"Well, I can’t do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation embrace the boredom and utilize it as a way to at least calm their mind..."

"... and maybe center their mind on something that they don’t usually go to mentally. And often things for maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony. Just changing the lights of a street lamp. There’s guys in uniform. They have a special routine. They do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns a simple task into a somewhat more complex dance. Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous...."

Says Stewart Brand, who has a new book, about maintenance. He's talking to Ezra Klein:

Brand is promoting his new book, "Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One" (commission earned)(only $10 in Kindle). If that sounds a lot like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," that's not hidden. The next thing Ezra says is: "You quote quite a lot from 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' which is a classic book.”