zen and coding

I'm gonna change it up again, and talk a little about the zen side of software. I think that everyone, no matter how much they choose to fight it, has a certain activity that puts them into a trance-like state where they hyper focus on that one activity and get more in touch with themselves. For me, that activity is engineering. More specifically, software engineering.

What prompted this thought? I started my work day today by writing software. I know, an odd thing for a software engineer to do is write software, right? All jokes aside, when I finished working and reworking one particular piece I noticed the following:

1. About 4 hours had passed.
2. I was intensely hungry.
3. I received 4 emails (when I get emails an annoying pop up clutters my screen)
4. I had written a lot of code.

That got me thinking: How did I end up losing track of so much time, ignoring basic bodily necessities, and even ignoring other thing happening on screen? It's a scary thought, really. That one can become so entrenched in an activity that they lose track of themselves, their environment, and their basic survival instincts.

The worst is that when that trance-like state ends, there is little to no recollection of what happened. Almost as if some primal part of the brain had taken over, and disabled any short term memory processing to squeeze out all the processing power it could. I'm not sure if that's the most accurate assessment of how the brain works, but that's how it feels.

I know I'm not the only one who gets these periods of asceticism. I use that word because it actually fits very closely with what some religions view as meditation. My understanding of meditation is that it is an attempt to release the spirit (if such a thing exists) from the body and reach some higher enlightenment. I can't say for sure whether or not I reach that while I'm coding in these trances. I can say, though, that some of my best code is born from these trances. Usually, said code is elegant, descriptive, and clean. This is in contrast to my normal code which is painfully brutish. In fact, I can go back right now and look at most of the code I've written over my lifetime (I keep a CVS repository with almost everything I've done since 1998, when I was programming more than just 'hello world' or a ridiculous variant). Instantly, the difference is evident. The projects which I spent a long time working on over a small period of sittings (usually 1 sitting would be 5-12 hours) look much better than the projects where I spent a lot of short sittings fitting the stuff together. I can even see where I got sloppy, and had some pressing interruption which I was forced to deal with and broke me from my development.

So, is there a zen to coding? Some hidden interpretation, whose meaning we must glean? I'd like to think that we can discover worth by doing the work that many deem worthless. Not many would think that developing software could add personal value (financial is a different story). I'd like to think that I have.