I always thought that I knew – in an abstract way, of course, what Zen was. Beauty in simplicity, something about being in the moment… Umm… sparse Japanese interior design… Perfection of form where every detail unravels to uncover complexity underneath, bla-bla….
Ok, I’ve heard of the word, anyway!
Well, I have now felt Zen – literally, hands on.
Sushi has got to be one of the simplest things on Earth to make. It has two ingredients – rice and raw fish. Sometimes also seaweed. Right?
The Zen lesson went as follows:
1. Take a really deep breath.
2. Relax completely
3. Pour that glass of wine back into the bottle
4. Turn the background music off
5. Look at rice, nori sheets and slabs of raw fish and start to methodically and paying absolute attention make sushi. Let the rest of the world disappear.
6. Realize that the closer you get to perfect sushi, the further perfect sushi is going to move away from you. The alignment of grains of rice, the sloping angle of thin fish slices open their vortex of complexity to you. Decide (calmly) to follow perfect sushi to the infinity sign.
7. Catch Zen.
On the way…
Yummy! That would have been sooo good after practice today. Any chance you deliver cross continent?