A few years ago my wife and I went to LA to visit some of her family. We were lucky enough to be there at the same time as a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks who were creating a sand mandala at an art museum. If you've never seen this, it's an amazing thing. There were 3 or 4 monks working at a time placing grains of colored sand in an intricate pattern on a low table probably 5 feet across. It was beautiful and astonishing. They had been working at it already for two days when we saw it. At the end of the week, when the design was finished and everything was filled in, they would brush it all away to demonstrate the impermanence of life and the world we live in. Nothing lasts forever.
This is exactly what working in the kitchen of a professional restaurant feels like to me. We work really hard to create something extraordinary that only exists for a very short time. In creating and preparing those dishes we learn about food, our craft, and each other. We create a community in the kitchen and in the dining room. We leave only a memory of something that will never exist in quite the same way again.
Zen and the art of cookery? If the sum total of a life is all the good times and all the bad times, then surely you've added an awful lot of good times and memories to peoples' lives. You've made the world a better place.
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