Finding Zen
Zen did not give me answers. It taught me to see thoughts as movements of the mind rather than instructions I had to follow.
I did not discover Zen through a teacher or temple.
It entered my life quietly through books and curiosity. Writers like Alan Watts and Charlotte Joko Beck helped me recognize something I had sensed but never named.
They were not presenting a philosophy so much as pointing to something obvious that I had been overlooking.
My mind was almost never where my life actually was.
It replayed the past or anticipated the future, always chasing an imagined resolution where things would finally settle.
Zen exposed that pattern quickly. It did not try to solve it. It asked me to see it.
As the pattern became more visible, I started to trust it less with my decisions.
Practicing zazen, or seated meditation, at the local Zen center in Savannah made the insight real.
Sitting quietly and watching thoughts move through the mind revealed something simple: thoughts are not the problem. Believing every one of them is.
When I began seeing thoughts as movements of the mind rather than instructions I had to follow, their grip loosened.
That shift changed more than I expected.
Conversations slowed down. Listening became easier. I began to notice fear or ego shaping a reaction before I acted on it.
Zen did not remove those impulses, but it made them visible. Visibility created space.
It also shaped the way I write.
The tone became simpler because the insight was simple. Zen rarely arrived as an explanation. It appeared as a quiet recognition that what I was searching for was often already here, under the noise of my own thinking.
Zen has not given me answers. It has given me a way to see.
More often than not, seeing clearly is enough to return to the life already unfolding in front of me.