I suppose wisdom is where you find it. Take this for example:
I realize we talk about the elevator speech, and elevator speeches, but this is written on the elevator wall, for all to see. It comes right under the headline "should your exit be delayed due to a power outage or mechanical malfunction."
Wow, a Zen elevator. Who would have guessed. Zen and the art of up and down.
"How old are you?"
He seemed a lively guy, friendly, we’d gone just about half a mile, he was teasing the radio operator. Of course I’d only seen the back of his head. He was driving the taxi. We were going from the beach hotel (Fiesta Americana) to the old center of the city in Veracruz, Mexico. Yesterday.
"I just turned 60," I answered.
He answered quickly, with the simple, matter-of-fact pride you might expect, not out of place, much more friendly than anything else:
"My oldest son is older than you. 61."
Now, my 88-year-old father is doing very well, golf and tennis daily, but this guy was driving a taxi, and happy about it.
"Veracruz has the prettiest women in the world," he said. That’s a hard comment to answer; but no worry, he went on quickly enough that no answer was required.
"That’s why I’m in Veracruz. My wife is from here."
Here’s the story he told, more or less in his words:
I was driving a trailer truck from Rosario (northwestern Mexico) to Veracruz (Eastern Mexico, on the gulf) when the prettiest girl I’d ever seen walked across the street, in a little town outside of here.
I stopped. I asked her where I could get lunch. She told me she could do me the best lunch in town, and she showed me where she lived, in a pretty blue house, unassuming, but well kept. So I gave her 100 pesos.
Lunch was delicious. I asked her how much I owed her, she said nothing; that I had already given her 100 pesos. I said no, that was for the food, I needed to pay her for the effort too. So I gave her another 100 peso bill and said if she wouldn’t charge me, then I would have to give her that. Fair’s fair.
Then I told her I wanted to take her out, and then marry her. So she took me to her mother, who said she’s too young: she was 14 years old.
I said she’s all grown up and she knows what she wants, and she agreed, so that was that. Except that it wasn’t, because I do things right. So where is your father, I asked.
"He’s the mayor (presidente municipal)," she answered.
So I went to the mayor, walked right up to him in front of 13 of his men, and told him I wanted to marry his daughter. I told him straight and tall.
"Shall I run him out of here?" one of the other man asked the mayor.
"No, this kid’s got guts, he’s standing up straight and speaking his mind," the Mayor answered.
But I’m not a kid, I said. I showed him my truck, and I showed him 1,500 pesos in bills, and I told him I was a man, I knew what I wanted, and his daughter did too.
That was 52 years ago, in 1956. They are still married. They have 23 kids, 10 daughters and 13 sons. "I can’t even tell you how many places my children and grandchildren live in," he said, "but they come back all together every year for the new year, and there are 80 of us now, including great-great grandchildren."
He said he’s never smoked, never drank, never ate seafood, fish, or red meat, and never strayed from his wife.
And that was the end of the story. We’d arrived at Cafe La Parroquia, in the old section of Veracruz. He jumped out of the driver’s seat and took my wife’s hand to help her out of the taxi, then he shook my hand, took his fare, and off he went. As we walked into the cafe, I said "damn! I didn’t even get his name. And I should have taken a picture."
While I doubt that the zen of business planning is going to work anytime soon — there’s some undeniable paradox in trying to work being in the moment with planning — there is something very powerful about zen that ends up adding to the allure of Presentation Zen, zen habits, and of course the original Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, among others. More recently, there’s Valley Zen, "at the intersection of zen and technology."
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Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds |
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig |
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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner |
I’ve had some email lately with Drue Kataoka of Valley Zen, for several reasons. First, I like that blog. Second, it introduced Alltop, which is good news for all. And third, I’ve had an ex-hippy connection to zen since I was in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s, which, as you might imagine, was a good decade before I became serious about business and entrepreneurship. And if there is any way to connect zen to business planning, I’d like to be the one to do it.
Drue’s quick answer to the ex-hippy zen MBA connection was a quick "look at today’s blog post," which I did, and with that I discovered From Counterculture to ValleyZen, which is very much aiming at that same target. Synchronicity again, I suppose.
The post is built around a new book by Stanford professor Fred Turner, and an interview he did with Valley Zen. If you don’t see the YouTube video here, you can click the link above to see it on the Valley Zen site.
Although it was tame compared to recent years, Israel was very tense in 1974. It was just a few months after the Yom Kippur war. Still, tourism went on. I was a temporary tour guide, in charge of a group of about three dozen people going around the world from Mexico City.
The group was a Mexican group, mostly from Mexico City with some couples from other parts of Mexico. It was an expensive tour so they were economically well-to-do, which in Mexico usually correlates with speaking pretty good English.
Julio Sanchez and his wife Carmen were exceptions. They were from El Salvador and they didn’t speak English. At least they hadn’t spoken English at the beginning of the trip, but during the trip they picked up a lot. Waiters and hotel clerks and people along the day were much more likely to speak English than Spanish. So Julio and Carmen learned how to order meals, and find restrooms, and give taxi directions back to the hotel.
Despite the tension in Israel, it was also Jerusalem, an amazing city to visit, a place people in the group had wanted to visit all their lives. They’d visited the Taj Mahal, Hong Kong, and other splendid places, but Jerusalem was, to most of the group, the highlight. The organized tour went through as many of the main places in Jerusalem as possible — Bethlehem, the Wailing Wall, the stations of the cross — but not the Dead Sea. It was left out on purpose, because of the recent war, meaning tightened security, and more danger.
So it turned out that on the one free afternoon of the stay in Jerusalem, six of my group set out on their own to see the Dead Sea. Normal tours weren’t going there, but they found a taxi driver who, for a fat fee, was willing to take them. I didn’t know until later, but it wouldn’t have been up to me anyhow. They were all consenting adults. I was in charge of tours, logistics, meals, baggage, but not discipline.
They started late. They arrived at an abandoned Dead Sea bathing area late in the afternoon. They had to walk several hundred yards from the parking area and normal beach spot — which was pretty much abandoned — to the water. The taxi waited.
Night fell. They weren’t sure of which direction to walk back to the taxi. They argued. Then suddenly, spotlights, a loudspeaker in a language they didn’t understand. There were military vehicles, people in uniforms pointing guns at them. Angry men, shouting at them and pointing guns, loaded them into a military vehicle. They were driven through the night to a military outpost with a lot of searchlights, and led into a closed room with no windows.
They stood in front of an officer, surrounded by men with guns. There was not a lot of light in the room. The officer asked them questions, angrily, but it was a language they didn’t understand. They could only shrug and shake their heads. What had they done? They couldn’t even ask each other, because the men were angry if they tried to speak to each other at all, and more so because it was Spanish, a language they — the guards, the officer — didn’t understand.
It was at this point — I heard the story a few hours later, in the hotel — that Julio’s newfound English, learned just during the recent weeks of the trip, saved the day.
"Jews," the officer shouted, demanding to know. "Jews?"
Julio’s face brightened. At last, something he recognized.
"Yes, thank you," he answered. "Tomato please."
They said it took a couple of seconds before the group realized, and started laughing. The tension was broken. The captured tourists, suspected of being terrorists, and the guards, and the officer, laughed together. Both sides switched to English, and understood each other (Julio and Carmen needed help, but they were there with four fellow tourists who did speak English, and the Israeli army personnel all spoke English.)
The taxi was long gone, presumably hoping not to get disciplined for taking tourists to the deserted Dead Sea area at night. The Israeli solders took the tourists back to the hotel. Check points were passed, the story was told, there was a lot of laughter along the way.
So that’s the end of the story. It’s as true as it was when they told it to me that same night, in the hotel bar, where they found me waiting for their return and pretty worried.
This happened in 1974, when I lived in Mexico City and worked with United Press International. We worked six-day weeks at UPI, so we got six weeks of vacation.
And I took the picture here from our hotel, looking across the street, that same day:
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