Buddha’s decision to hold up a flower was entirely spontaneous, as was a brush stroke by Picasso or a note played by Pablo Casals. Buddha wasn’t a newbie. He had paid his dues. For 500 lifetimes he’d been the attendant for previous Buddhas. He knew his way around the block. When Ananda stuck a blade of grass in the ground, Buddha saw that now there was a temple. There doesn’t seem to be in Zen a correlation between the time spend in deliberation and the quality of the action. Holding up the flower was a masterful stroke of genius, and yet, it was the result of genuine flow rather from racking one’s discursive brain to come up with the perfect testing instrument. “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke