All Day Sitting

This week so far has seen a succession of meetings; apart from the regularly scheduled meetings of the Practice Committee, on Tuesday afternoons, and Senior Staff, on Wednesday mornings, I also attended an all-day meeting on Monday, which was looking at the future of City Center. I confess I found it hard to keep my concentration levels up for that one. So this morning, even as we are gearing up for the next practice period, which begins with the one-day sitting on Saturday, I took myself off after breakfast to ride my bike, which as people who know me will attest, is one of my main pleasures in life.
We have almost eighty people signed up for Saturday, and when I sat down this afternoon, my to-do list looked like this: finalise the schedule, allocate jobs, work on the seating chart, assemble two sets of oryoki bowls, check how many spatulas we have for guest eating bowls, find a light-up chiden for tomorrow morning, fill out a vacation request form, look at some documents about sound systems, update the tenken (attendance) list to include all the new arrivals, reprint the tenken notes we give people who don't show up for part of the schedule, find chant sheets for noon service, write the doan and kokyo parts for noon service, and put out a sign-up sheet for people to do the doan jobs. I am happy to say that I managed to do almost all of that before going to the zendo at five fifteen, which means that a lot of the main work is done for Saturday, and now I can allow the hundred other things that I will need to take care of to manifest themselves, which they will. And then sit, and try to do some zazen in the midst of it all.