Adaptation

The Buddha taught that impermanence is an unavoidable reality of life, meaning our self, environment, and conditions are constantly changing, and thus we are ever adjusting and readjusting. Along with a complete lifestyle shift, change of environment, and an altered mind state (but I’m not on drugs!), I’ve been working on adapting to a number of more minor shifts. My dad used to say I always eat like a bird. Now, you may have a mental image of me repeatedly smashing my face into my cereal bowl attempting to peck my Cherrios like a chicken pecks corn, but this isn’t the specific likeness. Though my pecking habits have always been a bit odd, he meant that I have always eaten very slowly with a picky palate, and I sometimes eat lightly throughout the day instead of 3 main meals. Here on the monastery though, there is one meal a day. Just one, from 11AM to 12. Other than that, most people aren’t allowed to eat; by the body’s dependence on food energy, most people aren’t allowed to eat like birds. The purpose of eating only once a day is to keep one’s thoughts centered on meditation and mindfulness rather than the pleasure of food and eating; it’s not a practice of starvation or even “fasting” necessarily, but a simply a focus aid. The digestion of food can be distracting for the body and mind during meditation. Also, meditating on a full stomach can be a rather drowsy experience… eyes closed, sitting comfortably on the floor, belly full and warm, breathing deep, releasing tension, just makes you want to just maybe do a bit of laying meditation. Yeah, I’ll just lay here for a bit…and breath… and close my eyes… and relax… and then laying meditation quickly turns into sleeping meditation, which isn’t really meditation at all. Yes, our goal is to be awake and alert, light in body and mind, and mindfully aware of our consciousness in the present. Sleeping is good too, but I really hope my dreams don’t represent life’s Truth, because my dreams, while saturated with pretty flowers, remain generally light in logic. But who’s to say Truth can be found through logic…

Anyway, since there is only one meal a day, this meal is pretty large. The monks don’t always eat this well throughout their monastic life and at times have to survive on little to nothing for days, but, lucky for us lay residents, there are lots of supporters who bring lots of food to the monastery every day. Because I’m the official caretaker, I’m the only one allowed to eat a light evening meal, but the 11AM meal is by far my main source of sustenance. For a bird-like eater, taking in all of my nutrition for the day in one sitting was something I never thought could happen: I knew I would need a mountainous plateful each day, but the mountain looked unscalable. I watched my fellow lay residents, all of them fit and some skinnier than me, take down heaps upon heaps of food. Meanwhile, I ate some noodles, a few veggies, some rice, nuts and seeds and felt like crawling into a food coma. After a few days of dishing up way more food than would fit, my stomach finally got with the program and learned the valuable and necessary technique of periodic massive expansion. I’m happy to report that I not only eat a large and well-balanced meal each day, but always have room for dessert as well. I’m also gradually becoming less picky, especially because there is so much traditional Asian food that I’ve never seen (Sri Lanken, Malaysian, Thai, Indian, and many more), I usually have no idea what I’m spooning onto my plate anyway. It’s not like I’m some uncultured American-burger-scarfer, I try plenty of different Asian and Middle Eastern food at home, but this isn’t the San Francisco special, it is the real deal. I sometimes can assume that green things are veggies, white stuff is some rice product, brown things are proteins of sorts, and red and yellow things can be very spicy, but these assumptions have proven false many times over. In the end, I pile all these colors together on one plate anyway, so I sometimes find it best to mix them all together and just shovel away; other times I keep the blobs mostly segregated, look at the sky, and let my fork choose what sensations will come next. Both methods usually produce a nice balance of pleasurable sweets and succulents, and tearful spices on the tongue and sinus system throughout. My evening meal is composed of leftovers from lunch, so I do my best to memorize what’s-what in the smorgasbord… but still, my memory often proves ineffective and I doope myself into eating more of the wild and unpredictable madness. But I’m loving it!! (I need to mention, I’m VERY grateful for the generous donations of people… all this food is free!) Also, in case you were wondering, I tried vegemite…. that stuff tastes like poison. It looks like chocolate, but the first bite almost made me ralph, with the second bite tears were welling, and by the third it was confirmed disgusting. Everybody was happy to laugh at me, but nobody else was eating it with me… I should have known.

While food-intake-adjustments have been a gradual, though ultimately successful endeavor, driving on the left side hasn’t been such a smooth transition. When it comes down to it, driving on the left side is just stupid… I know because so few countries in the world do it. The British were just jealous we invented cars before they did, so they made their rules opposite and stupid so they could produce their own cars and make all the money off it. Along with stupid rules, the British make ugly cars. Sorry, I’m just a little bitter. Have you ever tried to drive on the left side? Go outside and try it right now. I didn’t think it would be very difficult to just hop over and drive on the left, but no, it screws with my mind every step of the way. It has come to the point that whenever I drive, I must sing a song the entire time. It goes like this (to the tune of “Jingle Bells”): Left left left, left left left, left left left left left…. If I don’t sing that song the ENTIRE time, I will inevitably wind up on the right side (I mean, it’s called the “right” side for a reason…), receiving expletives and dirty looks from a line of left-siders in ugly pseudo-British cars. It’s happened. More than once.

The first time I drove, I was really focused on doing everything perfect. Added to the challenge of opposite driving, New Zealand has apparently made speed limits a national secret, because there are 100x more billboards of cops with radar guns threatening “Speeding, it’s not worth it” than there are actual speed limit signs. I can’t even judge what I think would be a good speed because I’m too busy focusing on “left left left” to do mental conversions of MPH to KPH (kilometers/hr)… seeing my speedometer at 100 was a bit jarring, but apparently it’s only about 60 MPH. So anyway, I’m driving from the monastery to Auckland city for the first time to drop off Ajahn Chandako at a retreat, occasionally reminding myself “left” and driving slower than a grandma in a pink Cadillac. We bumble down the freeway (called the motorway out here, but I never remember to say that) just fine, find the retreat center after a bit of searching, I drop off Ajahn and get back on the motorway and do my best to remember the return route, ALL WHILE REMAINING LEFT! I make all the correct turns, stay on the correct roads, find the correct exit, and I’m feeling pretty confident. First time driving, no mistakes! I spin around the round about (no stop signs here, just round abouts and a suggestion to "give way"… don’t get me going on that) and continue along, though I begin to wonder why those headlights look like they’re coming at me. They are! Cuss, swerve, correct, thank Buddha I avoided that one. As the oncoming car passes me, I notice it’s a cop… and now he’s quickly flipping a U-turn, and now his lights are on. Of course, I pull over immediately and throw the car in park, trying to remind myself to stay calm, it was just a mistake, it will be okay. As I roll down my window, this cop is storming up to me already yelling,

“—the * do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to * kill me? You know that’s how people get killed, * like that! Get out of the car… you’re drunk. Get out of the car, let me see your eyes… Where are you going? Get out of the car!”

“No, I’m not drunk, I’m from California, it’s my first time driving here—“

“No excuse, friend, no excuse, that’s how people * get killed. How much have you had to drink? Let me see your identification. What are you doing in New Zealand?”

“I haven’t been drinking at all, I was dropping off a monk at a retreat in the city [In hind-sight, I realize a retreat in the city sounds a bit counter intuitive]. I’m living on the Buddhist monastery down the road. It was a mistake, I got confused—“

“No excuse, friend, no excuse. A Buddhist monastery? Where? What’s the address?”

“I… I can’t remember, it’s right down there, like 3 miles—“

“We don’t use miles here, it’s metric. I’ve never seen this monastery… wait here.” He comes back with a breathalyzer machine and tells me to speak into it. Interestingly, their breathalyzers here appear to be way more efficient than ours in the States, where you blow in a tube and the cop repeatedly says “blow harder” like you’re a big idiot until you’re blue in the face. The Kiwi cop sees that I haven’t been drinking at all, turns around, mumbles “keep left” and drives away, just like that. I’m left still standing outside the car, nerves tighter than an E-string, bewildered as to what just happened. I later realized it was Labour Day (not to be confused with our Labor Day, which already came and went) and the Kiwi cops have been cracking down on drunk driving in the last few years because apparently it happens a lot and dozens of people die every year; with a population of just 4 million, dozens of deaths is a major blow to the economy. This explains why he was so certain I was drunk, found it hard to believe I wasn’t, then drove off in search of other, more honest drunks. I’m just happy I didn’t get arrested, not even a ticket, and very happy I reacted quickly enough to swerve out of the way. I got really lucky. I also learned a lesson: sing “Left Left Left” AT ALL TIMES. Since that night, I’ve driven several times with decent success. I’ve only pulled to the right one other time, and that was because I had other stresses (particularly, a truck bed overloaded with oversized sheets of wood catching wind like a sail…) clouding my mind and distracting attention from my new favorite song. Don’t worry, in the end I avoided catastrophe, but that’ll have to be a story for another time…