Zen Driving in the Continuous Middle

Back in the early part of my work life I was fortunate to work for a company that invested in productivity tools meant to help us employees better ourselves, better grasp the keys to productivity that would make us infused with the possibility of corporate change, of making a difference with our customers and just be better human beings. There was ‘In Search of Excellence” and Tony Robbins (yes, I walked across coals to the throbbing disco beat of ‘You Spin Me Right Round Baby, Right Round’), the Pacific Institute, Teams and a host of others along the way.

And there were cassette tapes (age giveaway!) that you could take with you on the road so that even your windshield time could be more productive. It’s this portion of my corporate life that inspires the title of this blog entry, because it was a journey with no specific beginning and, at the time, no apparent end. It was just me driving countless hours and miles, traversing the open expanse of multi states in a given day, week after week, month after month.

During that time I’d put a tape in, momentarily revived by the synthesiser tones and an authoritative voice proclaiming the title and mission of the tape to follow. Many were multi-cassette editions that promised to enlighten me. Some might come with workbooks but, since I was driving, I’d have to fill those in later (yeah right!).

But a funny thing happened along the highway toward enlightenment…. Time would pass along with the miles and then, abruptly and with a near alarm clock tone, the tape would end and click to side 2. At which point I had absolutely no idea what I’d just heard on side 1.

What was it? Why couldn’t I remember it? What was I actually thinking about?

And though I should have been absorbing the tenets of the new corporate lifestyle, I found that I had drifted back to a time in third grade when I got in a cement fight at an unattended building site and, when we realized the cement was hardening, rode our bikes as fast as we could to a friend’s house where we used the garden hose to spray it off….

Maybe this wasn’t what my company had in mind, but in a Zen mode of being present and letting life, both past and present, wash over you live the garden hose, another sequence of the Continuous Middle had occurred. It may not have been intended, but the result was one of renewal: I had come a long way from the dopey third grader laden with cement, but not that far…. Just on another part of the journey.

#journey #selfhelp #travel #zen