Back on Top

So the day after that last post, I got my crap together and found a couple places to try for employment, typed up some cover letters and printed out everything I needed to head out.  I was feeling pretty good and optimistic about the whole situation.  It didn't really matter where I ended up because I would make the best out of it no matter what, plus no preconceived notion I had about any where would match reality.

I was ready.  I'd learned my lesson about the whole situation and was about to implement it.  All that was left to do was get cleaned up and go.

Then my phone rang.  It was a surprise because while I'd saved the number, it was one I'd not expected to hear from.

The restaurant I'd mentioned in my previous post hadn't had an opening a month prior, but here was the chef calling to ask me if I was still looking for a job.  "Why, yes, yes I am," I told him.

An hour later I was down there for a second/review interview and the next morning I was at work.

I really like it, but my endurance has been slowed by being out of the game for so long, so I'm having to build back up.  My first day, everyone told me I was already doing better than my predecessor.  I hadn't gone to aikido for six weeks on top of that so it was tough at first and I went home exhausted.

I have a lot of thoughts about this new phase in my life but I also have so much to catch up on that's happened in the past month I've been away.

I met two great people from Tassajara, one of them the tenzo with whom I talked shop for several hours on what it means to be tenzo on a further level than I've discussed here before.  I got a tattoo as a constant reminder of my practice and turned 30 (in that order...)  There have also been many developments in my practice and in how I experience the world through them, so I hope to get back in the habit of writing now that I have a little more structure to lay habits on top of for the foreseeable future.

I Survived Ango and All You Get Is This Crummy Post

45 calender days is a really long time. We had Fridays off, but most days started at 5:15 am with an officer's meeting and didn't end until 9 pm with chanting the Three Refuges. Half day sits changed the schedule for Saturday and the last five days finished it all off with a sesshin, but every other day was spent in zazen, kinhin, soji, oryoki, services, dharma talks, study, and class. Just about a tenth of the year, and it was interesting.

A lot happened over those six weeks that didn't really sink in until it was almost over and I didn't get a chance to write about hardly any of it.

I received the precepts the second weekend, which was a huge event on its own but it was quickly lost in the blur of the following weeks. We had two priests ordained by my teacher come visit for a while back to back, the second of whose ordination I attended late last year. I sat down with him for an hour and we chatted around the theme of ceremony which I'll get to writing about later. We also hosted Brad Warner for a Dharma Punx organized retreat which was fun to attend and cook for. I also got to go out for breakfast with him with two other people one day, so that was cool. Rereading Hardcore Zen after so long was interesting. It's a chicken-or-egg type deal but the book really matches my current attitudes and I read it at an influential time in developing my practice. I had thought all these views were my own but now I'm not so sure. It doesn't matter, they are mine and I don't have them because someone said that I should.

We had two other guests that same weekend so the buildup was something else. The second is the founder of the Dallas Meditation Center and practices in Thich Nhat Hanh's Order of Interbeing. His style was quite different but I intend to get to know him better since his center is down the street from where my parents live in Dallas. (He was out of town when I was there for Father's Day)

As tenzo, my first practice period (and only third sesshin) had its own special challenges. Three meals were served nearly every day; oryoki breakfast and lunch with an informal dinner. During the week we ranged 6 to 10 participants with around 20 for Saturday breakfast.

I started out really organized, planning a week's worth of meals at a time with my own spreadsheet displaying which day, meal, and bowl's food, condiments, number of diners, and who would be preparing/helping prepare the meal. I made two shopping trips a week, one on our off day, Friday. Two dinners a week I was able to let someone else plan and prepare to give me a break.

All this time, I'd been re-reading sections of the Tenzo Kyokun for inspiration and insight and came across something funny. One part I'd always read without too much care is the section where Dogen outlines the day's activities for the tenzo. With my professional training and guidance from within the sangha it never really matched up with Dogen's instruction. As I settled into how I thought things should be done, I realized I was actually doing it the way Dogen suggests. Setting up and soaking the rice for breakfast at night, preparing lunch while breakfast cooks... it was nice.

Before my term in charge, meals were prepared a day in advance and the recipes were overly complicated. With my menu and experience I didn't have to do this. It made storage much easier and I had a greater degree of flexibility if something unexpected came up. Because of this the third week was almost entirely improvised off leftovers.

There were a couple points where the whole thing was getting old and I was ready for it all to be over with, but that's all part of practice. It's not all that different from sitting; once you're in it you have to see it though.

One thing that I really enjoyed about the practice period was it's intermediate nature between daily life and sesshin. Daily life (for me, especially while unemployed) is very dynamic with almost no structure. Sesshin is completely regimented with nearly every moment planned out. During Ango, each piece of the day was optional and we could come and go as our outside life needed. This allowed a daily blending of “lay” and “monastic” life whereas the two extremes usually exist pretty independently. Sesshin is also really short so as soon as you're really settled it's over. But as I said 6 weeks is a long time.

All of this makes for a powerful reminder that practice is all the time. The practice period really helps establish practice as a daily habit and six weeks provides a good amount of momentum.

I really enjoyed participating and intend to go into some more detail about some aspects of it soon.

Silence Does Not Apply to Almonds

So Week 2 of Ango is underway and I'm really starting to get the feel for this tenzo thing.  I've made notes of some changes to menu items that need to be made and others items (especially some of my originals) have been wildly successful.

Monday, I inadvertently started the week off for everyone with a laugh during breakfast service.  I'd prepared quinoa, cottage cheese, and some frozen applesauce (care of Dale Kent, there's still more and it was tasty).  I figured we could use a little more texture so I toasted some almonds as well.

Now I've toasted almonds, cashews, and walnuts before but don't remember anything like this happening when I did.

So we're all sitting there at the table at 7:30 after two hours of meditation and a service.  My teacher, the ino, work leader, ino's assistant, jisha, visiting priest, a couple others and myself being all intense and focused for oryoki when we notice that the bowl of almonds are popping like rice crispies as they were cooling.  We each top our cottage cheese with a scoop and the bowl makes its way down the table.

Inside, I found this condiment's noisy irreverence, with all of us being so solemn, really funny and was trying not to smile about too much since my teacher was sitting to my right.  I thought I had it under control when the ino's assistant sitting right next to me on the left starts up with the giggles.  It was just too much and I had to snicker along with a few others.  I couldn't see my teacher's face but I'm sure she enjoyed it too.  They kept popping throughout the meal.

(I wish I could have been there for lunch when they ate the "So wonderfully mild gazpacho," as my teacher called it after dinner that night.  Two serrano chilies was one too many, it just got spicier as it sat in the fridge for three hours after I made it.  I said that I was glad "hot" was one of the Six Tastes and Three Virtues.)

What a way to start a Monday.

(I'm so lame...)

I'll have to write about my super exciting weekend receiving the precepts another time.  Plus I've gotta prepare for cooking a half day retreat for a bunch of Dharma Punx hosting Brad Warner.  It'll be cool to finally me him. Dunno how long he'll be in town though.

Two Months of Fun (?/!)

Ango started today and I'm not too sure what to expect out of this summer practice period so I'm trying not to expect anything.  It marks my first official assignment as tenzo (as far as I'm concerned, all the other stuff was a warm up).  I have full control over the kitchen as well as all planning and purchasing.

Since I can't take two months off (my supercool and exciting) job, I'll only be able to prepare breakfasts and a couple dinners during the week.  I've planned out all of the meals with the exception of two dinners a week and will coordinate purchasing and prep for all of them.

My activities this week will be limited in the evenings by Aikido since I have a test Thursday, and this weekend because my dad will be coming into town for the weekend for a visit and to attend my jukai ceremony (which I'll write about later).


It's an odd feeling with so much to do and no real choice about doing it.  It has to get done and I'm best qualified to do it.  I feel some resistance at times, it comes and goes.  The meals don't have to be fancy, people just need to get fed.  It's definitely far easier to do what I need to do when I'm in charge.  I've always been more comfortable as a second in command, just making sure nothing slips through the cracks, but it's good to be calling the shots and being successful.

By the time the sesshin rolls around the last week of June, everything should be running super smooth and should be a very different experience than the last two sesshin I worked. The previous retreats have had a huge buildup right before the start as we go from normal life to retreat life with meal planning and coordinating to do, but all of that anticipation will have been burned off by then, it already feels like a relief just to have it started.  All the meals for the whole practice period are oryoki, so by the final week I will have run through most of my recipes a couple times leaving no questions about prep, leaving me more mental space to just relax and enjoy it.

Every meal I prepare for the sangha feels like a session of zazen and after so many it feels so much more comfortable to slip into tomai sanmai (rice-washing samadhi)*.   It should be interesting to see what happens after  I've prepared the next 80 something meals in the Zen kitchen.

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*a new term I discovered that my girlfriend refers to as "cooking face."  Apparently I do a mean Bodhidharma impression while I'm cooking and have for years.  Virtual high-five to anyone who can find the kanji for "toumai sanmai"

Shaving Ice, One Hopper At a Time

My new job entails a lot of prep work, which I enjoy a great deal.  When you're a server there's side work to do that can be similar, but the biggest difference is that it's done on the side, as in while you're still waiting tables. 

In the kitchen, your attention is almost entirely on just what's in front of you.  In the dining room it's a little different. Waiting tables requires a lot more multitasking so the monotonous aspects of the side work require you to always keep your mind on your tables while you're doing it, forcing you to split your attention.  How un-Zen is that?

Now don't get me wrong, the way I did side work, at least in attitude, was altered by my practice, but it was still difficult to throw myself into cutting lemon wedges if I had to keep track of whether or not table 24's entree is up and if it was timed right that they're just finishing their appetizer so that I can use the same tray to bus those plates that I'm bringing the new food on.

In the kitchen there's a list.  It's always waiting, but nothing demands your attention more than the one item on that list you're doing now.  Everything else will be there for you when you're ready for it.  There's still a sense of urgency since you are getting paid by the hour and it's all got to be done before you can leave, but it's still just patiently awaiting its turn.

This is something I'd missed, fondly remembering assembling the collapsed boxes for chicken strips while watching the South Texas Sunset out a window at another job I held long ago.

I find myself peeling and deveining a lot of shrimp.  Today they were cooked first so I had to peel off their dorsal side and remove all the guts inside.  I noticed that as soon as I let my mind wander, what was supposed to go in the trash was going in with the shrimp, oops.  A split second was all that it took for me to make a mistake.

The restaurant I work at now serves oysters on the half shell, a lot of them.  So in anticipation for tonight's business I was asked to shave ice for their plating.  There's a sno-cone machine in the wonderfully brisk 32 degree walk in cooler where I stood for the better part of an hour cramming about a half gallon of ice at a time into the hopper and pushing down the frozen plunger.

I knew about how much I was going to need, but the cold was getting to me and my thinking mind kept going for ways of making the process go faster.  There was nothing I could do though as the hopper was only so big and it had to be loaded by hand each time.

Dishwasher and prep cook are usually the two entry level positions in a kitchen for a good reason.  The results of the work is usually taken for granted and almost always boring.  The skill level is relatively low and so is the pay.

But as I was grinding away, I wasn't reminded of the tenzo dutifully drying mushrooms in the hot sun because someone had to.  I was reminded instead of Huineng pounding away at rice for years until he realized the Truth.  I embraced it as an opportunity for enlightenment, not as just something that needed to get done.

After the first few minutes my arm and shoulder were getting tired from trying to push the plunger down from above my shoulders, so I relaxed and let my Aikido earn its keep by connecting with it and dropping my weight, letting the heaviness of my body do the work instead of my shoulder and upper arm.  This of course is connected with the breath and as I exhaled with each stroke, I saw each load as a breath and a moment in my life to be present in and enjoy.  So I did.

Every now and then that impatience popped up, prompted by the numbing cold in my fingers and diminishing amount left to do.  But I took a breath and enjoyed it, not only for the sake of enlightenment, but just because I could.

On the Clock Again, Finally

After nearly a year, I finally clocked into work today.  For the last two weeks I've been working on nailing down this job that I was told was a sure thing halfway through my first interview.  It's been a little bit of a rollercoaster to get it finalized as the management has been super busy, but today it was official.

My varied experience in the several jobs that I've more or less suffered through over the last 12 years will serve me well as versatility in this small kitchen is desired.  I couldn't have imagined a better fit for me.  Just to begin with the schedule is perfect, weekdays 10a-3/4p.  I'll still have time for Aikido and weekends for any obligations or activities at the Zen Center as well as weekends to spend with my girlfriend.  I have the option of picking up other shifts, but this is what they hired me for.

What I'm most excited about is seeing what effect my practice will have on job performance.  I'd just barely begun my adventure in sitting when I'd quit my last job and I'd seen a difference in how I dealt with other people and different situations but now I've been practicing intensely without the backdrop of the professional setting save the few lab classes at school and my cooking as tenzo which are a little different than "real life" kitchen work.

I'm excited to learn new things at this job and the management is excited to teach me.  It will be different than school though since I'm used to knowing more than my fellow classmates and am usually ahead of the curve.  Here I'm the only student so the pace will be faster and much more hands on.  There will be no time to fall behind.

The management is interested in food in the same ways that I am.  Learning new cuisines, techniques and ingredients isn't about knowing more than others or being cutting edge, they want to absorb the information because it's there, they want to experiment because they can.  Their explorations of vegetarian and vegan cooking is not to exclude meat but to see the things that pop up out of necessity in meatless cooking to share it with people who would otherwise shrug away from vegetarian meals.

Cooking in the Zen setting is different than professionally cooking as everyone is at least trying to keep their egos in check.  In the professional kitchen, the ego serves to get you noticed and is how you advance.  From what I've learned of this kitchen, that shouldn't be an issue as the crew is small and the management is most interested in team building so this should be a friendlier work environment.

Another thing I noticed while cleaning today is how long it's been since I spoke freely while doing kitchen work.  Zen kitchens are like zendos in that right speech functions not in total silence, but only on what is at hand.  It should be interesting to at least have the option of idle chatter to pass the time.

It's so odd, after nine months of off and on job hunting to be getting settled, that pressure is no longer there but I'm still squished from it sitting on my shoulders for so long.

Let's see what happens.

Epic Fail

Now that I've got the posting of my interview taken care of, I've got a lot of catching up to do.  Last weekend we had guests from several places come to stay at the Zen Center for a priest ordination.  They had to eat, so I answered the call to prepare a few meals for guests and residents.

In the almost twenty years that I've been cooking, half of that professionally, I've never cut myself with knife anything more than a scratch.  So within fifteen minutes of prepping for breakfast I dragged my knife across the tip of my finger, cutting deep. Of all the places and times for it to happen, it happened at the Zen Center, where cooking is emphasized as mindful practice. I'm professionally trained in various knife skills and even I managed to cut myself just slicing apples.  I wouldn't necessarily call it hubris, I was still being careful, but my mind drifted.  This served as a painful reminder that it doesn't matter how experienced you are, you always have to pay attention to what you're doing.

I disrespected my knife by not giving it my full attention and it bit me.

Knowing that the painful lessons are the ones that we're most likely to remember, I think (hope) that I learned my lesson.  A few days later as I was watching it heal, I wondered if it would leave a scar.  I've never been one for battle scars from the kitchen as many line cooks are, but I thought a permanent mark might be fitting as a reminder to remain present while cooking.

The thought of scarred fingers took me a few digits over to a mark on my index finger about an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide with three pairs of dots along side.  This is an old scar from my childhood that resulted from some poorly thought out creativity.

I used to make all kinds of things from the cardboard that came in my dad's laundered work shirts.  On this occasion I was trying to poke a hole in a piece with one blade of a pair of scissors.  I was successful in making the hole, but on the other side was the gap between my index and middle finger.  The gap wasn't wide enough for the blade to miss slicing my finger.

At first I thought it was just a scratch... until I moved the cardboard away.  There was so much blood!  Before my mind could make sense of it, there was blood all over the desk where I was sitting.  I'm not sure if it actually hurt as much as I thought it did at the time, but seeing that much of my own blood incited panic.

This happened at the school where my mom was teaching at the time, on the day before school started.  I know that she was in a meeting, but I don't remember all of the details between seeing the blood and sitting in the trauma room at the ER other than the pain and terror.  By the time the doctors came in to stitch me up, it'd worn off.  I don't remember if it still hurt, but I'd calmed down and was hoping it wasn't going to require stitches.

The cut was deep.  When the bleeding slowed and they cleaned the wound I could see through the layers of skin into the meat.  The doctors decided to skip injecting the local anesthetic and just poured it right in, saving me the added trauma before the sutures. 

Without the pain as a distraction, it had become a learning experience for me.  How often do you get closer than front row seats to a finger getting stitched back together?  It was interesting and made for a great story on the first day of school back from summer vacation.  Plus, on the way home from the hospital all I could think about was the sight of some poor second grader showing up for the first day of class to a dried pool of blood on his desk and floor.  (I was told later that it had been cleaned up shortly after we'd left for the hospital.)

It's weird how life teaches us lessons.  We're always supposed to learn from our mistakes and sometimes we do, but other times the point just doesn't get driven home enough.  Sometime life uses erosion and slowly etches the lesson in over time, but other times it cuts right to the chase and splits us right open.

I'm not sure if my recent cut will leave a scar, so its lesson may come and go.  What I do know is that I've sure watched where my fingers are before poking a blade through an object over the last twenty some years. 

It Is What It Is Because It Is What It Isn't, Isn't It?

Confused?

A lot of people think that Zen is supposed to be confusing, and it can be.  It's not intentional but pointing directly at the truth is very specific and precise.  So much so that until you actually experience, it won't feel true.  Maybe intellectually you can wrap your mind around it as being possible, but it won't feel true like gravity feels true, or pain, or the taste of fresh strawberries.

Words lay out the boundaries providing the frame for understanding, but without direct experience we can't see the picture within that frame.  The best we can do is describe it with metaphors, telling parables and stories of the moment of realizations of those who've come before.

For years, I'd read all these stories and metaphors, wrapping my mind around them but recently I've experienced my mind becoming them.  Something will fall into place and as I put together the words to describe it, I realize the descriptions already exist.  Not only do they exist, but they're pointing exactly to it.

It's like two people bird watching.  One spots a bird and tries to describe to the other where it is among the foliage.  Pointing directly at it, it remains unseen by the other.  "It's right there!" they exclaim. And of course, it is right there just waiting to be seen.  The second person may even be looking right at it, but not seeing it because of distracting foliage breaking up the bird's silhouette.

As I listened to Sojun Roshi's talk on the Middle Way that I wrote about last week, I heard things what he was saying but not always what he was telling me.  During the question and answer after the talk, I brought up my thoughts about things being just as much what they aren't as what they are and all that.

I knew he had been a painter earlier in his life so I brought up something related that I had struggled with years ago.  I mentioned that when I was studying fine arts, as I was developing my own "style," I struggled with portraying the figure and ground* as not being separate.  I became frustrated because, visually this is impossible.  By definition, the figure and ground have to be visually distinguishable or the canvas would be blank or at least a solid color.

This was an idea informed by my intellectual understanding of Zen and Taoism about the interconnectedness of everything, the lack of discrimination in an existential way.

After I'd said this, he told me I should try and go back to painting.  I realized at this advice, that Zen does not teach that reality is homogeneous, just that things are not separate.  The figure in a painting exists as figure because it is not the ground and vice versa, but the painting is nothing without them both.  The existence of the painting relies on the existence of the figure and the ground in relation to each other.  Every painting communicates this idea, we just don't see it even though we're looking right at it.

I could be dramatic and say it struck me like a bolt of lightning, but it wasn't like those Windows 7 commercials.  I wasn't suddenly prettier and surrounded by light with awe inspiring music in the background.  It was just the truth, as I'd been looking at it but never seeing it.

A few other examples of this came rolling out of my brain soon after this.

The first is very Taoist, in fact it's a whole chapter from the Tao Te Ching.  A cup only functions as a cup because of the absence of material inside, such is the hole for the spoke of a wheel as well.

Another that goes back to my own artistic bent is that of flavor.  When cooking, everything has some sort of flavor. Those that are successful at composing new flavors rely just as much on what they include as what flavors they exclude.  The true flavor of a well marbled piece of beef relies on not smothering it with butter or barbecue sauce or even ketchup.  Some foods call for this, and sometimes even a nice piece of beef.  But in true flavor composition, these things need to be recognized.

Speaking of composition, music is the same way.  A song is just as much the rests between notes as it is the notes themselves.  Take out the pauses and the song is no longer the same song.

I could go on like this forever, but it doesn't matter.

This seems to be one of the problems with promoting enlightenment experiences, satori or kensho.  You convince someone they're looking for something in particular when it's right in front of them the whole time, they might not recognize it when they actually see it.

Ever been in a situation similar to the bird watching one above?  As the second person, you finally see what you're looking for and get upset with the directions towards whatever's being pointed to?  "Oh, that right there!  That doesn't look like one of those, you should have said it looked like this right next to that."

Get the picture?  Look for yourself, if you keep looking you'll see it.  Remember that others can only point from where they're standing, sometimes perspective gets skewed.  Their descriptions might not make sense now, but when you no longer need them, they will.

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*The figure is whatever you're supposed to be looking at while the ground is what is behind the figure.  Optical illusions usually play on this interaction with an effect called "figure-ground reversal."  This phenomena inspired my desire to eliminate this confusion.

Contagious Calmness

So, I've still got it.

One of the classes I'm taking right now is called A La Carte.  It's really fun and easy (although sometimes frustrating) for those of us with industry experience. (A lot of my fellow students have never worked, or honestly will ever be able to hack it, in real restaurants)

Basically the class is divided into four groups of 4-6 people and we rotate staffing each portion of a restaurant at school.  People can come and have a student prepared six course lunch served to them by students for only $10 per person.  Each group rotates through hot station, cold station, dish pit, and service staff with the teacher, who actually is one, serving as chef.  One of the added benefits for us industry pros is that the chef allows one of us to serve as sous-chef and expediter each class.

This position in a classically structured French kitchen using the brigade system is the chef's first officer.  The sous-chef, or "under-chef" serves as a go between for the chef and staff, making sure things get done.  In most kitchens during service time they act as expediter, taking orders from the waitstaff and communicating them to the kitchen then staging them for service and finishing them off by wiping plates and adding garnish.

This is what I got to do today.  I've wanted to be expediter at just about every restaurant that I've worked in, but even though it takes a slightly different skill set than other positions, I was never taken seriously or believed in since I don't excel in back of the house* positions.

At school we don't have fancy computers to print out tickets so each server turns in a ticket for each table's order all at once.  Normally each course has a separate ticket that goes out with the food.  Instead the servers ask for each course to be "fired" and the expediter relays that to whatever station is responsible for that course.  The station then prepares it and puts it in the "window" which is a shelf between them and the expediter.  The expediter then wipes any drips and dresses the plate with any garnish to "sell" it in their own window between them and the servers or food runners.

Doesn't sound all that hard, does it?  Well, tickets come in constantly as well as servers coming back on top of each other to fire different courses.  Sometimes there are modifiers to an item, such as no bacon, a vegetarian substitution, or desired doneness.  The expediter will "add on" another number of items to a station and the station will call back the order to confirm.  If a certain number of items has already been called and more need to be added, the expediter will add on the new number and then add that to whatever has been already called, letting the station know how many they need "all day."

The expediter has to keep straight what's been fired and what hasn't yet, what's been sold to them and to what table it's going.  Sometimes servers make mistakes and need an order "on the fly," or they have to go back to the table to let their guest know we're out of something because it wasn't sufficiently communicated to them that an item was "86'd" because the kitchen is out of it.  There's all kind of slang that will put you "in the weeds" if you don't learn it quickly.  On top of all that, in the real world, kitchens are a cesspool of machismo and trash talking is the vernacular. If you can't hold your own, the kitchen won't respect you and they'll still make work near impossible. It can get hectic.

I had five servers each with about three tables each ranging from one to eight people, which I was told was the most we'd had all semester. I think we served 37 people.   Every one did a really good job and we got it done without any serious problems.

The thing that really pleased me was something that I hadn't heard in more than five years.  Before he left, the chef thanked me for doing such a great job and keeping a cool head.  The expediter has to have the strongest personality in the kitchen to keep things in control and he noted how well lunch service went despite issues in the dining room and the volume we did.

Back in the day, when I worked in a "quick service restaurant" (QSR, that's industry-speak for fast food.  Seriously, there's even a trade magazine by that title) I really knew what I was doing.  First of all, it wasn't really that complicated, but it was a lot of stuff to do and the volume a QSR can do during a weekday lunch can be insane.  If all the pieces don't fall into place, it's very possible for it all to come crashing down.  People freak out about irate customers, the grill person can lose count of how many patties are on the grill, there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong.

In my four and a half years of dedicated service, I had confidence in my ability. I take pride in my work and it showed.  I'd show up with a job to do and the intent to get it done.  Stuff happens, I'd push through it.  Freaking out isn't going to fix anything.  There were shifts where Murphy's Law was proved accurate and I just kept going.  I had several managers over the years tell me that I was like a calming influence on the crew. The freaking out would begin, I'd come up from that first drive thru window (it's actually referred to as the "bubble") to help out and everything would calm down.

I enjoyed the work, it didn't pay well enough for me to stick around any longer, but I do miss it sometimes. Working the drive thru, I'd have nearly 120 brief conversations with interesting guests everyday.  Through my back window I got to watch many South Texas sunsets.

The difference between that and what happened today was that back then my confidence was based on experience.  I knew the limits and all the variables, and I could do the work. I knew I could because I already had.  Today my confidence was a little of that, but it was mostly just guts.  There were a few times when I'd look down at the tickets and couldn't remember what they hell I'd called for or sold or anything.  I'd take a breath and attack the situation one thing at a time.

The funny thing about this was during my last dokusan ** this past Tuesday, my teacher asked me about whether or not I was paying any attention to my practice while at school.  Sure, I find myself correcting my posture or watching my breath, focusing on just what I'm doing in front of me, but these aren't really new things.  I enjoy what I do at school, so I'm usually pretty focused.  It was a difficult question to answer.

But that question Tuesday really primed my mind to be aware of what was going on when the going got tough today and it was nice.  I didn't have the option to freak out and just run away, I mean I did.. but not really.  I had to just keep going, and I did.

Keeping your head in a situation, especially one where everyone around you is losing it, can really impact how things will pan out.  I really feel this is one of the best ways my practice shines in my life.  This is the Bodhisattva  way and saving all beings really does start with yourself.  By improving my ability to keep my cool, I've saved others from losing it.  The effort really pays off.

So keep two things in mind.

The first, next time you go out to eat, whether full service or just the drive thru, yeah the people working there may be idiots screwing everything up, but it's a tough job that a lot of people don't appreciate. Be nice to them, pissing off the people that feed you is never a good idea.***  Food service professionals work long hard hours in hot cramped quarters so that others can enjoy a nice meal before heading to the movies with their sweetie after making probably better money sitting in an air conditioned office in a nice comfy chair crunching numbers on a computer.

Second, be mindful of how your attitude affects those around you.  It can be pretty easy to just go with the flow and let it all go to hell, but with just a little effort you can turn it all around.  Even if no one else realizes it or appreciates, you'll know. 

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*"Back of the house" refers to the kitchen, while "front of the house" refers to the dining room.  Traditionally the maître d’hôtel, "master of the hotel/house"or maître d' for short, is responsible for the front and the
chef de cuisine, or "boss (chief) of the kitchen" is responsible for the kitchen with various other chefs under him.

*** While spitting in food or other such childish things are actually considered food tampering and a felony, there are things they can do that can't be prosecuted.  Orders do honestly get mixed up, but not all the time, fixing it takes time and even if it's comped you're never getting that time back.  What time did that show start again?  Do you still have time to eat your food before you have to get back to the office?
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Forgot to mention post at Dangerous Harvests with a similar theme that I enjoyed.  I know I never seem to mention anybody else, but it just happens that way

New Opportunities

So after my "fantastic" weekend, some awesome opportunities opened up for me.

The first I didn't know about until yesterday, but actually happened Friday.  Andy, author of the Bayou City Buddhist invited me to join in on the Buddha bus at the Bayou Buddhist Houston Belief site.  Of course I said yes, so that's in the works right now. <<<EDIT: It's up now>>

The second, and somewhat expected but still exciting, was the first leadership meeting we had at the dojo concerning the future developments my teacher wants to make for the school.  Lots of volunteering for various things occurred, one of the more notable for me that of dealing with organizing food for our parties.  The other was formally signing up to be instructors for private lessons as well as administrative duties, which should bring me some much needed cash.  We also intend to have Zen meditation to complement our class occasionally, so I was volunteered to (help?) organize that due to my experience.  So all of that's pretty exciting.

The last has to do with business at the zendo.  The Rohatsu Sesshin is coming up in December and me being without a job/money wanted to see if there was something I could do in exchange to be allowed to attend.  Seeing as I have yet to even attend a 1 day sitting, I though offering my services in the kitchen would be a nice transition into such intensive practice.  Since the preparation and service of food is formal practice as well, I won't really be missing out on anything but a little extra boredom and aching legs.

My offer was received with great enthusiasm.  It turns out the tenzo has held the position for two years and done most of the work all by himself so an assistant would be wonderful.  I was told today that someone had provided a scholarship for me to attend.  I kind of thought they came from the community as a whole, but it seems like I have an anonymous sponsor.  If that's the case, I may have a feeling as to who it is but know if they wanted me to know, I would so I'll just be grateful to the community at large.

I've also been asked to help in the kitchen for a couple other occasions before the sesshin that won't be as formal so I jumped at those as well out of gratitude and the opportunity for experience.

So once again, I'm grateful for the generosity of the communities I find myself a member of, inspiring me to return the favor.

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I also applied for a job yesterday that I'm pretty excited about, but won't know anything about that for a little while

Vow for the September Moon

So today has been the September full moon.  I didn't do too bad last month and finished up only tossing some milk and a handful of grapes.  A couple stalks of celery almost didn't make it, but I sliced them up and pickled them by packing them in aka miso for a day.  I hadn't tried that before, but it was pretty good.

New month, new vow, fortunately, it was an easy decision. 

Since I haven't been running around waiting tables all summer, my activity level has not matched my caloric intake.  On top of that one of my classes was Plated Desserts, so yeah, that was healthy.  Plus, in keeping with last months vow, I had to eat things to keep them from going bad.

So this month, for my benefit and my girlfriend's benefit ("about time," she'd say) I'm going to watch what we eat.  This is essentially an attempt to live the fifth Grave Precept the way I see it: to not pollute the mind, body, or environment. 

We have the added benefit of me being enrolled in a class called Principles of Healthy Cuisine, so this should be easy.  I've already made progress through some of last month with cooking more often.  But a big help is thanks due to the federal government.

While I'm not the last person to get up and defend what the government does for us, I'm certainly not the first, but they've provided an unbelievably good service to citizens with MyPyramid.gov.  Everyone should go here and check it out.

While it's not news to me that a meal should include a starch, vegetable, and a protein, I wasn't really doing the balance right.  I've decreased the protein portions greatly, increased the veggies, and paid more attention to how much butter and oil I add.  Sometimes I'm even lucky enough to throw some fruit in there as well.

It's important for people to remember that lowering your caloric intake instead of increasing your physical activity is not an acceptable substitute.  You have to move to burn fat and if you don't, you trick your body into slowing your metabolism down.  This actually causes more weight gain when you lapse in your diet than if you'd just skipped the diet completely.  And on top of that you have to reset your metabolism in addition to everything else.

We'll see how it goes as I try to keep up last months commitment and implement this months.

Just Keep Swimming...

Last week I started a new semester at school, hopefully my second to last. The week before that I had finals for the summer semester. While I passed everything, the summer still had its way with me and I still have room for improvement.

I've started looking at my classes a little differently now, though. Rather than just trying to pass them, I'm trying to make myself stand out for my teachers since I would like teach there myself some day. My original hope was to get a lab assistant job this semester so I wouldn't have to get a real job before doing my co-op in the spring, but that didn't work out.

Basically a culinary lab assistant does stuff any other lab assistant would do, except it's with food. They worry about sorting and organizing requisitions so that all the raw product is ready for the students to cook. While I would like this experience, it was really more of a way to get my foot in the door for further employment.

Now I'm taking a class in which we we form teams that take turns working different spots in the kitchen and dining room for a "restaurant" that serves the public. This class also has a teaching assistant to help some in the dining room which is starting to appeal to me.

After our first "practice" run, I see that this class should be interesting. My patience has been tested in many classes by inexperienced or lazy students that won't step up and let/make me do all the work. Some of my fellow classmates have never worked in kitchens, let alone dining rooms, so tt was something else to watch their nervous faces stumble with just what's really expected of them. Having done both, with far more experience waiting tables, I made the comment of not knowing whether it would be better knowing what I know and seeing where we were failing (and probably frustrating myself trying to help) or being oblivious to all this and struggle with my own confusion.

While I can hold my own in the kitchen, after years of dealing with guests as a server, I'm far more comfortable in the dining room. But even experienced servers get several days of training before being let loose on the public and we only have one more practice run before that happens.

This will be a great opportunity for me to practice patience as well as an opportunity to endear myself to the instructor. I'm hoping my experience and performance will help me if I decide to apply for the lab assistant position again.

All of this time, I've been wanting to teach things I'm somewhat passionate about, like food safety and sanitation or purchasing. I hadn't even considered how rare dining room management skills are for a chef or culinary instructor. Most instructors have only done tours of duty in the kitchen. While the chef occasionally makes their way to the dining room, it's usually a toss up until they face the guest as to whether the experience will be an ego stroke or savage complaint. (people are always trying to get stuff for free)

Customer service stops at the kitchen door for almost every kitchen position. Anything more than that makes up the nightmares of cooks. The next time you eat somewhere, especially fast food, pay attention to who's cooking and who's taking your order and ponder how different your experience would be if they switched.

When I worked in fast food, they always wanted girls to take orders since they should be natural hostesses able to soothe angry guests. The guys were always hidden away, cooking the food fitting the fast food employee stereotype a little too well. As soon as it was known that I had cash handling skills and could actually be polite, I was shoved behind a cash register, which I enjoyed infinitely more.

(The irony of this was that my next job, I applied to be server, but they shoved me in the kitchen due to my "experience" cooking. While this was a ridiculous and frustrating pay cut, I don't regret the experience.)

In fairness, all this may leave me coming off as arrogant, that I know so much more than my classmates, but I've got more than 10 years experience working almost every type of food service. On top of that I've been taking two years worth of culinary classes over the last five years with my poor attendance and incomplete homework being the only things keeping me from finishing. I may not have the motivation of some of the others, but I'm also not fresh out of high school. I should have graduated already and be teaching by now. I know my flaws that stopped me and that's what I'm working on now.

So I'll push on, with my head up and see what happens. Most of them are good kids and I'll enjoy sharing my experience and confidence with them, watching them grow as the semester progresses.

What Do I Cook?

There are a couple comments and questions I always get when I tell someone I'm a culinary student.

The first is usually, "Oh, so you want to open your own restaurant?" I don't really get this one. People don't ask law students if they want to start their own firm, or teaching students if they want to open their own schools.

In case you were wondering, no, I don't want my own restaurant. I don't even want to work in restaurants anymore, I have other goals. While Anthony Bourdain gives most of my reasons in wonderful, thought out, and colorful language not to own a restaurant in his now classic book, Kitchen Confidential, I really don't like the hours any more.

Another big question I get is "What do you like to cook?" I like to cook everything. I certainly have preferences, but they change all the time. Three main influences though: how much does it cost, how big of a mess does it make, and how long will I be standing in the kitchen.

I also don't like the perception that people, especially those preparing "home cooking," tend to think their cooking isn't good enough for me, that somehow I won't like it because it's "simple." That's far from the truth. A lot of care usually goes into preparing it and that comes through in the taste.

I like to explore other cultures through food. But with all the various techniques and ingredients, spices are the easiest to keep on hand for variety in the kitchen.

The most common things I do usually involve either pasta or rice, chicken, some vegetables and some sort of sauce. Just any culture you look at will have some variation of this and just the sauce ingredients determine its origin.

One annoying thing about making things up is people always want to know what you call it. Why does it have to have a name? Does it taste good? That's all that matters.

A lot of people find cooking intimidating, but they shouldn't. People have been cooking for millennia. In times like these, cooking is a very useful skill to have for yourself because it will save you money and allow you to control the nutritional value. If you have everything prepared before you actually start cooking, it can be enjoyable. Cut up all your produce and meat, have everything in front of you so you won't need to look around for some ingredient you forgot and accidentally burn something. This definitely includes reading a recipe a couple times and having it in front of you.

Cooking is definitely an art, but not everyone has to be a Picasso. It doesn't have to be complicated and difficult to understand. All that matters is that it tastes good. Just as any child can pick up a paintbrush and paint a nice picture, to some extent, anyone can take a few ingredients and prepare something tasty. You may not be super successful the first couple times, but confidence is just as much an ingredient as anything else. As long as you don't burn it, there's only so much damage you can do that will end up with something inedible.

So start simple, think it out, and have confidence. Don't be hard on yourself, it's an adventure and a journey so enjoy it.

Understated Job

So I mentioned Dogen's work the Tenzo Kyokun before. I also complained about the accuracy of the title's translation.

From what I've read about temples and knowing what I do about kitchens, I really don't find "cook" an appropriate translation of tenzo. The only literal translation I've seen is "heavenly monk," but that's from Wikipedia. The tenzo is an officer of the temple in charge of the kitchen, this makes him by definition chef , which is the French word for boss. (also visible cognates: English "chief", or Spanish "jefe") His job is multi-faceted and I'm sure anyone who has served as tenzo would agree that they do more than just cook.

Most people have come to understand an abbreviated role of what it means to be a chef. They think all the chef is responsible for is coming up with the menu and taking credit for the success of a restaurant. This is only where it begins.

The day to day life of a chef is far more than that, a real chef at least. People think culinary students go to school to learn how to cook the classics and make stuff up. I've even worked in kitchens where the staff resented their boss because corporate policy gave them the title of chef even though they'd not made up the menu or been to school. In some restaurants, this position of chef is called the kitchen manager, and my training in culinary school is essentially for that purpose. While we do take cooking classes, we also take classes on management of people, product and money, purchasing, and safety and sanitation.

One of the things covered in most classes is the flow of the food. Purchasing is a little complicated so I'll leave it out, but food comes in the back door. The chef is usually responsible himself for checking to make sure everything he ordered is there and up to the standard it should be. (not all food purveyors are as reputable as they should be... but the same goes for some chefs. anything to make a profit) In a traditional temple, all this shows up in the form of offerings if it's not grown by the monks themselves so they don't get to be picky.

Dogen covers this in the Tenzo Kyokun:

"Without worrying about their quality, simply make the best of what you have. It is prohibited to show your feelings or say anything about the amount of ingredients."

"Even when, for example, one makes a soup of the crudest greens, one should not give rise to a mind that loathes it or takes its lightly; and even when one makes a soup of the finest cream, one should not give rise to a mind that feels glad and rejoices in it... Even when confronted with poor ingredients, there is no negligence whatsoever; even when faced with scanty ingredients, one exerts oneself."

Yeah, that's part of the whole accepting without prejudice and unattachment thing. They don't have customers that can vote with their feet about how the price of the food doesn't add up to the quality. There's a saying, "The mouth of a monk is like a furnace, Just as a furnace burns both sandalwood and cow shit without distinction, our mouths should be the same, eating rich and plain food as food. We should use whatever we receive." You can't put that on a wall to point at everytime a guest complains.

Another task layed out by Dogen for the tenzo is to mindfully count all the monks that need to eat and prepare just enough food to feed them and not have any left over. He lists all the places monks may be hiding to check so that nobody goes hungry.

In a professional kitchen, this is a little trickier. Until you've been in business for a while, you can't really predict how much volume (or business, in non-industry speak) to expect for each meal. There are a lot of factors to consider: day of the week, season, weather, holidays and other local events. While there isn't such a strong imperative on not having left overs and sometimes items do sell out, unsold product is loss of money.

These are just two things a chef and a tenzo have to deal with and there hasn't even been any cooking yet. There are other similarities such as how to treat food and such, but I can save that for another time.

Enlightenment?

A thought that has struck me as odd concerning "enlightnement" is that the popular view, and from what I can tell, the view among some Buddhist traditions, is that once you have it, you have it. How can this make sense in an ideology that above all else, stresses the impermanence of everything?

I find myself practicing, and I guess following, the Soto lineage of zen which seems to place the least emphasis on the concept of enlightenment. I think the Soto way is the most fundamental bare-bones form of Buddhism in the way that handles concepts like this. In barely feeling comfortable in going over this, keep in mind, this is just how I understand these things right now, and don't consider myself in anyway authoritative.

The main expression of practice is zazen, which is seated meditation. You sit there facing a wall trying not to think. There's no real goal or focus, you just try to keep your mind from latching on to the thoughts that pop up. From all its being called a "natural state," it sure doesn't seem so. The purpose is to stay in the moment and not let our minds wander to thoughts of the past or future. I guess as advanced social creatures, our minds try to use the downtime to build a structure of reality around the present to give us a sense of security.

This sense of security is false, though. We can't revisit the past, and just as our prejudices cloud our view of the present, they further cloud our views of the past every time we recall them. Thoughts of the future are even more dubious because we haven't even seen what will happen. So seeing through this illusion could be called enlightenment, but you have to actually experience it, understanding it as a concept is not enough anymore than understanding that sugar is sweet lets you taste it in its absence.

Letting go of that security is usually referred to as an aspect of Buddhism's "unattachment." The present happens on its own and will never happen like the past again. (Like the metaphor of never being able to put your foot in the same river twice.) So, if practiced honestly, zazen can be seen as enlightenment itself even if thoughts pop up, because you are expressing the impermanence of the moment by letting thoughts go.

Now sitting is not the only time we're supposed to practice this, but it is good exercise in that we minimize distraction to build up our ability to make it easier to find that state when we're most in need like stressful situations.

How can I relate this to food? Well take the metaphor of the perfect meal. Think of the best meal you've ever had. Not just the taste of the food, but everything: the atmosphere, the people (or lack thereof) you enjoyed it with... Did it eclipse all the stress of your day so far, or compliment how wonderful it was going?

Now consider this: it will never happen again. No matter how hard you try, you can't orchestrate all those circumstances again, and even if you could, you would still be hampered by your expectations of how awesome it was the first time.

If we back up a bit, and limit the example to just the food, there's a reason we use the word "best." By definition, it can't be equaled, and to top it would rob it of that quality.

Your favorite food wouldn't stay that way if you ate it all the time, either. So, if enlightenment is the perfect meal, each meal is a moment in time, and we of course want each meal to be the best ever, we can't compare one meal to another. If breakfast was too awesome for words, and lunch doesn't live up to it in comparison, not only will the experience of lunch be tainted, but we'll lose some of the sparkle from breakfast. We might as well not even eat lunch if we're hoping dinner will be better or even compare to breakfast. What happens if breakfast the next day is awful? What will we expect lunch to be like? In the restaurant industry it's said that you're only remembered by someone for the last meal you served them.

Is this making sense? Just as we consume meals, we consume moments. Some moments leave us feeling empty and unsatisfied. Some over stuff us with pleasure until we want to burst. Comparing the present to the past or the future doesn't make sense since we can't re-eat a meal once it's complete or before its prepared. Our only hope of happiness is to consume the present moment without comparison and enjoy it for what it is. That right there is what I've come to understand is enlightenment.

And as far as enlightenment being permanent. We can't eat the same meal forever. Some meals may inspire similar feelings as others, but each time it will still be a different meal. Does this cheapen the meaning of enlightenment? I don't think so. I think it makes it more precious and not so exotic as to seem unattainable.

Birthday.. yay

Thursday was my birthday. I don't usually like to make a big deal out of it. It's just another day to me, personally, but everybody else tries to make it more, so I usually get stuck thinking bigger thoughts about it.

I mentioned how I wasn't really looking forward to it when I was last at the Zen Center and was told it makes for a good practice to contemplate my mortality. Not the best thing to think about, but necessary and it got me thinking about how I really feel about my birthday.

I know I tell myself thinking about my birthday makes me feel older, but when I really think about it, I don't. I think it's me just buying into what other people say. Fundamentally, I feel the same everyday, even if I understand I'm different each moment. Why do we have to use years to mark the passage of our lives? When I sit in practice, minutes and seconds seem to be all that matters as the pain builds in my legs.

I think I'm just in the habit of regretfully celebrating my birthday because I never really felt a sense of accomplishment for the year. Yeah, looking over each year, there were things I got done and made progress with, but the last year I actually did things I can count as successes and milestones.

Restarting Aikido, I earned two ranks, bumping myself to gokyu. I feel I've made a successful commitment making it a substantial part of who I am. I also started the zen practice I've been toying with for several years, making it a daily habit and helping to give some definition to what I believe and how I see the world, as well as reaping some benefits I've mentioned before.

I think the biggest thing as far as life in the "real" world is my success with school. I got back into culinary school after being kicked out of another for two years of awful attendance. Not only did I successfully complete the term, but I earned myself straight A's which I don't think I've ever, ever done.

So maybe next year's birthday will have a little more celebration to it. By this time next year, I should have graduated and gotten a real job. I'll be paying back student loans, but I'll be done with school by thirty.

Speaking of food and celebration, though. I was more or less dragged to dinner by my girlfriend and a friend of hers for my birthday and thankfully I did take the initiative and chose where. One of the classes I'm taking right now is Charcuterie, which to those that don't know, is basically the production of any meats ground or cured. It originally was a cuisine based on necessity, using all the parts of the animal westerners don't usually consider edible, mostly the different organs. These days, it's kind of frowned upon by most westerners since it's usually cured at temperatures in what's referred to as the "danger zone" which is between 40 and 130 degrees where bacteria is able to thrive. It's making a comeback as a dying art, so I'm pretty interested.

I think it's great because it's a respectful way to treat an animal, you don't just take the steaks and chops and bacon and toss the rest as dog food or compost. It helps to fully appreciate the gift of a creature's life. The fact that it usually tastes great is just a bonus.

Most of charcuterie items I've had were of the more refined type, prosciutto, serano ham, terrines and fois gras, but the restaurant we went to was more rustic and I had pork cheek and black pudding for the first time. The pork cheek was served with marinated wild mushrooms and had a texture that pretty much resembled that, kind of like a pickled portabella mushroom. The black pudding was a little more extreme a food. Black pudding is basically a sausage but it gets it's color by using the coagulants in blood as a binder instead of pork fat as its binder to hold it together. Having never had it before, I can only assume it was good and that it just wasn't something I really enjoy. Fat in sausage definitely has a better, more moist, feel in the mouth. The black pudding was a little drier, but at least I can say I've tried it.

Sorry to any vegetarians who might take disgust, but I don't have a problem eating critters and feel grateful for their gift. I'll talk about that some other time.

Happy birthday to me

Why Cooking?

To contrast the theme of my first post, I'd like to go over what I like about cooking and why I chose food as a career (still not sure if it chose me, though).
For one thing, I really like to cook on a personal level... or rather, I like to be able to cook, there are definitely days I don't want to cook. Analysis of cooking ranges from the primal idea of throwing some meat on a fire and provide for yourself and family to the scientific ideas of what actually happens on a chemical level.

I think everyone should know how to cook a a few specific things. Having to rely on others for sustenance is a crutch. Not everyone should have to cook for themselves anymore than everyone should have to build their own houses or fix their own cars, but complete ignorance is just a sad thing.

As far as cooking for others, I find it can be a very intimate gift. People need food, water, and air as basic minimums for survival, so to provide one of those can feel pretty good.

I enjoy working with food in general, both serving people and cooking for them. Serving provides many different things. Everyday you meet new people and never know what to expect either good or bad. The good is, well, good; the bad provides an opportunity to grow, to be a/the better person rather than take it personally. Every interaction is a unique opportunity.

Cooking food professionally is a different story, though. There's a reason kitchens use a brigade system modeled on the military. A kitchen functions as a crew and the conditions are usually hot, wet, and greasy with fire and sharp objects all around. The satisfaction derived from working a shift in the kitchen is also very different. You prepare and get slammed, then you get to clean up after, unless you work as a team everything will fall apart. Not everybody likes each other, and some are better than others, but everyone is necessary and everyone has to deal with it and can form a good bond.

They each have their drawbacks, though. You can't always depend on the money from waiting tables like you can getting paid hourly in the kitchen, but it's less monotonous than working in a kitchen. You also rarely get to see the satisfaction your guests receive from what you've prepared for them when you work in the kitchen.

But I still enjoy it.

Discipline and New Habits

Since I set this thing up a couple days ago and haven't really done anything with it, I guess my first post should be about discipline. This ties in nicely with my zen practice, culinary school.. and well, a lot of other things in my life.

One of the reasons I'm still in culinary school after four plus years is due to a lack of discipline. I missed a lot of class the first couple years so I had to repeat a lot. I don't want to make excuses anymore and it doesn't really matter anyway, but discipline was pretty much the problem. It was too easy for me to make excuses that I could accept as suitable reasons to either just stay home, drive all the way there and not get out of my car, or just drive around. I've dealt with this for waaaay too long, but I'm fairly confident I've broken that habit. I didn't see it as being lazy, because I really struggled with it. I cared that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing, I was just better at making and accepting my own excuses.

And habit was a big part of it. For many years I've halfheartedly looked for some sort of meditation practice to incorporate into my daily life. I'd tried different moving and sitting forms of meditation, but never really stuck with it. I knew the benefits of such things from my previous experience with aikido. Most of it's benefits were from focusing and staying in the moment, but I had trouble taking those things off the mat into daily life. And of course the reason that was my previous experience is because once I started to lose interest, I gradually stopped going. It had been a hobby, but not yet a habit yet. Every time I was given another chance, I'd psych myself up that it'd be different this time, but I just wasn't able to follow through.

So what's different? What changed that allowed me to make new habits and break the old ones? Now that I think about it, it's not all that obvious. I think the credit rests with resuming Aikido. Last summer, I found a book (not in a store to be bought, but in a box in the woods, but that's another story) called Zen in the Martial Arts. I'd set it aside for a while but read it eventually and it got my interest back up to get back into Aikido. I'd never really lost interest in it entirely, it always kind of stuck with me and colored my worldview in some way, but now I realized I actually had the time to train. The instructor at the dojo I found required a one year commitment, which I did hesitate to commit to (fear isn't really the right word, but in sense it is appropriate).

Over the first few months I had some frustrations, but stuck with it since I was in for the year. Now I've always felt the need to share things I learn with people, mostly as a courtesy to what I've learned, so I've always respected people who teach. But I think the most important lesson I could ever learn was when my teacher told me that there were days she didn't feel like teaching us, but she did because that was the commitment she'd made.

I don't know why that had the effect on me that it did. Of course it was to be expected of her, she's only human; no one could be expected to really want to do anything four days a week with almost no break for years on end no matter how much they enjoyed it. But for some reason, this acknowledgment really struck a chord. I became more aware of the years of effort and dedication to reach that point and that without all of that she would not be in the position to teach us.

As someone who habitually adjusts interests time after time, this sort of dedication was brought into a new light. I couldn't help but see this revelation in the other parts of my life, my teachers at school for example, but not just them: anyone who was any kind of authority on anything had made the conscious decision to commit and follow through with it.

About this same time, I was reading an awesome book, Zen Heart by Ezra Bayda. I credit this book with me actually beginning my practice and will talk about that more some other time. My point, though, is that here was another person who'd dedicated themselves to something that hit home in me somehow. I'd put off actual practice for so long, but this book inspired me in a practical way to make the commitment myself.

Now there were other reasons to do it, and they are all legit, but in an idealistic move I cut my hair about as short as I could tolerate to mark this commitment. I'd needed something concrete that I couldn't ignore and it seemed an appropriate way to mark my commitment to my new life and new practice.

Now whenever I'd scratch my head in wonder about doing what I'm supposed to do, I get that nifty scratchy reminder. Plus, about once a month, I have to renew that commitment by cutting my hair again.

But discipline... yes, back to that. I had started sitting in the evening after my girlfriend went to bed, and that was fine for about a month. It was calming and became a little habitual. I followed what was laid out in Zen Heart for practice until I was able to take a free intro class at the local zen center. I've always been an evening person, but after sitting once early one morning, I learned how sitting can affect my day. I was actually somewhat awake and motivated.

I was fortunate enough to be given a scholarship for a deeper six week intro class to sitting meditation a month later and applied my new perspective on teachers and commitment. Here were two people teaching this class who had dedicated themselves to this life sharing their experiences with me, and on top of that, they had agreed to share it with me without charge. I had to take this seriously to honor this as a gift. It definitely paid off.

I committed myself to get up an hour earlier than I was accustomed to sit for twenty minutes everyday. For anyone who hasn't sat zazen, it's more than you'd think. Just sitting for twenty minutes? How hard can it be? It's pretty tough not just mentally, but physically as well. Discipline is needed to keep from stopping when it starts to hurt or when you get bored. Rather than have a watch in front of me and decide on a time I'd stop. I set a timer and refuse to look at it. I won't move until it goes off so there's no, "eh, that's close enough to twenty minutes.."

Sitting is so simple, and it's a great way to build discipline, among other things. I make the commitment and there's nothing else to do until the time is up. After six months, it has become a habit, and one that spills over into other parts of my life. Gotta go to school? Just go, it's more exciting than just sitting there, and I'm supposed to do it anyway. After enough days not missing: new habit! Don't feel like scooping the litter box, washing dishes, doing laundry? Won't take more than twenty minutes, and my legs won't hurt after doing it.

So the irony of the title of this blog and the title of this post: did I have everything I needed already? Did I have discipline? Well, no... I didn't, not then, but the past is the past. I've learned my lessons, and now, in the present, I do have more discipline than I did. I definitely had the seeds before, otherwise I would have just been lazy without a care of whether or not I did what I was supposed to do. So in a way I did have what I needed already, just not at that present, it was waiting for me in the future to learn my lessons and then I would be ready.

What an ungodly long way to make a point, but before starting this, I didn't have anything at all. So here's to new habits.