I keep telling myself it's alright to spend so many hours per day scanning, I have a finite number of negatives, this can go on for at most another week or two, right? Then I think, 'hey, I have color negatives, too!', and I know I'm in big trouble.
I got the scanner a week ago, right when I was about to enroll in the online TEFL course. Guess what I haven't done yet.
I really have to reign in my hobbies and interests and decide what I really want to be doing at this point. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking the Yamaha drums get packed away today. I'm really not that good at it, it's only really fun playing with other people, and practicing drums is not serving any future plans.
I need to prioritize the training I got at the monastery. I'm still comfortable with the decision not to join that monastery. That being the case, I've changed my opinion about my mentor there, and I've gone back to appreciating him, even though I doubt his role in my eventual decision to leave and not return was conscious or intentional.
He is my brother in more ways than one, including that I don't want to be close to him. His volatile, moody personality was too unpredictable. But, even though he might not believe in this, our karma clicked. They complemented each other, and I think the unintentional, intangible push he gave me away from the monastery was something at work. I'm flattering myself, because I'm saying that I was at his level, where most of the monks there were not (or not, that doesn't mean anything). Eh, why not?
My personal exploration into the essence of being is not to be done at the monastery. At least not in this lifetime or at this point in this lifetime. At a point where I need to stop to go on, then the monastery is the place to do it, but for now I have to keep moving. Moving means staying in the material world, even dying.
But in the material world, I do need to maintain what I learned at the monastery. For me that exploration is the most important thing in life. More than taking pictures, or playing in a band, or getting laid, or making money, or drinking alcohol, or buying a house, or raising a family, etc.
And the cornerstone of the practice is sitting, the Zen tool, the Zen contribution to the enlightenment panacea. There were brief moments after deciding not to enter the monastery when I was wondering why I was continuing sitting. Those moments were weird because I was sitting long before I visited the monastery. The benefits I found in the practice of sitting were not at all conditioned upon any monastic aspiration. All the monastery did was help. The monastery helped tighten up the regimen, let me know what I was doing right and what I could do better.
February 23, 1997 - Diamond Heights, San Francisco
