Review: Zen and Now

I have always believed that you don’t find books – they find you. Recently, Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now (Vintage Canada) found me. I was at Chapters/Indigo for a specific purpose – buy a specific book – but on the way to the cashier Zen and Now caught my eye. This was entirely fitting as almost 20 years ago, the book that inspired Zen and Now, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (HarperCollins Publishers) found me, and rocked me to my core. 

I say this without hyperbole – ZAMM changed my life. The cult classic – which is not really about Zen and not really about motorcycle maintenance but a lot about the metaphysics of quality and the relationship between a father and son – is my desert island pick. It was the first book I ever gave my husband as a gift. It was the book I read while articling at a law firm and during a time when I shared an office with another articling student. I remember explaining a scene in the book to her which illustrated how we are confined by our expectations of how we think the world works. The scene described how you can trap a South Indian monkey by putting rice in a hollowed-out coconut shell tied to a stake. The monkey will put its paw in and grab the rice but the clenched paw is too large to get out of the hole and the monkey won’t release the rice from its grip in order to escape. My description came with visuals and instead of being blown away with the sad and tragic brilliance of how our rigid value systems doom us, my friend just laughed until she cried (but hey, we were also working 80 hours a week in those days so maybe she was just tired.) In any case, I think you get it by now. I love ZAMM.

In Zen and Now, Richardson becomes a “Pirsig Pilgrim,” hitting the road on his motorcycle to follow the famous literary journey that Pirsig and his son Chris took in 1968. Metaphysically, this journey was “through the high country of the mind.” Physically, it was from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Richardson’s goal is to reach San Francisco and end the journey on his 42nd birthday. Years before embarking on this road trip, Richardson had read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which claimed that the number 42 was the meaning of life.

It was at this point I really knew that Zen and Now picked me. I am on the cusp of my 42nd birthday. Will I soon realize the meaning of life? Did Zen and Now find me to remind me of ZAMM?  Have I been watching too much Oprah? These questions swirled around me like a tornado. But since I view existential angst as a delicious milk bath within which to swim for hours, the experience was quite pleasant. 

Ultimately, I really do believe that the Universe gives us messages and provides a surprisingly prescriptive guide if we are alert enough to recognize the clues and creative enough to decode them. Zen and Now reminded me of ZAMM’s teachings on the limits of rationalism as a life principle. I knew this academically when I first read ZAMM in my twenties. And then all the magical and mysterious “coincidences” of my adult life were the applied knowledge to this theoretical understanding.

I don’t know what awakening I will have at 42. For now, I only know that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”