Devotion (19 page)

Steve Cope calls early meditation experiences
the noble failure
. The first time I heard him say it, I was reminded of my great friend and teacher, the late Jerome Badanes, who once said much the same about writing novels.
All novels are failures
. Even at the time, as a very young writer, I knew what Jerry meant. In novels—as in life—there is no perfection. We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal. Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing—there must be a moment when we stop. When we say, This is the best I can do for now. And though Jerry didn’t apply the word
noble
to the failure of novel-writing, I think he would have agreed that there is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness—the
doggedness.
It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.

These days, when I practice yoga and do sitting meditation, I am more aware than ever of the monkey that is my mind. Watch it go! One minute, I’m right here counting my breath, and I think I’ve got it—and the next, I’ve left the room, the house, the state of Connecticut. I’m in Italy, perhaps. Thinking about the teaching I’ll be doing next month. I’m in New York, at last week’s party, wondering if I said the wrong thing.
Come back
, I’ll tell myself. This is the magic moment that Sharon Salzberg talks about. Not when your thoughts have wandered, but when you realize your thoughts have wandered.
Come back.
Gently, with compassion for the self, and its poor little monkey mind destined to fail.

We discovered that I was pregnant the fall after my mother died. We had been trying—or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we hadn’t been not trying. I was forty. Well, forty and a half. Half years had become important in matters of midlife fertility. We were squeaking in right under the wire. Blessedly avoiding the nightmare I had seen so many of my friends go through: the doctors, tests, labs, drugs, invasive procedures so often ending in heartbreak. I had
been through enough
. Did I think this—or is memory supplying it? Jacob’s illness, my mother’s death. The last few years had been rough. Didn’t I deserve a break? Even though words like
deserve
really aren’t part of my psychological makeup, still I wonder if there was a little bit of reverse hubris. A feeling that now—now things would be easier. I mean, God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. And everything happens for a reason. Right?

My pregnancy felt
bashert
—the Yiddish word for “meant to be.” There seemed a sad, poetic symmetry to it: the end of one life, the beginning of another.
You’re breaking the cycle
, an old friend said. I knew what she meant. I had been an only child, and now I was going to be the mother of two children. The empty seat at our table would be filled. My ambivalence and fear had vanished. I was deeply, powerfully happy. I called my obstetrician, began taking prenatal vitamins, and made an appointment to see her in about a month. It seemed so right that I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

At eleven weeks, Michael and I drove into the city to see the doctor. It was a beautiful, cloudless day. We held hands in the doctor’s office, looked through well-worn issues of
Fit Pregnancy
and
Child
. I had my blood pressure measured, my weight. We joked with the nurses. I felt no worry, no pang of apprehension. Was it the hormones? I lay on the examining table and waited.

There are times in my life when all I can remember is Michael’s face. I remember Michael’s face the moment that Jacob was born; when the pediatric neurologist gave us the news; when he told me my mother was dead; and in the obstetrician’s office, when she couldn’t find the heartbeat. As I lay on the table, the wand of the sonogram pressed to my lower belly, I watched Michael’s face. He watched the doctor’s face. And that soft, caved-in expression—a magnitude of vulnerability—came over him once again.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Isn’t it possible that it’s still too early?” Michael asked.

“I’m going to send you for a higher-resolution sonogram.”

That afternoon, the machine at another doctor’s midtown office detected the faintest of heartbeats. I saw it on the screen, flickering like a distant star. Bed rest for a week was suggested. Bed rest, and then we’d go back in for another look.

“Maybe it will be okay,” Michael said as we drove back to Connecticut. “Maybe we miscalculated and you’re not as far along as we thought.”

I was mute as we sped along. The hollows of my eyes burned. I had hit up against the hard edge of something. I knew Michael was trying to comfort me—to comfort both of us—but I also knew that it was over. That faint, flickering star on the sonogram was burning out.

I wasn’t getting any closer to a personal relationship with God. It didn’t occur to me to ask God questions, or to expect answers. We weren’t really on speaking terms. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I heard and beheld God in every object, yet understood God not in the least. And increasingly, that was okay. I didn’t need to understand. Who was I, to understand?

One Saturday evening, Michael, Jacob, and I were at an outdoor party in Connecticut. It was a cold, drizzly night, and a huge bonfire was blazing in an open meadow. Dogs and kids were romping, and adults were huddled under shawls and blankets, warm by the fire. I stood shivering next to a woman I had gotten to know slightly—the mom from Jacob’s school who I had first noticed all those years ago at the lake. The one whose son had a long, Samson-like mane of hair. The boy’s hair had since been cut.

She and I were drawn into an instantly intense conversation—the only kind we ever had. Perhaps because we had both almost lost our children, we never made small talk with each other. I wondered out loud how she had known it was time to cut her son’s hair. How had she decided that she had fulfilled her bargain with God?

“God told me it was time,” she said. Her face was lovely, lit by the orange glow of the bonfire.

What did she mean,
God told her
? Was there some sort of sign?

“I got on my knees and asked God what to do, and he said that it was all right—it was time, now.”

I looked at her hard. She was a bright woman, sophisticated, well-traveled. Nobody’s fool. How could she believe God spoke to her? Maybe God
did
speak to her. Maybe he just didn’t speak to me.

I remembered a story my aunt Shirley had once told me. A famous Orthodox rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik, paid his respects to my grandmother during her convalescence after a massive stroke following my grandfather’s death. My grandmother had already lost use of the left side of her body, and had lost most of her ability to speak. But through Shirley, she managed to convey her question to the rabbi. Why, she wanted to know, would God visit such hardship on an ordinary woman? She understood the trials God inflicted on great men like Abraham and Isaac, but why on someone like herself? The rabbi’s answer was this:
Mrs. Shapiro, do you realize what you’re asking? You’re asking to have a dialogue with God.

I didn’t think I wanted a dialogue with God. What I wanted was an awareness of him: the unspeakable beauty, in the words of Thomas Merton, of a heart within the heart of one’s life. I was enormously comforted by the idea of that inner, glowing, invisible heart.

Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror. But here I was. It was two in the morning, and the monsters had crept their way out of the closet. Every thought led to bleakness and despair. Three in the morn
ing. Then four. I tossed, turned. Got out of bed, went downstairs. Drank a Diet Coke. Came back upstairs. Turned on my computer. Read Internet headlines, went on Facebook. Scanned through the status updates of perfect strangers. Went back to bed. I couldn’t soothe myself. I wanted to be a person who would make a comforting cup of tea, curl up in an easy chair with a soft blanket, read something helpful. Perhaps listen to some Chopin nocturnes. Ride out the storm. But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn’t have been in the state I was in to begin with.

What had set it off? It was a random Sunday night—nothing special. In fact, we’d had a good, busy weekend: a sleepover for Jacob, some errands, an early dinner with friends. Michael had finished a screenplay he’d been working on for months. We’d all tucked in early. Now, my mind had become a flip book of the most painful, devastating thoughts and images. They went something like this:

Michael clutching his arm, collapsing.

Me in a doctor’s office—the prognosis dire.

The two of us in a car, a truck speeding toward us in the wrong lane.

Our wills—we hadn’t redone our wills.

Money was tight. We always gambled a bit on our future.

What if Michael couldn’t sell his next screenplay?

Our house—we could lose the house.

The phone ringing. The school. A freak accident.

Or an allergic reaction. Or—

The what-ifs continued. I thought about waking Michael. I could hear him snoring in the other room. But I didn’t want to ruin his night too. I tried the
metta
phrases:
May I be safe
.
May I be
happy.
But the simple words, which I usually found centering, were slippery. I couldn’t hold on to them. I felt as if I were scrambling up a muddy incline. There was nothing to grasp. Just handfuls of dirt.
May I be strong. Live with ease.

My heart pounded in my ears. My chest and stomach felt tight. I couldn’t breathe all the way in. Maybe I was having a heart attack. It wasn’t unheard of, after all. I resisted the urge to look up symptoms of heart attack or stroke on the Internet. No good was going to come of that. I imagined an ambulance racing up our driveway, lights flashing in country darkness. How had I gotten here—again? All the yoga, meditation, learning. All the brilliant teachers, the searching, seeking, reading—all the goddamn
thinking
, and still there was this: the waiting out the night. Face-to-face with my absolute aloneness. With the certainty of change. With precisely the suffering of which the Buddha spoke.
We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted
, Heinrich Heine once wrote.
That new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.

In the darkness of my house as my family lay sleeping, all I could feel was the anguish of the unknown. Its uncanny attractions seemed like a mirage that could only be made out in the light of day.
May I be safe
, I kept repeating until finally the sun began to rise.
May I be happy
. I thought of something Jack Kornfield had once said while teaching meditation, which had later been repeated to me by one of his students:
This too, this too, this too
.

Along with thinking of my daily meditation experience as the noble failure, I also began to think of it as the daily reminder. Each day I unrolled my mat on my bedroom floor. I practiced yoga and watched random thoughts float like dust motes through my head. Even in physically challenging twists and inversions, I could be elsewhere, thinking. I started to keep lists of what I found myself thinking about. Usually, it was some combination of what had happened earlier that day, or the day before—or what was about to happen later. I recalled that bit of Ayurvedic philosophy that Steve had once shared with me:
Be careful what you surround yourself with, because you become what you surround yourself with
. When I was able to notice the contents of my mind, I saw exactly how true that turned out to be. If I had talked to our accountant, he was in there. If I had received an e-mail from a student, she was in there. If we had been at a dinner party the night before, the guests were in there.

What was cluttering my mind when I
wasn’t
noticing? Sometimes, particularly while driving, I would realize with a jolt that I had covered many miles in my car without the slightest bit of awareness. The outside world was a blur. Where was I? I had no idea. Instead, I was lost in some story—usually a story that hadn’t even happened. What was the use of that? Over time, I began to wonder whether these stories had anything in common. I knew that neural pathways in the brain deepen over time: anxiety creates
more anxiety, depression more depression. Maybe these stories also created their own pathways. They seemed to be variations on a theme. But what was the theme?

During my retreat at Garrison, forced inward by the silence, I found some clarity. I saw that no matter where my mind went, it all boiled down to this: it kept comparing.
How am I doing?
it constantly asked.
Am I up or am I down? How do people see me? Does she like me? Does he think I’m smart?
I cared—I saw this—far too much. It was horrifying, in fact, to realize how much of my mental chatter involved either shoring myself up, or tearing myself down.
How am I doing?
Over and over again, my mind asked the question in one way or another.

The awareness that I was always comparing was hard to tolerate, particularly in the silence. Did other people do this? I looked around the meditation hall at the other participants. The woman with the curly hair who carried a pot of lip balm with her all the time—she probably didn’t compare herself to other people. What about the young guy in the front row, wearing a yarmulke? It would never have crossed his mind.

As I took stock of the room, comparing even about comparing, Sylvia and Sharon were giving a dharma talk on the Brahma Viharas—Buddhism’s four most central virtues: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The path to achieving these virtues was strewn with stumbling blocks, of course. These were called the far-enemies and near-enemies.

“The far-enemy of sympathetic joy is envy,” said Sharon. “And the near-enemy is comparing.”

My ears pricked up. The near-enemy of sympathetic joy was comparing? I hadn’t paid much attention to sympathetic joy. I felt
joy for other people—easily reveling in the happiness and success of others. So I hadn’t really paid much attention to this Brahma Vihara. I figured I had it down.

“It’s painful and unskillful to compare,” Sharon said, “no matter what conclusion we draw. Comparing creates agitation in the mind.”

I felt Sharon’s words go through me like a shock. There was the lesson and the internalizing of the lesson all at once.
Comparison itself
was the problem. Whether I was up, or down, or sideways was incidental to the very act of comparison, which was agitating. I understood this to be absolutely true. I thought of how I felt when I compared myself—whatever the result. It was diminishing, slightly sickening.
Unskillful
, that perfect Buddhist term.

In the months following Garrison, I attempted greater skillfulness. I unrolled my mat and began the process of my daily reminder. Comparing? I tried to talk to myself kindly, something I had learned from Sylvia.
Don’t do that, honey. Come back.
Lost in a story?
Come back, come back
. Where were my feet? Ah, right there. Beneath me on the ground. Where was my breath? It filled my lungs, whether or not I paid attention. Where was I? Held in the infinite arms of the present.