A Room Without Chairs

  In the morning, I stop off at the local gas station to grab a coffee. As I am taking my coffee and breakfast out of the store, I notice that there is a new Pepsi flavor called "Pepsi Ginger". I decide to buy it to try the flavor. But then just as  I leave the gas station, I reflect: possibly a similar flavor could be achieved by combining any cola with ginger ale. Could it be such an original idea after all, and why didn't anyone arrive at it before?
   I head into the meditation hall, which now happens to be downstairs instead of upstairs. I take down the tables that function as meeting spaces and later stack the chairs. I clear a space for the meditation mats and cushions, thinking there will be perhaps a maximum of 6 practitioners attending. It never occurs to me that a participant might need a chair, but one of the participants does. And at the end of the session, I help to put chairs into rows. The other volunteer mentioned that only one table is needed this time for the food, and participants in the chanting and meditation centers can just use chairs to sit and eat their lunches. Here is the same room, with three different functions: a place to meet, a place to eat, and a place to meditate. And all one needs to do is reconfigure the arrangements to accommodate each. What is a room, if not a space where things are rearranged for different purposes? For a moment, I reflect: a room only looks a certain way and functions that way because people agreed to set it up to do certain things. But if the people agree or think differently, they arrangement suddenly changes to become something else.  A dining room becomes a study or a meditation hall, depending on the function. Can we say the room is only one thing, and one thing alone?
   I suppose the analogy can be extended to the ginger-flavored pepsi. On the outset, it appears to be something 'brand new', but what are the ingredients? It's that ages old pepsi formula with sprigs of natural ginger flavor. And what is in the pepsi? Water, sugar, flavors, carbonation. The constituents are the same ones found in nature, only rearranged to taste a certain way.  When I market it with a special brown (presumably ginger-colored) label, I am confronted with something new. New, yet, in a sense, many of the flavors have been tried and tasted before.
     If I am not careful, I will be fooled into thinking that these things around me have fixed essences. If someone were to tell me that I cannot move the tables because the room is for meeting only, there is a restriction to what the room is thought to do. If I confuse the ginger pepsi for a magic elixir, I forget that it's made up of ingredients you can find pretty much anywhere else. The same goes with thoughts and emotions. While one emotion may seem wonderful, it is often compounded of other conditions. I had better not think that the emotion is so powerful as to stand on its own. The same thing with rooms; if I fill the space with chairs, I can make a new function in the room. But I had better not then conclude that the room is only meant for chairs.  By limiting myself with labels or emotional reactions, I think: a room with chairs can only be a room with chairs.