Shanghai Supermarket Zen Deja Vu
I went to the supermarket today with my ITGS students to look at the shop’s IT systems, which caused me to have an epiphany.
The first few weeks of living in another country are always thrilling. Going to the supermarket took on the aurora of going to another planet, because everything was so different. Going to Jingqiao Carrefour with jetlag in 2004 was a happy aneurysm for me. I had no idea where anything was. I could not read the labels and the shop was unbelievably crowded with people staring at my overflowing shopping trolley. All of this excitement soon faded when I got bogged down into a routine of work and commuting. Going to the supermarket soon went back to being a mundane chore where you put your mind on passive autopilot as you buy what you want before getting out.
Walking around Kangqiao Bandao’s (somewhere in Pudong) RT Mart today revealed another side of supermarket reality that I usually overlook. I spent an hour with my student’s actively looking for evidence of barcodes, weighing machines, labelling, loyalty cards and point of sales systems. We had fun defacing a barcode just to see how the supermarket staff would deal with it at the checkout. Being an active participant made me feel like I was seeing a Chinese supermarket for the first time. I had a fresh, beginner’s zen mind about this place that I used to have when I first lived in Shanghai.
I still enjoy living in Shanghai, but it is very easy to get swept along by busy routines and distractions until you overlook all the small details that make living in this city so fascinating. I hope to have many more moments like this over the next sixty years. I had forgotten that going to the supermarket could be so much fun.
Thinking about this makes me want to pickup a copy of Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which is a beautiful and elegant description of what it feels like to be aware of all the wonderful things that can happen to you in the course of a day. I have a monkey mind that likes to be constantly over stimulated by RSS feeds, websites, movies and podcasts. I think it will be good for me to download this book from Audible to keep me grounded while I am travelling to and from work.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Shanghai, supermarkets, zen