Zen And The Art Of Understanding Dementia

Everybody has heard of the book title
'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance',
it is a best seller, now fifty years old.
It's anniversary is being celebrated in the media.

It is a a book about philosophy that seeks to synthesise
several complex ideas within an engaging narrative,
literally a journey through a landscape and the mind.

To converts the book is beguiling,
to others it is discursive, distracted and indirect.
In other words it is the definitively woolly
1970's idea of a statement about life.

What better subject for material for a follow up
to apply such discursive thinking could there be,
the patience and lack of aim that is part of 'Zen',
in the 2020's, than to dementia? 

There the absence of memory becomes a spur to fear
as a person seemingly feels their personhood ebbing away
in dribs and drabs that they fear will later become a torrent;
they have less of themselves with which
to hold on to what remains of themselves.

Just like the nervous breakdown that is at the core
of the 1974 book, our going through why we go through
changes in consciousness might seem to be circular,
but if through the thinking we, and our neighbours
and 'loved ones', find where we and they are,
then we might find the place we feel 'present' in.