I am Zen Chan
Welcome to Zen Chan’s personal blog! This stands as an extension of my main website. Here is the place where I can write down my thoughts and feelings, where I can talk about experiences and other things freely. It differs a lot from my website, which is where I mainly gather my creative works in one place. Even though I occasionally write about restaurants which I visited and like as well, I concentrate on reflecting about past experiences in my life, which includes my upbringing, my school and university life and also my work life. I also think a lot about social structures and what kind of impacts those have on our lives as human beings. That is my ‘Life Experience Series”. If there is a special occasion, an event, or anything that I wish to preserve as a memory, I will write that down as well. So there are really light hearted topics, but also quite heavy ones. I’m thinking about a lot of things. Sometimes it gets really fuzzy and it feels like my thoughts are on the verge of overflowing. This is when I decide on a subject, in order to arrange my thoughts for a blog post, in which I communicate my thoughts more coherently to myself, but also to others who wish to read about it.
As you can see, the topics I write about are a little bit more diverse. I don’t know what brought you here and I don’t know whether you will stay to read anything else of mine, but if you do, I want to thank you for taking your time and for providing some place in your mind for my thoughts.
My Name 'Zen Chan'
Some people might wonder, why I chose the name ‘Zen Chan’ because it is also known as ‘Zen Buddhism’. ‘Zen’ is Japanese and ‘Chan’ is Chinese. And both actually have the same meaning. But there weren’t any religious thoughts behind it when I decided to name my Internet persona ‘Zen Chan’. I only found out about the meaning when a friend looked it up on Wikipedia. I thought it was a funny coincidence and somehow I liked it even more.
Honestly, I didn’t think much when I created that name. Long ago, I read the manga ‘Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne’ by Arina Tanemura. There was a character named ‘Zen’. I liked that name because it somehow emits a calm feeling (now I know why). Well, and I also like Jackie Chan. That is why I combined those two without much thought and named myself ‘Zen Chan’. Now that I’m saying this out loud it sounds a bit stupid, doesn’t it?
This has been me since then. So now you know the story behind this name. That is why you won’t be able to find anything about religions or Zen Buddhism on my blog.