What the Heck is the Convoy of Zen?

So what the heck IS the Convoy of Zen? 

In my day job, I am a high school history teacher—and my students know I am a beast about precision of language, which is kind of funny since I am being pretty free in my application of the word “Zen”. 

When I reference Zen I mean the fruits of traditional Zen meditative practices: peace, thoughtfulness, working with intention, acceptance of the present moment.  In my usage, zen (lower case) is mental space, freedom from anxiety—basically the opposite of my normal spastic freak-out default mode.  I have zero success meditating (Z.E.R.O.—my internal voice Never. Shuts. Up.), but the simplicity and “being” of Zen practice make sense to me within the framework of the religious tradition I live by (Catholic—I have not had much success with Catholic meditative practices, either, and by not much I mean super close to Z.E.R.O. Urp.). 

                               *Zen = Not Perpetual Freak-out Mode*

In my one brief and awkward stint with therapy the counselor suggested exploring mindfulness, and I scoffed pretty massively. SCOFFORAMBA galore. 

We were in the thick of medical things then; now I get that I needed a little space outside of day to day medical crises to realize that accepting things and just working through that acceptance is probably healthier than the denial/rage/spastic creativity approach I tended to take to deal with the marathon of aggressive low grade brain tumors...

 (“You need a song about chemo? I CAN WRITE YOU A SILLY SONG ABOUT CHEMO, GIVE ME THIRTY SECONDS”. We were legit the Village People of the oncology clinic, silly hats, hand motions, and all).

But in the middle of everything, I could not do mindfulness. I wanted things to be fixed/better/not a catastrophe every other second.  That is what it is.

(Side note, therapy is a super useful thing and I really should have kept going more than like, 3 times.  Some things really require professional help. I will um, add that to the zen list. Yes. Ergh....)

---------->ANYWAY, keeping up the near frenzied holding-it-togetherness of those years proved unsustainable once the dust settled and I had to actually process “What the Heck Happened Here?” and more importantly, “Now What?”

I also tell my students that history rarely works as a strict chronology. Timelines are a tool, but one little line with date dots does not a history show. History is much more of a tapestry or web, interconnected fibers crossing and recrossing and affecting the paths of other fibers…

My own zen trek is kind of like that. A little all over the place, but ultimately moving forward, hopefully.

Remember those old Family Circus comics where the kids would march all over the neighborhood and leave a little dotted line trail criss-crossing everywhere behind them? THAT is what it’s like.

So as I try to put all this into words, I ask for patience and an awareness of the tangly wiggly all over the place-ness of how I am figuring this out. Ideas overlap. Some things I have discovered very recently have been so helpful I WISH I had started them earlier, so I will reference them earlier (Bullet Journal, I’m looking at you).  Some things will take longer to flesh out.

I make zero claim to having any deep insights—I feel a little like an ancient explorer discovering a new world in which an awful lot of people already live. Uh, yeah. “Discovery”.

If you already live on the islands of zen I am just learning about, Hello! Glad to finally get here! Let’s have an umbrella drink and enjoy the possibility of sunshine! If not, I hope you enjoy the exploration, too.

Movin’ right along really is better with friends. Thanks for jumping in the figurative Studebaker and coming along for the ride.

Serious Side Note: If you are seriously depressed, or really struggling with getting through each day, please talk to a doctor.  Please talk until a doctor can HEAR you and help you figure out a plan. These ideas here might be helpful, but a lot of them only helped me AFTER I talked to my doctor.  That is another story for another time…but take care of you.