TWO

Taking Stock

It is August and just over a week since I quit corporate America and launched out on my own. For the last eleven years I have juggled two almost full-time jobs at Random House with only half an assistant—selling reprint rights for Alfred A. Knopf (something that became so familiar to me after thirty-two years that I felt as though I could do it in my sleep) and publishing nine books a year at Bell Tower, a spiritual imprint I set up as part of Harmony Books in 1989. Earlier this year I admitted to myself that I was unenjoying a great deal of each day, and I decided to stop living my work and start living my life. I have taken my pension and made an arrangement to continue editing my Bell Tower books as an independent contractor.

I planned to set things up in a corner of my living room so that my home office would be almost as invisible as my small, elderly television set. Perhaps that will eventually happen but, for the time being, it is just not possible. The office is there, but it is certainly not invisible. My son, Adam, graduated from college in May and announced that he didn’t want to live at home. I supported his decision (after having had the place more or less to myself for the last four years, I have grown to like living alone) but pointed out that first he needed a job and a checking account. I suggested he wait to get an apartment until he had settled into a job.

Unfortunately, he was miserable in his first job (not surprising since he was trying to sell telephone service door-to-door), quit after just a few weeks, and is now a little at sea as to what to do next. So it looks as though it will be some months before he and all his accumulated possessions from college will leave the apartment. Currently, every closet is jammed with his goods and chattels. And then I purchased a computer, printer, and scanner for my new life and acquired with them three huge boxes I dare not abandon for a year in case anything goes wrong. After which I brought back from the office nine boxes of my own stuff that I felt I needed to set up shop. So every available surface—windowsills, tables, and floor space—is stacked with files and books and manuscripts. This is hard for someone like me who thrives on a great deal of empty space. But this is the situation, and there is no choice but to relax into it and not fret.

This new phase of my life has forced me to reexamine and question the smallest details: Why do I do this rather than that? Is there a real reason for it? Or is it just the encrustation of habit? This happened once before in 1964 when I came to live in the United States. I had thought I was coming here to discover what America was like. Instead, it was myself I discovered. For a short while, silhouetted against the backdrop of a new country and culture, I was able to see who I thought I was more clearly than ever before.

Human beings are creatures of habit. What normally happens is that we develop bad habits, but it is not so hard to develop good habits instead. Once these are set in motion, they operate on their own. In some ways this is a blessing because the moving mind (the part of the brain that learns how to perform physical movements) takes over physical and mental activities, and we come to rely on it. This is what I hope will take place with all this new equipment with which I have encumbered myself. There is a jungle of wires and tefillin-like black plugs seething beneath my desk—evidence of a terrifying amount of electricity being consumed in the name of simplicity. At the moment I am still in the learning stage, trying to figure out exactly what is in the computer Dell shipped me and how to make good use of it. Presumably, at some point this will all recede into my moving memory and become second nature. However, after sixty-one years of living, far too many things have become automatic for me. Half the time I do not even realize that I am doing them, and I welcome the opportunity to take a fresh look at everything.

We get very attached to our habits, and it can be amusing to try to dislodge some of them occasionally. As we grow older, we tend to close down our options. We think of it as refining our taste. We prefer broccoli to cabbage and cauliflower, so we gradually stop buying cabbage and cauliflower. There is nothing wrong with eating broccoli (my favorite vegetable), but a variety is always healthier. It is not a very good idea to eat broccoli every night of your life.

We place our slippers in a particular way under a chair. We can no longer even imagine placing them any other way. It is okay to eliminate unnecessary things, but we need to keep an eye open to make sure that we don’t go overboard. I noticed that I always hold the telephone in my right hand. The other day I decided to pick it up with my left hand. It felt very strange. The telephone was heavy in my hand. I pressed it too hard against my ear. I didn’t seem able to relax with it the way I normally do. Also, I wasn’t used to listening with the other ear, and there seemed to be a great deal of echo either in the receiver or in my head. When I thought about this for a moment, I realized that all my life I have been overtaxing one ear and causing pressure on it. Also, I have not been using 50 percent of my listening (and holding) capacity. This really woke me up. We need to be flexible—willing to cross our legs the opposite way for a change, open the refrigerator door with the other hand. We have to guard against not becoming rigid. Flexibility offers a slender tree the freedom to sway in the wind, and so it is with us.

Since I am someone who has lived a very orderly life up to now, I had nursed the idea that in the future I would not be so rigid. My days would proceed naturally, and I would not set aside special times for this and that. I would cope with e-mail (something I had not permitted in the house before), the phone and fax, work on manuscripts as the occasion demanded, and an opportunity would spontaneously arise each day for me to write a portion of this book. I would never feel pressured again. There would be time for walks and expeditions, meals with friends, joining a community garden in Riverside Park that I had long admired, tai chi chuan, a second period of meditation in the late afternoon, and so on.

I had been invited to write this book at the beginning of April, and now it was August. It had taken all these months to organize things so that I would have the time to write the book. I had to give up my job at Knopf before I could take on another project. So I thought that on the first day of my newfound freedom, there would come a moment when I would just start writing the first chapter.

But this did not happen. Each day I was busy from seven in the morning until Adam returned at the end of the day. It rained a great deal, so I did not go out much. There was always more Bell Tower work to do; it was right there in front of me, and there never seemed to be a natural break when I could turn to what I saw as my own work. After four days of this, I realized that I had trained myself for forty-three years to put my employer’s interests before my own, and this was going to be a tough habit to break. The first lesson in my new life was perhaps how to establish boundaries.

I thought back to the days when I had begun to meditate and remembered how at first it was so difficult to fit two half-hours into an already crowded day. Then it became clear that if you waited for a space to appear in your schedule, it never did. But if you meditated before the day began and again at the beginning of the evening, there was never any problem fitting everything else in. So I determined that in the weeks ahead I simply had to sit down at the computer early in the day and not peek at my e-mail until the time for writing was over—not that I needed to set a specific time to start and finish but that I had to take care of this one thing, my writing, before all the demands of the day claimed my attention.

 

 

That was August, and I was full of good intentions. Now it is February. It has been just over six months since I abandoned a full-time job for the freedom of a life of my own, and it is hard. For all these months I have been coasting along on the energy accumulated over a lifetime of push, push, push. I had had a full (too full), active, and successful professional life, and now that I have broken loose from the old mold, I am in limbo. I am no longer being driven by outside circumstances, and inertia has set in to some extent. This is truly a bleak, dry, and uneasy time. In my previous life I was, of course, usually on automatic, reacting to outside stimuli.

Whoever I talk to or whatever I read points out that the way to get going again is to make myself a schedule and stick to it. As the months trickled by I noticed that, although I planned to start writing at 8 a.m. and round off the day by practicing tai chi chuan at 5 p.m., neither of these things ever happened. Yes, it is possible to schedule every moment of the day and not allow yourself any wiggle room. That way I would certainly get things done, but would I be any more present while I was doing them than I had been in my old job? I do not want to exchange one kind of servitude for another. Not that you can’t choose to be present at any moment, but being present does tend not to happen if you get pulled or pushed into the next activity through sheer force of habit. I know only too well that I can have a bath, get dressed, do my mini-stint of yoga, eat breakfast, and listen to the news on National Public Radio, without really knowing what I am doing.

Early on in my time at the philosophy school, we were instructed to pause between actions and remember who we were. One of the reasons for this was to prevent the energy from one task from being carried forward into the next. If you make a clean break when you finish something and come to a full stop, then you can start fresh with whatever is necessary for the next action. This made an inordinate amount of sense to me, and I resolved to introduce the practice into my life. That was over thirty years ago, and I haven’t managed it yet because I have always been moving so fast that I have been unable to come to a stop. This is a terrible admission for someone who believes she has a lot of willpower, but it is true. I have failed absolutely, so it is not surprising that I am having such a difficult time with the two things I have recently tried to add to my schedule.

It occurs to me that in my old life I was like one of those little Volkswagens, beetling along the highway en route to events other people had organized. In this new life I am determined to leave the day open and experiment with formlessness. I know this is harder than making myself a new timetable, but I have a long history of doing things the hard way, if only to prove that it is possible. I believe that operating without a regular schedule is the only way I will discover the space around and between things and events. In the past I led a tethered life, and now perhaps I can learn to glide on the available air currents.

So: I no longer feel as though I am running my life. I am not running after it or ahead of it. It is just running on its own, and if I stay in the present from time to time, I catch a glimpse of what is approaching and am ready to welcome it when it arrives. You could say that I am here expecting the unexpected.

To the extent to which I am able I am trying to live without props. This doesn’t mean that I don’t plan anything (this is, after all, New York in the twenty-first century). At my age I suspect that it isn’t possible to change the time I awake naturally in the morning (5:30 to 5:45 a.m.), or the time my eyelids close in the evening (10-ish). Anyway, I don’t think that I need to alter those things. There is plenty of time during the day between waking and sleeping, and if I can relax my grip on all those hours, perhaps I will also find a way to make a shift between the sheets.

What it means is that I am not dragooning myself to do things. This way, I don’t have to deal with the regret that will definitely arise when I don’t manage to do them. For instance, I have just started a Japanese brush-painting class, which is something I have been meaning to do for longer than I care to admit. On my shelf I have a slew of books on the subject. Over the years different friends have given me not only books but also rice paper, brushes, an inkstone, and sticks of red and black ink. I never asked for any of this stuff, but my friends were convinced that I would enjoy brush painting. I even have a manuscript a would-be author sent me from California in 1985, complete with brush-writing equipment (this was for Chinese brush writing and painting). The manuscript arrived unsolicited, with a letter that encouraged me to follow the instructions in the teaching manual. “There is no SASE,” it continued. “If you like the experience, think about publishing the book. If the answer is still no, just let me know.” The author and I wrote back and forth for some time and eventually he said, “I am moving you from my book publisher file to my correspondence course file.” I never actually started grinding the ink and using the brushes, however, and neither did I publish his book.

Then, last fall, I went to China in a group led by Kazuaki Tanahashi, a master Japanese brush painter now living in California. We were following in the footsteps of Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, but Kaz initiated us into painting the enso, or circle, for several mornings in Shaoxing (the Orchid Pavilion there is renowned for its calligraphers, particularly Wang Xizhi, the inventor of Chinese running script, which is like clouds floating in the sky), Hangzhou, and elsewhere. Kaz showed us how to grind the ink (hold the ink stick vertically and make sure its whole surface is in contact with the inkstone as you dilute the ink with water) and then draw a circle on the flimsy paper. He demonstrated how to do it but didn’t give us any verbal instructions. Later I questioned one of my fellow travelers who had once taken a course with him, and he said that Kaz had told him that the brush should be vertical and the mouth horizontal. (I think I have that right. This meant that the mouth should be in a half smile, which certainly helps to keep you relaxed.)

While we were in Hangzhou we paid a visit to the Shi-lin Seal Engravers Society on an island in the graceful West Lake, where many of the group had individual chops made (these are the traditional seals with which painters and calligraphers sign their work). I couldn’t imagine that my work would ever be good enough to sign, so while I waited for the others, I made a momentous purchase of my own: a set of three beautiful brushes in a green brocade box.

On my return to New York early in November, I put them on the shelf with my growing collection and eyed them ruefully from time to time. Then, in January, I was in SoHo at lunchtime, and I walked past a little storefront with a sign that said KOHO SCHOOL OF SUMI-E. Outside was a bunch of flyers, so I took one home and read it from beginning to end. It sounded very forbidding, but it did offer the possibility of watching a class before signing up for a ten-week course. A few weeks later I was again in the vicinity and the lights were on in the store, so I walked in. The gracious Japanese-American teacher and her cat who greeted me were both very welcoming, and so I decided to come a few days later to observe the Sunday-morning class. While waiting for the other students to arrive, I learned that Koho Yamamoto was almost eighty years old and had established her school on the corner of Houston and Macdougal Streets twenty years before—around the time I had started gathering brushes, ink, and books. I think that this fact brought home to me that I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. I had already lost the possibility of learning from her for the last twenty years. Who knew how much longer she would be teaching? I made a commitment to join the class the following weekend and now, after three lessons, am happily experimenting with bamboo leaves and stalks. Plum blossom and pine trees to follow.

It is fascinating that I have chosen to study this particular discipline without really knowing why. Just yesterday, I came across this quote by Motoi Oi: “The aim of the Sumi-e artist is not the reproduction of the subject matter but the elimination of the inessential.” The book in which I found the quote, The Book of Bamboo, by David Farrelly, goes on to say that the aim is “not to record every rock on the mountain or each leaf in the grove, but to capture—with a spare economy of strokes—the moment-by-moment urgency of life itself.”

Once you join a class there is an expectation of practice, regular practice. (What other kind is there?) So the next question was: When would I fit this in so that it actually got done? I decided that the evenings would be the best time since then I would not be tempted by e-mail. But evenings came and went, and I usually felt too tired for the unfamiliar discipline of holding the brush wedged between my middle and ring fingers, keeping my elbow down, pushing or pulling the brush with the whole arm, not just the fingers or wrist, and keeping my attention where the ink was flowing onto the newsprint (which is what is used to begin with). Eventually, I realized that the only way to practice is to do so when it occurs to me, immediately—not planning it for some time in the future, because that time will probably never arrive.

I know that that was rather a long story, but I wanted to trace the maneuverings of my mind over the last twenty years and illustrate the lengths to which a seemingly intelligent person will go to avoid doing the obvious. Now that I have actually started the Sumi-e painting, I feel as though I have a responsibility toward it. I practice whenever the impulse arises, and this might be in the middle of the morning, sometime in the afternoon, or in the evening. It doesn’t matter, as long as it gets done. And I don’t kid myself that it is going to happen absolutely every day. It gets done as often as it gets done—probably three or four times a week in addition to the two-hour lesson on the weekend. It is a tremendous relief to me that I have resolved this amicably with myself.

This approach is working with other things, too. Writing and answering e-mail is compulsive, but I have now given myself the freedom to get up from the computer and walk around the house when I feel like it, do a little cleaning (rather than launch a major blitz once a week), correct galleys while snuggled under a blanket on the sofa, run a few errands on Broadway, or go for a walk in the park with a friend. I have even made a date recently to go to a foreign film at lunchtime. This last sortie seemed almost sinful to me after so many years attached to my desk during the workweek, but I am learning (slowly) to relinquish the attachment to my desk.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with living a simple life. What I am endeavoring to do is abandon as many outmoded ideas that I have been harboring as I can, so that my head and heart are clearer and my step lighter. I recently attended a two-day seminar on the variety of meditation practices available from different traditions. It was given by the elderly, inimitable, Sufi teacher, Pir Vilayat Khan. I took copious notes about different states of consciousness and what needed to be done to reach them, but the deepest impression that remains with me is his instruction that we should become like gossamer. This is a wonderful image and illustrates precisely how I am trying to live these days.

Not only am I doing my best to eliminate the inessential, but I am also trying to do what is essential. Like the S-shaped duo of yin and yang, these are two aspects of the same principle. You cannot have one without the other.