Zen Stories

What do patient satisfaction, motorcycling and competition have to do with Zen Stories? Short answer - I'm intimate with all three.

Long answer - I attended a "lunch and learn" meeting last week with a group of people seeking to improve patients' experiences at the hospital where I work. The theme for the hour was "Zen Stories" and was facilitated by a beautiful woman who works in the Lab as a phlebotomist. I won't retell the Zen Stories here but I will summarize that they all had to do with people being "fully present". We talked a lot about what "fully present" means and I think we reached consensus that, at least in the realm of patient care (customer service), it implies a singular focus and broad receptiveness to the reality of a shared now. We are asked to do this repeatedly throughout the day as we tend to one patient's needs and then tend to another patient's needs. The first patient never loses importance in our minds, but our conscious mind must continually re-focus on the "now" patient.

The motorcycle both allows and requires the rider to be fully present. Extraneous external stimuli are muted - phones, radios, snacks and beverages - but senses stimulated into awareness. Each deceleration, acceleration and curve; each stop sign, car, truck and deer requires that elapsed moments be allowed to flow into the past so that the present is the focus.
(Bad buddhism, bad Zen. Sorry)

And competition...

'Competing gives purpose to my training and allows comparison of my efforts with those of other men. It’s also a relief not to be typecast by Parkinson’s. There’s no “PD” placed after my name on the whiteboard in the list of competitors. There’s no-one telling me to “rest if you feel tired.”'

This comes from a post on Stumptuous.com. Here's the link: http://www.stumptuous.com/shaky-man-in-the-gym-2-keep-on-shakin

"PD" is Parkinson's Disease. I think this gentleman gets the same thing out of competing that I do. Read this story and the shaky-man-1 and you'll learn of a man improving his future by focusing in the now, and by refusing to adhere to the tenets of his pathology.

Peace man.