A Life of Surprises

Much is made these days of being intentional, setting goals, keeping your eye on the ball, knowing where you’re going. The Zen life is a life of discovery.

I never expected to have a child. I’d already been married once when I fell in love again. It took me more than a decade to realize that I’d fallen in love with her boys, gotten married a second time, and thrown myself into being a stepdad. It was a steep learning curve. I wanted to be a good father to them, but I kept stumbling. They had a dad. He wasn’t a bad guy. I managed to find peace in the situation: I would be the best “uncle” I could be. I thought I couldn’t have loved them more if they were my own kids.

They grew up of course, moved out, to live with their father first before heading off to college. I was getting to see them a couple of weeks a year. My second marriage ended soon after. I shouldn’t have been surprised. So many couples stay together for the kids. I was an unusual stepdad.

The third time’s the charm. Another surprise, my third marriage is in its thirtieth year, and we have a daughter. What a surprise. We’d tried to get pregnant, made our required trips to the Rutgers fertility clinic and, faced with their extreme options, decided to leave it up to God. Then Dee got pregnant. At the age of 55, I became a father. And I had thought I couldn’t love my own child more. Another surprise: Morrigan has been my teacher all her life.

Bernie made me a Zen teacher-in-training six months after Morri was born. I’d never expected to be a Zen teacher. It took another ten years for me to complete my training and to be recognized as his successor. In Zen, a teacher’s primary responsibility is to have successors, but the zendo was never the center of my life. Where would I possibly find a successor? My Zen path – another surprise – was taking me into social entrepreneurship. I was 65 when we opened our first charter school.

For a while I hoped that one or more of the young leaders in our schools would not only assume the leadership of our charter network when I retired but would also become a successor Zen teacher. When that dream failed to materialize, I turned to Chao Chou, one of the most revered of Chinese Zen masters, for support. Like me, Chao Chou was a late bloomer. He didn’t begin teaching until he was 80 years old. He taught then for 40 years. Chao Chou was my hero. Every Zen student studies the Chao Chou koans, and yet

Chao Chou had no successors.

And then, they were there. In out tiny sitting group, two students were ready to become Dharma holders. Maybe they’d been ready for a while. Maybe I’d been too busy with my other things to notice, or maybe now the time was right. How long will it take for them to be ready for transmission? It took me ten years with Bernie to ripen. Do I have ten years? Will I get to finish this process, to bring it to the point of transmission, or will they have to finish with one of my Dharma siblings? What’s the alternative? Not start at all? Was I too old to become a father? Was I too old to open a charter school? It’s wonderful, this unplanned life of discovery, this Zen life of surprises.