She's Gone

I have been seeing a woman for the past twelve years.

She wasn’t my girlfriend, or even my friend. But I’ve spent two or three hours a month, times twelve, times twelve – in total almost six hundred hours – in deep conversation with her, and she probably understands me better than anyone else.

When I first met her I was reeling from a failed marriage and dating a man who wouldn't leave his wife. Back then my diet consisted almost entirely of coffee, liquor and cigarettes. In the mornings I would walk very slowly across Harvard Square to my office, concentrating on moving one foot in front of the other until I reached my building, feeling worried all the way that I might not make it. In the evenings, after my son drifted off to sleep, I’d sit on the windowsill in my tiny apartment, smoking and staring out at the sky.

Rather than dissecting the present, when we met she took me immediately back to an equally painful, unacknowledged time: childhood. For the first year or so I would emerge from her office sobbing, hanging my swollen, red face toward the sidewalk, and hope not to see anyone I knew as I stumbled home. It sounds cliché nowadays, but there is a kind of primal utility to unpacking the sorrow of your youth under the guidance of a kindhearted non-parent, to properly grieve and then move forward, accepting full responsibility for your independent adult life.

The later stages of our relationship were based on Vipassana meditation and Buddhist teachings. When she first initiated this I balked, thinking she wanted me to convert. As a preacher’s kid steeped in Methodism for two decades, I'd had my fill of organized religion. But Insight Meditation is more a philosophy of life than a religious doctrine, and despite my initial reluctance its logic gradually became apparent to me. In fact, for me the extreme rationality of the practice was its most attractive element.

If you read Siddartha in high school you know the basics; if not, they are that the world is full of suffering, and that we spend our lives perpetuating that suffering by trying to distract ourselves from it, and from the fact of our impending deaths. The goal of Buddhist practice is to develop compassion for ourselves and others and ultimately, awareness of and freedom from the cycle of distractions that keeps us unhappy.

Lest this description sounds a bit new-agey, as it initially did me, it essentially means this: the human mind works to maximize our comfort (survival) in a type of undeveloped universe in which we no longer live. We’re designed to seek out the familiar, even when it’s unhealthy, and we thereby unwittingly repeat history. Breaking the cycle is possible, but It requires concerted effort to move away from our habitual responses and engage with the world in more conscious, mindful way.

The main method Buddhists employ toward this goal is silent meditation. Not just for minutes at a time, but days, months, even years.

Try to sit in silence without turning your attention to the scattering of ideas that come your way. Concentrate on your breath, the simple act of inhaling and exhaling, the sensation of air moving rhythmically through the body. Try to silence the perpetual voice that each of us hears – the one that drones on about mistakes and failures, casting judgment and manipulating our experience. Sounds wonderful, right? Yet turning off that voice and calming the mind is extremely difficult to do, even for accomplished practitioners.

Once long ago she told me that the amazing thing about extended meditation is that all your emotions present themselves, even though you’re not interacting with anyone. Each of us goes through our days believing our feelings result from the circumstances of our lives and our encounters with others. But if you go into silence, as she has, you see that regardless of your environment, every thought and emotion - sadness, anger, joy - comes from within you and is under your control.

In this year when I’m embarking on enormous life changes of my own, I feared ending therapy would be a setback. I’m still uncertain of my own life course, managing only brief moments of silence and clarity. Yet strangely enough her departure has made me feel strong. Maybe its from watching a role model break with convention and take a leap into the unknown to achieve a lifelong goal. Maybe its seeing a stage of my own life conclude, and having the opportunity to remember back over the past twelve years and acknowledge that there has been positive change.

I'll picture her going forward with shaved head, carefully layered clothes, knapsack strapped to her back, silent.

All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.