The Zen painter

I once heard a story of a Zen painter who had been asked by someone to create a very simple rendition of a tiger. The Zen painter told the person to come back in two weeks.

When the person showed up at the Zen painter's door two weeks later, he asked the Zen painter if his painting was ready. The Zen painter looked thoughtful and took some time before replying.
"Please, come inside," he finally said. The two went inside and the Zen painter took out a blank piece of paper, a bottle of ink and a brush and sat there staring at the blank paper. The person wondered if the Zen painter had remembered that he would be coming back, and wondered if the Zen painter had even given any thought to the painting at all. Just when the person was about to get flustered and ask the Zen painter if he had in fact remembered the painting, the Zen painter took up the brush, dipped it in the ink bottle and made three quick brush strokes on the piece of paper.

The person was astonished. The painting was very simple, very beautiful, a perfect balance of three smoothly flowing lines that presented an amazingly clear sense of being a tiger.

"Wow," the person said. "That's amazing... Did you..." But before he could finish his question the Zen painter put a finger to his lips to indicate that maybe the person shouldn't ask the question that was on his mind. The Zen painter stood up and walked to a closet at the far end of the room and opened the door. Out poured a four foot high pile of papers all with various brush strokes - two weeks of attempts at finding the perfect flow of ink that would culminate in those three brush strokes.

The ways we communicate can be said to have a similar journey, if we are to bring them to a similar type of culmination. And to articulate this, there are many stories, sayings, adages, suggestions and sets of instructions, many of which tend towards this same understanding - that we need to pay attention to the ways we build our own ways of consructing (and presenting) the details we want to share with others.

Sometimes the journey may not be so straightforward as with individual acts of communication. For instance, when we seek to build an overall personalized style, tone or mood that we can call our own, there are many levels of considerations. I think that within this journey is more of a sense of a need to watch ourselves as if from outside - to objectively, without sentiment, observe what it is we do to effect that style, tone or mood, and what we might do to create it as tightly tied to "the ways about us" as possible. It is sometimes a quite long journey, potentially evolving throughout the full course of one's life...