Recommended Reading

 Last semester a professor of mine recommended that everybody in the class pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Technically it was part of an assignment but it was never actually required that anybody finish reading the book. I’m glad that I made the commitment to reading it all though. It’s a very insightful and thought provoking work and I recommend that anybody who is interested in leading a good life picks up a copy. There’s a section in Zen that discusses “stuckness” that has been very relevant to me lately.

Getting stuck is a natural part of doing work, regardless of what that work is. As human beings we simply don’t have all (or even most) of the answers. We tend to get frustrated when we get stuck as if we previously thought ourselves infallible. Where most of us get frustrated, Robert Pirsig instead argues that being stuck is a very positive state of being in Zen. Any synopsis that I offer here won’t do justice to the depth that Pirsig uses in discussing his philosophy, but in short being stuck causes, or rather allows us to think about our new “problem” in ways that we never would have had we never gotten stuck.

I was stuck on Monday when I composed my last blog entry. I knew what I wanted to write about but I really wasn’t sure exactly where I wanted to go with it. I’m a very deliberate person and I don’t care to say anything strictly for the purpose of saying it. As I stared at the post that I would ultimately submit without any revisions I couldn’t help but feel something was missing. However, I was unable to come up with a very coherent way to take it any of the directions that I wanted to go with it. I was hung up on how short the post was, but I really had no reason to be. When I sat down to write the piece I really didn’t have much motivation beyond that I found the night’s theme of buildings collapsing to be humorous. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t stuck, but rather I was finished. There was no point in stretching the story to be anything more than that, and I’m happy that I left it where it was instead of trying to force it to become something different. Even though I didn’t make any edits I really wasn’t finished with the post when I was done typing. It was the reflection and realization that I already had what I wanted that resulted in a complete work.