Enlightenment and My Progress (Or Lack Thereof): Lesson1

I thought a good idea would be to follow up my last meditation on Enlightenment with occasional updates of my insights into the True Nature of Reality. I imagine that most of them will take place in the men's bathroom on the second floor of the building where I work, as this seems to be the place where I have most of my epiphanies. What follows is my latest lesson on “emptiness”:

I was at the urinal today, when I saw someone do a flying kick through the entrance of the bathroom. Yes, you guessed it: Mr. Snoogles. After noticing that I was relieving myself and perhaps thinking that I needed some entertainment while doing my business, Mr. Snoogles showed me his latest kata technique. Somewhere in the midst of his second time through, a student, whom I’ve known to be very shy, walked in. After seeing Mr. Snoogles kicking imaginary opponents and deflecting pretend blows to the face, the student quickly averted his eyes to the ground and moved to the farthest urinal in a manner I interpreted to be quite uneasy. Mr. Snoogles, in true form, was completely oblivious to this third party member, and was about to begin yet another kata cycle, when I motioned to him with both palms open and a go-ahead gesture that maybe he ought to use the bathroom for it's original purpose: going to bathroom. Now, I respect Mr. Snoogles’ adaptability in turning the lavatory into a makeshift dojyou, but I fear that other customers might not be as keen on using this space for martial arts practice as Mr. Snoogles is.

After some thought, though, I realized that Mr. Snoogles was cryptically using this event as a teachable moment. That is, he was trying to impart on me the practice of breaking down the psychological barriers that cause us to assume that certain places and things have an inherent meaning. What Mr. Snoogles was trying to teach me was that a bathroom—like anywhere else—is a priori of meaning save the connotations we impose upon it. A true sage sees a place for its emptiness, and in response, offers a dynamic adaptability to this apparent contingency, hence Mr. Snoogles’ use of the men's bathroom on the second floor of the building where I work as a training ground for karate.


I left Mr. Snoogles in the bathroom and returned to my desk to record this jewel of knowledge. While I was writing, though, Mr. Snoogles poked his head around the corner and said in his very unique and mysterious English:

“Johnny, why we the purpose of bathroom going?”

He then laughed like a little Buddha who has just posed a riddle to a pupil with absolutely no chance of understanding the vast and inexhaustible wisdom of his master. As a result, I now sit here bewildered, contingent, and temporary.

Zen Master Snoogles

I’m told that nothing takes place in a vacuum; everything exists in the context of personal experience and in a matrix of socio-historical lighting. Even the smallest interaction between two human beings requires the confluence and mutual acceptance of thousands of identity claims, shared meanings, and linguistic forces that, if one stops to think about, are tapestries meticulously woven with the tiniest threads and pins of that rather abstract concept known as “culture.” To try and ignore all of these ingredients is to deny the beauty of basic societal interactions, and therefore denies the importance of the individual in his or her environment. I’ve only met one person who has been able to transcend the necessity of context in personal interactions, and he is one of my co-workers: let us call him Mr. Snoogles.

Mr. Snoogles is an absolute anomaly to me. I have never met someone who effectively imposes his esoteric world onto others as much as him. For Mr. Snoogles, context is a foreign concept and randomness is a ritual. Every time he looks at me with his petrified grin and glazy eyes, I have absolutely no idea what will happen or what will come out of his mouth. Even if we’ve been discussing a work-related topic, or making small talk, the interaction can easily pull an absolute 180 at the drop of a hat when it is in the hands of Mr. Snoogles.

Just the other day, without any warning, Mr. Snoogles approached me and asked: “ Do you have experience?” I searched my memory for a conversation we might have had in the past that would justify him asking me this question, but I came up with nothing.

“Uh. Well, what kin…I mean, what?”
“Do you have experience?”
“With what?”
“Experience.”
“Right, but with what are you wondering if I have experience?”
“Women.”
“Oh, well I ha—…”
“Do you say in English, ‘Do you have experience?’”
“Yeah, I guess, but it really depe—…”

And I’m cut off because Mr. Snoogles abruptly turns and walks away.

After our so-called interactions, I often feel as though I have been hit on the head with a frying pan, or perhaps smacked in the face with a sock full of coins. It’s typically a what-the-hell-just-happened kind of sensation. If I were a cartoon, there would be stars circling above my head. But, as far as I can tell, Mr. Snoogles has no idea that what he has just done is anything out of the ordinary. He’s an intelligent man, that’s for sure, but he is impervious to—or simply does not care about—the importance of context in his interactions with people, especially me.

Mr. Snoogles is under the impression that I am (among other things which I am not) a karate master. At least once a day, I can count on Mr. Snoogles calling my name, at which point he will begin with his favorite English slogan:

“Do you know?”

He then will either demonstrate a kick-punch combo or launch into a diatribe in Japanese which as far as I can tell is about the history of karate or how to really mess someone up by hitting him or her in the eye.

One day I walked into the men’s bathroom to find him practicing his kata in front of the mirror. He was not the least bit embarrassed at being caught, and after asking “do you know?” he immediately demanded that I not only try the moves with him, but also contribute to his verbal dissertation on the beauty of his technique. I tried the moves. I nodded politely, and offered the few Japanese conversation-fillers I know in the hopes that he would take the hint that I was just being courteous. Maybe then he would realize that I have nothing to add to the conversation because I know approximately jack shit about karate. But, he didn’t take the hint, and we spent about 15 minutes in the bathroom, him showing me the moves in the mirror, and me damn near peeing my pants.

Mr. Snoogles will not be undone, he preservers even when it’s apparent that I lack the intellectual equipment to follow him into his own little world. Day after day, he does his best to squeeze some kind of knowledge out of me: whether about karate, women, computers, the Dutch language…it usually catches me completely off guard and I am unable to deliver. Sometimes I wish that I did have some secret mastery of it all, and that maybe Mr. Snoogles’ enigmatic way of interacting with me is similar to a Zen Koan. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the old tale of the Yogi who approaches the Buddha with some form of existential apprehension and receives an answer that is of absoltutely NO help to anyone :

Yogi: "Oh venerable one, what is the true Nature of Reality?"

Buddha: "Defecation!"

At this point the Buddha would crap his own pants, grab a handful of his feces and chuck them at the Yogi, hitting him right in the forehead. And because of this the lucky bastard becomes enlightened.

So, in this light, maybe after Mr. Snoogles drops a weird non-sequitur on me or shows me how to block a punch, I can attain a deep understanding of the contingency of our fixed opinions about human interactions as well as our own self-imposed limits, and reach enlightenment on the spot (as well as receive the ability to become a bad-ass karate master, a ladies’ man, a computer wiz, not to mention fluent in Dutch). I can make it to Nirvana by gaining a sage-like insight into the bizarre antics of Mr. Snoogles and unlock the door to The Unknown...

Nothing has happened yet, though.

The Waddle

Each morning, I drink coffee with my breakfast, which is usually a bowl of granola. This culinary combination always results in a trip or, let's be honest, trips to the bathroom, both to urinate and drop fecal bombs (for those of you now wincing at the impending topic, I say to ye: "Oh, c'mon! Lighten up! What's funnier than bathroom humor?! After all, we're all humans, and I've yet to meet one of us who has NOT taken a dump at some point in his or her life, save perhpas Julia Roberts or Catherine Zeta Jones. Oh, and Wittgenstein and Kant, too, both of whose teleogocial view on the transcendental theory of ontol--just kidding...POOP! HA! Anyway).

On lucky days, I can kill two birds with one stone and complete both evacuations in one sitting, but on other days the whole process can be divided into as many as two or even three trips to the lavatory. On the particular morning I am about to tell you about, I recorded three trips: two pees, one crap. Now, there is one more thing necessary to understand before this story begins, and it is about my toilet. I have no heating in my apartment, which roughly translates to having a piercingly cold toilet seat on freezing winter mornings. So, if I can, I like to finish the peeing portion in my apartment before I leave, and carry out my morning duke at work where there are heated toilet seats. I attest: heated toilets are arguably the highest quality of comfort fathomable; very little compares to sitting on a warm throne of porcelain. Plus, taking a dump at work also allows me to justify disappearing for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, as my boss has not yet accused me or any other employee of abusing The Call From Nature.

So, on this morning, I was in my school's bathroom, relaxing on the heated toilet seat, and enjoying a few pages of a manual written in Japanese of which I could read approximately three characters. After a fair amount of time had passed, I began the wiping phase with a naive reach for the toilet paper dispenser, only to find that some scoundrel had completely iced me, leaving me without an outlet for decent wipage. No worries, I thought, and followed the directions of pushing the buttons and pulling the levers in the hope that an extra roll would drop down from what I describe as the "emergency compartment" located directly above the blank roll on the more technologically advanced dispensers. Nothing came out, though, so I knelt down to try and see if there was actually anything in the dispenser. Perhaps it is stuck, I foolishly thought. No dough. I had been left stranded in the stall without anything to wipe with, and I felt like a skydiver whose first parachute fails to open, and when he pulls the chord to his emergency one, the line goes slack and it is then that he must come to grips with the inevitable plummet to his surefire death. Well, maybe it's not as dramatic as this, but I knew something must be done, and this was to make a quick dash to the neighboring stall to take refuge in its hopefully abundant oasis of holy-grailesque toilet paper.

If you've been in this situation before—and I hope you have because it builds humility—you know that you cannot pull your pants up before dashing to the next stall because, well, you have not wiped yet. So, with your pants around your legs, you must do "The Waddle." Now, this penguin-like trot is no huge deal if you are in the privacy of your own home and must journey to a nearby cupboard to retrieve your spare roll. However, in a public bathroom it is notably more complicated. Because your pants are around your legs, you are forced to move more slowly which obviously increases your chances of being caught by another user. This (clearly) is ultimately what you do NOT want. So it becomes a genuine test of choosing the right timing to make the move to the next stall. First, you must listen very carefully to accurately assess whether or not there are any other members in the bathroom. Once you can be sure there are none, you slowly open the door and peak your head out to check (again) that there are no users that you failed to pick up on the radar the first time. If there are, you must abort the mission and re-try a few minutes later. Once you are absolutely, positively sure there is nobody lurking around the urinals or sinks, it is then safe to commence your waddle to the next stall.

On this particular morning, after I had exhausted looking for anything that I could possibly use as a wiping instrument, I began my preparations to waddle from my stall. No sounds of flushing, check. No hands been washed, check. No one talking, check. Okay, open the door…slowly, slowly...alright, it looks safe. I stood up, pushed the door open, waddled like I've never waddled before, and safely made it to the neighboring stall without being seen. I pushed on the door, but it would not open. Silly me, I thought, it's one of those pull ones. I pull, but it still does not open. Then, I glance down at the lock and it is showing the RED square. Occupied! Dammit! I forgot to do a sound check for the other stalls! Stay calm, I tell myself, just continue the waddle to the next stall.

It was then, exactly, that I heard footsteps. I instinctively turned my head and looked over my shoulder at the user who had just entered the bathroom. It was my boss.

There was no mistaking that, at that moment, I had literally been caught with my pants down in the men's bathroom on the second floor of the building in which I work. There was a curious expression on my bosses face—he was not laughing, he was not freaked out or even flustered. It is safe to say he looked very confused.

I broke eye-contact, turned my crimson face toward the vacant stall, waddled, and sat down in my sanctuary. I half-heartedly finished my business, and returned to the office where the embarrassment of having been caught mid-waddle awaited me in the face of my boss.

To this day, though, neither he nor I have ever spoken of the event. I like to think that he has had the same experience before, and out of respect for my bravery at attempting the waddle at work, he has chosen to “forget” that he has, in fact, seen my bare ass.

The Elbow In My Side

It was a relatively sunny November morning when the man standing next to me on the train unintentionally dug his elbow into my side. Truthfully, it really didn't even hurt that bad. It was more of an eye-opener—a chakra of sorts—something to kind of shake me out of a complacency that had been troubling me that morning, one that I couldn't put a finger on. I guess it took an elbow in the end.

The man was wearing a black suit, with sharp and shiny black shoes. I was, too. And come to think of it, everyone else on the train was dressed in the same attire, which I suppose becomes a uniform of sorts when people en masse endorse the same appearance. This was the Legion of the Japanese Salary Men (which also includes women but given the patriarchal pulse of this country, the apothegm remains gender exclusive), a ubiquitous wave of workers who cram themselves into trains every morning to journey to their place of work, and then do the same thing 10 to 12 hours later when returning to their homes. On that day, I was a member of the brigade.

I usually don't have to take the train to work because I live across the street from the university who hired me to sit at a desk in the English Lounge, which sounds mysterious (in an underground and smoky kind of way) but it is not. It is a student union-type area on the 2nd floor of a newly constructed building on campus, where I have a desk from which I can look out the window and see my white apartment. I have a phone, a computer, and a business card which claims that I am a "Humanities and International Relations Specialist," which qualifies me to offer English conversation practice to anyone who wants it. So, luckily, I avoid the riptides of Tokyo, the ones that suck the workers in every morning and send them back out into the shadows of the city once the moon is high.

The morning I caught the accidental elbow to my side was a morning when I was riding the train into Tokyo for work. I was called to the Imperial Hotel—Tokyo's most luxurious and pricey hotel—to attend a ceremony held in honor of my university's Forty Year Anniversary, a very prestigious and formal event I found out. Until now, I had never held a job where I was required to wear a neck-tie, let alone one that brought me into a big city's morning rush that unvails the busy-ness and self-importance of the Real World's patrons. In short, I wasn’t fond of it, and it set off a chain reaction of existential questions that still remain in my head at the present moment.

Since my very first year in Japan—and I'm on my fourth one—I’ve struggled with the question of when it will be time for me to leave this country and go back to my own. I've held two jobs since I've been here, and both require that, once a year, I make the decision of whether or not to extend my contract for another year. I never fail to find this decision difficult, and Japan and America have been playing an amusing game of tug-of-war with my whereabouts from the second I got here.

As far as foreign countries go, I imagine Japan is one of the easiest places to live and, paradoxically, one of the most difficult. The foreigners role here is one of novelty, a sort of exoticism that for Japanese people represents an otherness that inspires both interest and apprehension. I am unique, but also a source of nervousness. I am physically inside the country and culture, but held outside of it at the same time. Of course, to say that it is this way with every single one of my Japanese friends is untrue. It is the relationships forged with the exceptional people of this country, the ones with whom I have transgressed cultural and environmental boundaries, which keep me here year after year. But, how long can these relationships assuage a feeling I have in my gut that tells me I am, ultimately, a fish out of water and will remain one as long as I am here?

Metaphorically speaking, the elbow in my side represents a certain claustrophobia I feel in Japan. In addition to physical claustrophobia, I also experience a lack of emotional space that causes me to second-guess whether or not it is appropriate to express certain feelings or opinions. It represents the tightening of my jaw after I come to work in the morning and my “Good morning” to a stranger is not returned with more than a split second of eye-contact and a nod so infinitely small I would not have noticed it had I not been trained to look for it in my four years here. But, still I stay because then I am shown such a simple and heart-warming ray of kindness that makes all of the ignored smiles and averted eyes seem like water under the bridge of humanity.

Should I stay or should I go? A friend of mine once said that the teens—which are a notoriously uncomfortable and unsettling time in a person’s life—are a walk in the park compared to one’s mid-twenties. Amen.