The Little World

We need to question two more servants about this zen business. Here’s WHEN to fill us in on the schedule:

” When do you seek zen enlightenment? When you don’t have it. When you feel all up and down and jangled and iffy and nothing seems to satisfy you. That’s the time to contemplate what you need and then meditate as fast as possible – with a hard cutting edge of insight to power your way to bliss. Leave no stone unturned and take no prisoners. Out of my way, I’m going to grab peace! “

I think our honest serving men are laughing at us…But there is always HOW to fill us in on the details:

” Traditionally, zen practitioners meditated. This sounds like they were thinking, but a lot of them tried not to do so. They tried to empty their minds for hours at a time. And this before MARRIED AT FIRST SIGHT was broadcast to help them do it. It seemed to involve a lot of sitting on mats in deserted wooden buildings looking at bamboo. The process was aided with haircuts, hunger, and shapeless clothing.

This might seem like a recipe for 1970’s punk but it did tend to work for many people – or at least they said it was working. In the Orient it worked until the local kings, warlords, or military oligarchies built up enough arms to effectively attack their neighbours…and then all bets were off until they’d slaughtered themselves calm again. “

Whew. That’s more honesty than I bargained for – as George Gobel used to say ” You don’t hardly see that any more… “. But we can apply it to scale modelling.

When do you build models? If you are lucky, you build them in your spare time. People who build them while they are working are just working. It’s when it becomes recreation that the good comes – people can forget their daily job in the complexities of modelling.

If you do not have a daily job – unemployed or retired – you may be blessed or cursed with boredom. This is where scale modelling can save your mind. Even the simplest models occupy your eyes and hands and yield benefits for both organs. The employed can afford more kits than the idle, but the idle can turn basic materials into scale models every bit as good as the commercial examples. Retirees are in the best seat – they can spend as much time as they like pursuing perfection. Hopefully, they never catch it.

How? Well the classic plastic kit and the classic modelling knife, bit of sandpaper, and tube of glue is all you need. Then you add the airbrush, the spray booth, the Dremel, the Anglepoise light, 24 separate hand tools and 100 ten-ml bottles of paint. Then the shelving system and dust covers, and 300 reference books.

You set up a workshop that is never absolutely right or quite finished and start knifing styrene. And fingers. You clip, cut, sand, test, paint, cement, wedge, fill, sand, fill, sand, curse, undercoat, fill, sand, and eventually paint. Then you decal and clear coat and weather and base and display and start all over again.

And surprisingly, you feel tranquil – sort of – sometimes. The real trick is to increase the amount and the times.