Koans encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind and approach your life more as a work of art. The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will find not chaos but beauty. Koans light up a life that may have been dormant in you; they hold out the possibility of transformation even if you are trying to address unclear or apparently insoluble problems.

John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros