The Zen of Using Your Hands: Sushi as Digital Detox
I’m cautious about the word Zen. It’s one of those words everyone feels they understand and almost no one can actually explain — least of all me. So I won’t try to define it here. The only thing I can say with any confidence is that whatever Zen is, it has something to do with giving your full attention to whatever is directly in front of you, right now, and nothing else.
Here is what I’ve noticed, across several hundred sushi classes, about how that attention gets found.
The average person checks their phone somewhere around 150 times a day. I didn’t know the exact number until I looked it up, but I didn’t need to — you can feel it in a room full of people before class starts. Phones come out while we wait for the rice to finish. They come out between the market tour and the studio. What I’ve come to understand is that a sushi class isn’t really competing with the phone for attention. It doesn’t have to. Making nigiri takes both hands. For the length of the class, the choice is made for you.
Nigiri itself is built from eight steps — pick up the rice, shape it, add the wasabi, lay the fish over it, press, turn, press again, set it down. I describe it to guests as choreography: something you could, in principle, memorize in about fifteen minutes. In practice, almost no one does, not on the first try. What usually happens is that I teach step one, and by the time we reach step seven, someone has already forgotten it. I get asked the same handful of questions, over and over, in slightly different words, for the first four or five pieces. It’s one of my favorite parts of teaching, honestly — watching someone hold seven new instructions in their head at once and lose two of them every time an eighth arrives.
Long before anyone masters the choreography, though, they run into a smaller, more physical problem: how not to get your hands completely covered in rice. I tell guests, only half joking, that for the first few pieces, most people’s hands end up looking like a polar bear’s paws — thick, white, unrecognizable. And even once you’ve solved that, there’s a second problem waiting: the rice itself has to be exactly right. Packed too tightly, and it won’t come apart properly in your mouth. Too loose, and the piece falls apart in your guest’s chopsticks before it ever reaches their mouth. No one can tell you the correct pressure in words. You only find it by feeling for it, piece after piece, failing in both directions until your hands quietly figure out the middle.
And then, somewhere around the fifth piece, something shifts. The questions stop. The room, which a few minutes earlier was full of guests asking me to repeat myself, goes quiet. Nobody plans this moment or announces it. It simply arrives — ten sets of hands, each working alone now, each guest fully absorbed in trying to make the next piece slightly better than the last.
I remember one guest in particular noticing it happen to him. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that he taught mindfulness for a living — not as a religious practice, he was careful to say, but as a practical technique for settling the mind. Partway through the class, in the middle of that same silence, he looked up and said he felt Zen. I don’t think he meant it dramatically. I think he was simply naming, out loud, what he does for a living, the moment he happened to feel it happening to himself.
Once a guest reaches that point — once their hands have found their own rhythm — I try to say as little as possible. I’ve watched other instructors do the opposite: correcting the shape of every single piece, coaching from the sideline the way an overinvolved parent calls out corrections from the bleachers. I understand the impulse. It would probably produce slightly better-looking sushi. But it would also take something away, and I’d rather guests keep it. The whole value of that silence is that it belongs to them. My job, once they’ve found it, is mostly to leave them alone inside it.
Which leaves me in a strange position, if I’m honest. I’m making nigiri right alongside my guests, my hands doing more or less the same eight steps as theirs. But I don’t get to disappear into it the way they do. I’m the one person in the room who has to keep watching — the knife, the fish, whether someone’s shari has gone too soft, whether anyone needs help they’re too absorbed to ask for. I give my guests an hour of not thinking about anything but their hands. I don’t think I’ve ever had that same hour for myself, not once, in all the classes I’ve taught.
I used to think that was simply the cost of running the room. Lately I’ve started to think it might be closer to the point. Someone has to stay awake so that everyone else is allowed to disappear for a while. I’ve made my peace with being that person. I just didn’t expect that teaching people how to find a kind of quiet would be, for me, one of the noisiest parts of my day.