September 18th, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a book that I’ve never read but know about from high school called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” (Have any of you ever read it?) This morning I was wrestling with the big grass-mower that we use at the farm. In my personal life, I never learned much about all the machines we use with motors and engines, and I learned a lot about them firsthand today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our grass-mower is called the “Bull Mower,” and there’s a stylized glyph of a bull’s head next to that name on the machine. As you can imagine, you can’t budge this thing in any way without motor power. Any time you lose power, then, it’s an issue, and, as I learned today, the essential parts of a machine like that are more delicate than you’d expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I got started with the grass-mowing today, I noticed after a few minutes that the max speed setting on the mower wasn’t working. I had learned a few months ago that the motor can slow down or even stop when plants tangle up in the blades. To check that, I turned the machine off and propped up the front end where the blades are. What I forgot was that you have to seal off the gas flow with a little switch when you do that. If you don’t, the gasoline will get caught up in the workings and disable the engine totally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, that’s exactly what ended up happening. It took a call to Kogura-san and another call from him to his repairman to fix. The fix involved draining lots of backed-up gasoline out of the machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I wish that I could say my trouble ended there, but that was not the end. Before you lift up the mower’s front end, you have to switch the gas flow to “closed”; after you’re done with that, you need to switch the flow back to open. I lost count of how many times I forgot to set it back to open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might think that today was all frustration based on what you’ve read so far. While I wasn’t happy to keep on making the same mistakes, they also provoked me to remember that old Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance book. Though I haven’t even read the book, I imagine that it has something to do with mindfulness or focus. And, thinking of all the times today I repeated the same mistakes and struggled with the same stumbling blocks, I feel like I understand that “zen” – calm, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it – is a necessary part of dealing with the many times in life that things don’t go quite right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This diary was a ramble, but I had more fun writing it than usual. Hope you liked reading it, too!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sincerely,
Reed<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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