I started with memories. There were times when intellect, objectivity, and stamina had dropped away. Falling in love topped my list, but that was a one-off, far too special to be a model for ordinary life. I could, however, clearly remember two experiences that might help me understand, in a productive fashion, how to connect with the opposites of my greatest strengths: learning how to ski and learning how to sing (or, more correctly, taking voice lessons . . . I’m still not sure I know how to sing).
I began skiing in my late 30s, and I don’t think I’ve ever gone skiing alone. I always skied with my sons. Jon and Jeff were 11 or 12 when I started, and they soon became competitive freestyle skiers. What I found so remarkable about skiing with them was that they were always so much better than I was, no matter how good I became. In fact, when they were teenagers, skiing was the only activity we did together in which they were the authorities. Inherently excellent teachers, they could always see what I was doing wrong and help me do it better. That experience, in which they were the parents and I was the child, was wonderfully refreshing because it was such a potent reversal of our usual relationship.
When I took singing lessons for the first time, at the age of 50, I realized that this was the only time I felt like a novice since learning to ski. Unlike skiing, in which I’d progressed very rapidly, it was clear to me that I’d never want to sing anywhere but in the shower, no matter how many lessons I took. Despite having a resonant speaking voice, I’d never been able to carry a tune well, and my tonal range was extremely limited. The voice teacher was patient, persistent, and forgiving. It felt as if I were back in grammar school. What a novel feeling for a man accustomed to being an expert and authority!
Skiing and singing were activities in which intellect and objectivity were almost worthless and relaxation was the cornerstone of stamina. To commit to them, I had to let go of my greatest strengths and allow something unfamiliar to take their place.
I live in a world and a city in which accomplishment outstrips everything else. What have you done? How far did you go? How high did you rise? These are the judgments made of every person every day. In my medical practice, I treat many successful people, men and women who have risen to the top of their fields. Most apply the same rules to recreation as to work. How fast? How far? How many? How much? I’d run into popular gurus who made it clear to everyone how “evolved” they were. Their “more” exists only as a contrast to someone else’s “less.” This is a quantitative approach to living that creates emotional and spiritual poverty.
I still spend most of my time as an expert and an authority. But Christopher’s teaching invited me to explore another route, which has enriched my life: let go of my strengths and discover the joy and freedom of simply being a novice, an essential step for me in being able to follow his teaching.
I never do this in my work, because my expertise is too important to the health of my patients. But my health is important too, and it depends on my ability to play when I’m not working.
Ask any child what’s so good about play, and you’ll probably get the same response: It’s fun. Well, I know how to play and I know how to have fun, but I also know how to turn play into work and banish the fun. My kids had invented a name for that: “torture sports.” How could I trust myself not to do the same with being a novice? The truth is, I couldn’t. I’d have to trust Christopher and follow his example.
Chris had two ways of doing things. If he didn’t want to do them, he simply didn’t. If he did want to do them, they would absorb all his attention. John Cubeta, an educational psychologist who had worked closely with Christopher, wrote to us about that quality of total absorption, the Gift of Presence. This is John’s description of having lunch with Chris:
Once Chris decided to do something, he plunged into it wholeheartedly. There was nothing halfway about him. One might say there was a certain Zen-like quality to Chris: when he slept he slept; when he ate he ate; when he laughed he laughed. In fact, he taught me how to eat a hamburger.
I had slowly, unconsciously, developed a habit of talking my way through meals. Half the time I wasn’t sure what I had eaten, not to mention whether or not it was tasty. One day, I was attempting to have a conversation with Chris after we had just bought a pair of cheeseburgers. I kept trying to get a dialogue going, but it would abruptly end whenever it was Chris’s turn to respond. I was starting to get a bit miffed. After all, hadn’t I bought the burgers? I finally asked Chris why he didn’t answer me when I spoke to him. He continued to eat in silence. Nothing I said seemed to register. Eventually, he swallowed the last bite. Then he said, very plainly, “I didn’t want to speak while I was eating,” obviously annoyed that something so simple and obvious should require an explanation.
The next time we had lunch together, I watched Chris’s expression when he ate his cheeseburger. Ecstasy! It was as if he had put all other functions on hold while he concentrated all his energy on experiencing the cheeseburger. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Living and working with ideas and concepts all day tends to dissociate us from the physical world by letting our sensing faculties atrophy by inattention. Taking Chris’s cue, I practiced the art of “not thinking” whenever I ate something. It worked! Not only does the time seem to stretch, but the food actually tastes better. Through the years, I have tried to extend this principle to other aspects of my life, with some success. To this day, if I find myself eating too fast, I slow down and say to myself, “Chris would never eat a hamburger like that.” I smile—as I always do when I think of my friend Chris—then I slow down.
John’s note gave me an insight into the Gift of Presence. It’s not a state of will. Chris lived it spontaneously. For the rest of us, or at least for John Cubeta and me, the gateway to Presence was recognizing the obstacles to its fulfillment and allowing them to move aside. Today’s world is filled with obstacles. From the perspective of Presence, it’s a minefield.
The chief obstacle to Presence is the pressure of time, or lack of it. I can remember summer days in my childhood when I would hang out with friends from dawn to dusk doing nothing in particular. We might ride our bikes, swim, gossip, play Monopoly. Once all the properties on the board were covered with hotels, we’d inflate the value of Monopoly currency and allow each property to build multiple hotels, anything that would keep the game going till nightfall. We didn’t care who won. If one player went bankrupt, the others would extend loans. All we cared about was keeping the game going. If I had a sense of time in those days, it seemed like a lake of infinite depth. I could swim and play and dive in that lake without feeling that it would ever end. Most of the kids I see in New York today are so heavily scheduled with programs, activities, and playdates, and so bred into competitive activities, that I fear they may never know that feeling.
Doing nothing is not acceptable in our society, so we don’t want to teach our children that it is. Doing nothing is considered a sign of laziness or weakness or decadence. Rest and relaxation have to be earned.
In writing my third book, The Fat Resistance Diet, which is about the obesity epidemic, I wanted to answer the question How much exercise is normal for humans? I discovered that the daily energy expenditure of Stone Age people was about the same as one to two hours of moderate-intensity exercise. They usually enjoyed a good deal of leisure time, which they would spend hanging out together, often telling stories. That’s how they were able to create language, art, and culture.
Modern society has made “doing” an obsession. This has created a new illness, Hurry Sickness. You know you’ve got this if there’s never enough time and you live with a constant state of time urgency and anxiety about everything that has to get done. Hurry Sickness was first identified in the 1970s as a cause of heart attacks. It’s a defining characteristic of the so-called type A personality. The other key characteristic of the type A personality is hostility toward people who slow you down—which, for many of the type A’s I know, is everyone. What’s sad is that people with Hurry Sickness usually believe that they’ve found the secret to success. We’ve created a world in which you need to look busy or you’re not important.
Several years ago, I went for a massage from a famous teacher and practitioner of shiatsu. I’d been told that it was almost impossible to get an appointment with him and I’d have to see one of his students. But somehow, my medical credentials landed me a treatment by the master himself. I thanked him for making time to see me in his extremely busy schedule.
“I’m not busy,” he confided with a serene smile. “I just make sure everyone thinks I am.” I couldn’t tell if that was truth or marketing, but it definitely got my attention.
How do I get to be not busy? I wondered. As an adult, I’ve felt as if every moment of my waking life is doubly committed. There’s so much to do, so many patients to treat, so much new data to process, and so much processed information to teach. I’d become an expert at multitasking, today’s solution to the problem of time pressure. It began to encroach on my family life. How often would Christina look at me knowingly and say, “What were you thinking about? It’s not what I was saying.”
“Of course I was listening,” I’d protest, and then repeat word for word what it was she’d just said. But there was always a several-second delay, the kind of pause you get with a very long-distance phone call. Busted! I’d be listening to her and thinking about one or two things that had to get done or that I’d forgotten to do. She could always tell the difference. “You’re just rewinding the tape of what I said and re-listening. You’re good at that.”
Multitasking seems to be a requirement for success in today’s world, but it’s not. Time urgency and multitasking are the absolute enemies of Presence. How can you be fully present if you’re watching the clock or dividing your attention? In any situation in which the decisions you make impact the outcome, being fully present is essential for success. We can see this clearly with elite athletes, performers, and surgeons. If you’re trying to land a flip on the balance beam or remove a brain tumor that’s pressing on the optic nerve, anything but your full attention will cause disaster. Maybe that’s why we respect people who demonstrate Presence. Watching the Olympics, even as we snack on corn chips and surf the Guide, can connect us vicariously with that quality of Presence, which is so hard to come by in ordinary life.
Christopher, in his usual unique way, had taken things one step further. He exemplified Presence without performance, Being without doing. That was his gift.
I discovered in my work with patients that Presence can be the equivalent of doing. Most of my patients come to see me because of my reputation for being a good diagnostician and knowing how to fix things. They expect me to analyze their problems and come up with a treatment plan. Because they’ve typically had these problems for years and have seen many other physicians, and because most of them are highly motivated, they recognize that medical treatment is always a work in progress and they want to actively participate in that work. I learned early on that listening is by itself therapeutic, especially for patients with complex chronic multisystem illness. Before I’d offered an interpretation or opinion, before I’d ordered a single test or prescribed a single treatment, I could see the changes in their faces and bodies simply because they had my full attention.
When I was on the medical faculty at the University of Connecticut, my department chairman once confided in me, “You know, Leo, I’ve found that giving a patient thirty seconds of undivided attention really makes a difference. We have to teach that to the residents.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: 30 seconds . . . I was already trying to do much more and it still didn’t seem enough. The implications of his statement are both frightening and true. Doctors are under such time pressure and so accustomed to multitasking that even a few seconds of Presence matters. Presence does not always require a great deal of time, but it does require not watching the clock, not attempting to multitask, and not thinking ahead to the actions that I, the doctor, will take.
After organizing my thoughts about Presence, I gave a lecture on what I’d learned to a group of 300 health professionals. One audience member asked a very tough question: “What about the patient you really don’t like but who won’t go away? You cringe when you see his name in your schedule and his interactions with you are so disagreeable you just want to get him out of the room as quickly as possible?” There was a murmur in the room. We’d all experienced that feeling more than a few times.
I thought about the handful of people I knew who brought out that kind of reaction in me, and I recognized the profound change that Presence can create. “When you’re fully present,” I answered, “you’re not just listening to the other person. You’re also listening to yourself, because the encounter always involves both of you. So I start by being aware of my own subjective feelings toward the person. I’m a trained professional whose job it is to help this individual. If I respond to him with aversion, how do other people react who have no special training or responsibility to render care? Then I ask myself, what is it like to be this person, whom most people would prefer to avoid? Often the best thing I can do for him is not to prescribe another medical treatment, but to not be another person who wants to disengage from him.”
A colleague approached me as the meeting was breaking for lunch and said, “That was a very sensitive answer to a difficult question.”
I smiled, as I always do when I think about Christopher, and replied, “I had a very good teacher. He was much better at it than I am.”