I'm only half-joking when I say that every time I read about one of these zen masters getting in trouble for his sexual adventures, I find myself wondering where I sign up. I suspect a lot of other men think the same thing.
But here's the reality: donning the robes of a zen priest would not improve my love life one iota. All it would do is make me into a pretty dull and boring zen priest. I would still be me, just in a different set of clothes. Still negative, still cynical, still no aura of danger or bad boy cred. Still just as safe and dreary as a bowl of tepid oatmeal.
The thing that makes these sixty- and seventy-year-old zen geezers attractive to women is the same thing that makes them successful as teachers. It's not their accumulated wisdom or their enlightenment; it's intensity and personal magnetism. They'd be just as successful selling multi-level marketing schemes or running for political office. Having a title and a Japanese middle name have little or nothing to do with it.
Some of you know that due to a series of odd circumstances, I briefly acquired a frankly undeserved 'bad boy' reputation in my mid-forties, and the results were salutary. However, it was going against my basic nature, and it intellectually and emotionally drained me. I was always 'acting'. I eventually went back to being good ol' reliable boring mcarp.
At this stage in my life, it's sort of comforting to have a sense of my place in the scheme of things, even if it's not quite the place I would prefer to have. I'm too old and burnt out now to swim upstream against my basic nature.
But it would be nice to have that personal assistant.
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