I had to take Mandy home this morning and it was rainy pretty good so we covered up as well as we could in garbage sack like rain jackets and headed out on the scooter.

Mandy like many Taichung residents hates the rain, mainly because they’re spoiled with excellent weather 49 weeks of the year more or less, and she was complaining about it this morning, “Wo taoyuan sha wu.” (I hate rain.) I told her I love rain and that I try to think of going out in the rain as an adventure because adventures are fun. We rode on to her house and I think that he was able to hear me because she loosened up and enjoyed the ride.

Tonight as I was leaving school, in the rain again, Mike and I chatted about movies and pulled on our rain gear and I felt deeply grateful for the life I have. All the more so because I know that life is always changing.

Life really is an adventure if we let it be one, it’s an adventure and an education if we choose to understand it in that way. For me the past year has been full of slowly getting better at something (teaching kids) I was terrible at before and being paid to do it. It’s also been full of riding a borrowed scooter way the hell out into the mountains to start my tai chi chuan training over. And it’s been having my whole life turned about by a woman who loves me.

Now as I said I feel very grateful for this life but I’ve begun to realize that feeling grateful isn’t a matter of having lots of success to feel grateful for as much as it’s a matter of choosing to feel grateful. I could choose to view the way things have gone of late as a miserable failure because my classes often don’t go well, the kids often get on my nerves, I’m having to relearn so much about tai chi chuan for the first time, Mandy is constantly f’ing up my schedule… but why would I want to do that when it’s just as easy to be grateful and to enjoy the life I have?

My friend and (informal) Zen teacher Glenn is always talking about how we tend to live our lives as stories instead of as direct experiences. It can be a difficult concept but the way I understand it now is that I could tell the negative story about my life, viewing it as I explained in the last paragraph, or I could tell a more positive story but both are stories and not life. The goal of Zen is to stop telling stories to simply let things be and to enjoy the story at the same time… at least that’s what I think it is.

I’ll leave you with this since it’s the best way I can say things at this point. The more I tell and form the story of my life the busier I am trying to control the story, the more frustrated I am that the story isn’t perfect, the more miserable I am. The more I listen to the story, the more I live it as it happens, letting it be what it is, the more naturally it flows and the more amazed I am at how perfect it is.