nicotiana

In my view, there is nothing new under the sun; there are good people and bad people, with some in the middle, and notions are either mostly realistic or based on some phantom of the human mind, and the latter (Communism, Nazism, COVID-19, The Satanic Panic) always end badly with shattered lives and ruined hopes.

Those of us who saw the Wall — the scary one, under Communism — and witnessed the world ready for nuclear annihilation at any moment, while we heard weekly of those who died trying to escape empires that were not just repressive and incompetent, but seemed to delight in humbling the talented so the herd of incompetents could run free, tend to distrust ideology of any kind, whether native Utopian ideology or some other notion like religion or capitalism made into an ad hoc dogmatic belief system.

No matter what intellectual background we have, then, we find ourselves gravitating toward the simple principles that show up consistently in life. One of these seems to be that life should be pleasurable, since people are driven to acquire pleasure more than they are compelled to avoid pain. If you want adequate results, scare people; if you want great results, reward them for getting it right and let them figure out the rest on their own.

I can never believe in One Big Idea, since the more broad the solution the less specific it is and therefore it creates resistance from details moving bottom-up to eventually dethrone it. The more cooks in the kitchen, the worse the soup, and if you write a rule to control the methods used by all cooks, the less it applies in the infinite variation of everyday life. But as a starting principle, I tend toward realism, a sort of seat-of-the-pants type of scientific method that says pay attention to reality instead of coming up with a testable hypothesis and assuming that this represents the whole of the system.

In this view, history is a better guide than theory, and time-honored things endure because they work even if they become unfashionable. This is equal parts frontier practicality and Zen Buddhism, where you are induced to meditate and experience life until you creep out of Plato's cave, the mental ghetto of human brains responding to their own impulses more than perceiving the world around them. The Zen of Pipe Smoking might begin this way: what matters is the rhythm of the pipe, not the rhythm of the smoker.

Like all good principles, this consists of a nice tidy statement followed by a few pages of footnotes. The draw on the pipe depends on the pipe, what is in it, the humidity that day, the heat, and of course the mouth of the smoker. Pipe enjoyers since the invention of the device have smoked by place the stem in the mouth, lighting the material in the bowl, and allowing the low pressure area of the sealed mouth to draw in smoke from the open bowl. Leaf crackles, embers glow, and every seven seconds or so the smoker opens the mouth in order to let out the old smoke.

If pipe smoking has a Zen, it consists on maintaining this rhythm no matter what is going on around you. You may be fighting with a fidgety lawnmower, dodging bullets in Ukraine or Taiwan, running to grab your kid before he falls over a cliff edge, or simply typing back one of those urgent messages on the internet that begin with an insult to the mother of the other party. You may be under massive amounts of stress and fearing for your life or future. The world could well be on fire around you.

But somehow, you must keep the rhythm of the pipe going and not start puffing fast, at which point you lose flavor and the pleasant balance of nicotine, and send yourself into a cytokine storm of panic and anger. Instead, you clear your mind, keep the rhythm, and look with new dispassionate eyes at the problem from a 30,000 foot view before zooming in to what is immediate, necessary, practical, and realistic.

Much of the lore around pipe smoking involves the smoker being a thoughtful, analytical, and perhaps wise sort of person. One cultivates wisdom by clearing the mind and looking at what is there, studying it in depth with the patience that only someone enjoying the flavor of tobacco and calming waves of nicotine can do, so this stereotype makes some sense. Possibly much of it comes from the Zen of the Pipe, since to have that amount of mental discipline orients the individual toward sanity, balance, and understanding.

As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun; we have seen all the patterns before. In fact, many of them become obvious when examined under the magnifying glass of cold and dispassionate thought applied toward a goal of making life more pleasurable. For those who adopt the Zen of Pipe Smoking, this type of thinking hovers within reach, since they have accepted the pipe as a greater reality than their own impulses and therefore, have lost the veil of illusion that causes us to focus on our own thoughts more than the world around us.