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Showing posts from May, 2017

Please Don't Step on My Sacred Shoes

     I've owned the same pair of running shoes for about 5 years.  I bought them in preparation for an obstacle race that I was running, and they've served me well ever since.  We've worked on farms together, swam across lakes, and pedaled endless miles on bike trails and country roads.  In short, my shoes and I have been through a lot over the years, and I guess you could say we've bonded as a result.  That being said, it's becoming clear that our relationship will soon be coming to an end.  The rubber soles are slowly falling apart, and tiny holes are forming in the cloth uppers.  It's not a good look.  And I should've bought a new pair months ago, but a combination of cheapness and sentimentality have caused me to hold off for the time being.      I remember when I first entered a Zen center and carelessly kicked my shoes off by the door.  I came back after practice to find that they'd been placed side by side against the wall with my laces t

The Zen of Long Road Trips

     My eyelids are getting heavy as I drive down the interstate.  It's been a long weekend of college graduations, and late-night parties with family.  It was fun.  But the lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me.  I try all of the usual tricks to stay awake.  I roll down the windows, play loud music, and consume energy drinks until my chest burns.  But none of it helps.  I do some quick math, and calculate that I have about 3 more hours on the road before I get home.  There's no way I'll make it at this rate, so I make the decision to pull over and take a nap.      But this leads to a new problem.  Where am I supposed to pull over?  It's illegal to sleep on the side of the highway.  I'm not above catching some rest in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but my GPS says that there aren't any nearby.  In fact, there isn't much of anything nearby.  I'm traveling through a stretch of country where the landscape is dominated by forests and abandoned farms.

How Tipping 20% Became My Spiritual Practice

Before I started practicing Zen, I treated people the way I thought they deserved to be treated.  If someone was kind to me, then I would be kind to them. If someone screamed at me, then I would scream at them.  And if someone really pissed me off... Well, you get the point.  Looking back, this mindset had a huge effect on the way I treated the waitstaff in restaurants. To be clear, I was never rude to my servers, but I did tip more or less based on what I thought they deserved. In fact, if the service was especially poor, I wouldn't leave a tip.  The goal was to show them that they'd done something wrong in the hopes that they'd do better next time. It sounds good on paper.  But my spiritual practice made me question if my tipping policy was effective in the real world. What if my not leaving a tip was simply perpetuating the cycle of disappointment and discontent? For example, what if I received bad service because my waiter was having a bad day, and then I