tossed zen salad

There are hundreds of books about specialized and mundane activities that are written as philosophy guidelines for life. Usually the books are very touching and insightful and they can bore you to death if you think that particular activity is dull to begin with. For example, there are books that relate bowling to the path of a man's life through all of its trials and tribulations. Some books are classics - riding motorcycles and repairing them and how it - ditto to bowling. Then there is are just the interesting ones that pop up from time to time that come and go with the phases of the moon: Cooking-ditto, knitting-ditto, camping-ditto, fishing-ditto, dating-ditto, painting, car repair, traveling, prison, marriage, and there are even a few as far fetched as picking a particular soda from a soda fountain at your local convenient store and picking the right convenient store. It's that broad. You could fill a whole lifetime reading this genre of books(and then you could write your own zen book about a life filled with reading zen books). It would seem that everyone has found a zen in something personal to them. What is baffling is that so many people were able to write about it. What are the odds that the bowling guy was also a writer?

For me, I try to find zen in everything. There is bliss to be had in everything I do (even the rage and homicidal feelings have a zen to them) and I feel like a hack writing about all the powers of the universe and the connecting strings that bind them all together, every time I head out on the road for a tour, eat a great meal, ride my bike or find a good deal on a typewriter. What is this feeling we have where we feel that we need to share our discoveries? Isn't it true that we are all enjoying our lives subjectively and no two lives are identical? So what makes one zen more true than another? No matter what you find, you can never relate that experience to another and have them understand it. Their experience and what they feel might be completely different from yours. You may love bowling and someone else might find it a complete waste of energy.

I went to a poetry open mic with a bunch of comedians in Calgary - this is a few years ago - The idea was that we could use the "open mic" as a way to try out some of our new comedy for a captive audience. The problem of course, is that poets have no sense of humor and comics never take anything serious unless it's their own experience. And there are very few comics that are serious enough to be poetic. Some are, but they wouldn't be found at an open mic.

The experience was a disaster. Poets bared their souls and we laughed at them. We saw the humor to their trivial commentary and thought their ideas to be generalized and repetitive. We told jokes and the poets saw our pain and empathized with it. Then they scoffed at us for hiding our pain in laughter and not just baring it for all to see. I also think they had a problem with the lack of rhyming.

The entire evening was painful for both worlds. Other than the discovery that poets can out-drink comics, no familiar ground was discovered. Not even my feeble attempt at reconciliation by performing my now famous, "Ode To Chocolate Cake" could save us. Everyone left in a little more pain than they showed up in. Zen failed everyone that night.

Both worlds are a zen unto themselves. For comics there is the release of all the inner pain and anguish by using humor to express it and share it. They use laughter as a measuring stick for acceptance within that group of strangers. They continue to hear the echoes of that laughter to remind them they are being heard for a long time after the crowd has gone. For poets their inner pain is shared very boldly. It's raw and passionate. Rarely is it ever silly to anyone other than comics that enjoy laughing at other peoples' pain more than their own. Both zens have merit and both have gaping flaws, but they work unless you mix them together.

Somehow the evening itself was the zen. The individual philosophies failed when new factors were introduced to each other. Which means that they're self-serving beliefs and not a truth. Any time that happens to a philosophy or religion, it must be viewed as a failure and rethought out. Something that fails when tested is not a truth but just a nifty idea.

You can label anything a zen. Look at your day today; everything that happened to you today describes the struggles, the joys, the pains, the journey of one life in this mad, mad world. Written correctly and with a few sentimental tones, which should include lots of sensory-laden vocabulary, your day will become the quintessential story of man/woman. Add a sunset, a warm breeze, a major loss or destruction of a dream, a rebirth, some hope and some rhetorical questions and you have a philosophy according to...

You.

It's your own personal mixture of zens.

I have many zens that make up my salad. I have writing, travel, motorcycles, woodworking, mountains, seduction, cooking, dining, the list is endless. All of them are temporary fixes that make me feel like a Buddhist monk when I am experiencing them in their highest blissful state. I could die in my own arms when I see mountains, lakes, and valleys. I could disappear when I am riding a motorcycle. I am lost in some other dimension when I am eating a great meal or having sex with a great partner. That doesn't mean I should write a book about it....

But I'm gonna....

Think about your zen salad and what it means to your success story... then add rain. That's your book.