, just for a night, to remember what it felt like to be profane.

They scale down to drink cheap beer. To buy ice cream. To feel wind on skin that isn't sanctified.

And then, as always, they climb back up.

Shozan Jack Haubner calls this “jumping the wall.” He says it's not rebellion. It's recalibration. A way of testing whether the discipline you've chosen still serves the life you're becoming. He writes: “In Zen, true liberation means that you attach to nothing, including the means of your emancipation—Zen practice itself."

I've been thinking about this as I advise leaders who have built their lives around momentum, who conflate stillness with stagnation. Who fear that, if they stop moving, even for a moment, they might disappear into the void they've been outrunning.

But the wall isn’t our enemy; the wall is our teacher.

The wall teaches us that discipline without release becomes rigidity; that structure without spaciousness is a cage. That the same systems that hold us can also hollow us out if we don't periodically step outside them—not to abandon them, but to remember why we built them in the first place. 

Professional athletes call this their “rest day,” the time when muscles repair, when microtears become strength, when the body remembers it is not a machine, but rather a living system that requires reciprocal maintenance—the kind of care that flows both ways, that honors both effort and ease. 

We’ve made our identities so coextensive with our work that to stop feels like erasure. So then, our work gains an all-encompassing frequency—one that drowns out the quieter signals: intuition, longing, grief, the body's whispered requests for pause...

Jumping the wall is not indulgence. It's attunement over optimization. It's choosing to sense what the moment is asking for, rather than forcing a preset rhythm onto a living, changing system.

The ones who jump the wall well—who truly escape and return—come back different. Sharper. Softer. More committed, not less. Because they've tested their allegiance. They've tasted the profane air and chosen, once again, to climb back up.

That oscillation itself is the practice.

This is the paradox Haubner elucidates so beautifully: We must leap over the very thing that liberates us, lest it become just another prison. We must be willing to betray our disciplines in order to stay faithful to them.

So maybe the question isn’t whether we should jump the wall, but rather, How do we build walls worth returning to?

What kind of discipline invites us back, again and again, not out of obligation but out of resonance?

What kind of practice remains porous enough to let us escape, and yet secure enough to welcome us home?

Perhaps it's not just about deep time, after all… Perhaps it’s about choosing what we repeat, on purpose.

A complementary text that I found particularly touching is Mary Oliver’s “The Journey,” first featured in her book Dream Work. Haubner writes about jumping the wall to test whether your practice still serves you. Oliver writes about the moment before the jump—when you realize that the structure you're in, no matter how well-intentioned, has become a cage. Through their work we understand that leaving is sometimes a way to remember why you stayed. And sometimes, we must leave to discover we were never meant to return.

— Rimma Boshernitsan, Dialogue