EIGHT

Giving Attention

Years later, when my ex-husband, Neil, was dying, I remember asking Ram Dass what I could do for him. Somehow, until that moment, my loved ones had always died offstage, and I had no experience in such a situation. He told me just to give Neil my full attention, if possible coordinating my breathing with his. Giving others our complete attention is such a simple thing, and yet we rarely remember to do it. Whether the person we are with is dying or living, this is always one of the greatest treasures we can give them. When I thought about it, I realized that when I myself was in the hospital with hepatitis, my friend Katharine just came and sat there, waiting on me, as it were. Everyone else seemed under the impression that they had to entertain or engage me in some way. It was such a relief when she came. After each visit I felt as though she had actually brought me energy while the others had drained it away.

From time to time I will be in the middle of a conversation with a friend and am suddenly aware that he is no longer listening. If that happens, I stop speaking and wait a minute. The silence is often enough to bring him back. Perhaps he was off on his own train of thought, but wherever he was, he was no longer hearing me. Of course, I have often been guilty of this myself, although no one I know has tried the same trick on me. I generally return from my “vacation” and desperately try to figure out what my companion has just said.

Not only do most of us not listen very carefully to what other people are saying, we also rarely listen to ourselves. And if we are not willing to listen to our own voices, then why should anyone else bother? You will find that if you start listening to what you say as you say it (and I am not talking about rehearsing it in your head beforehand), you will discover that you speak with more clarity and it is much easier for the other person to hear you. There is a great power in attention.

Attention is at its most miraculous when you start to use it. To begin with, it is only when you bring all your senses to bear on whatever you plan to do next that you will know how to proceed. We tend to approach most things with preconceived ideas. We carry forward whatever we noticed on earlier occasions in the belief that it will be very useful this time. In fact, there is an unspoken assumption that we do not really need to pay that much attention this time because “we’ve done it before.” But no two situations are exactly the same, and such a habit can be very costly. Centuries ago Heraclitus pointed out that you cannot step twice into the same river, and hardly any of us have taken his observation to heart. I am not a very technical person, but I have discovered that I can solve many household problems just by bringing myself into the present, contemplating what is in front of me, and waiting for inspiration to arrive. One day I came home from the office and went to the closet to get something. When I glanced down, I saw a note and a few screws on the floor right next to the polisher. It was from my Brazilian cleaning lady, and it read: “This machine it dusnt work.” I hauled the polisher out and sat down on the floor beside it. I started to take it apart, one piece at a time, hoping to catch sight of where the missing pieces might fit. And, indeed, about twenty minutes later I had reassembled everything and got it to work (don’t ask me how).

The main thing to remember when you are faced with a physical task is that you need to put your full attention at the place where the work is being done. For instance, if you are hammering a nail into the wall, you may think that the place to focus on is the head of the nail. However, the work is actually taking place where the nail is going into the wall, so put your mind at that precise point while your eyes watch the hammer hit the nail. This will enable the nail to go straight into the wall. If you are trying to unscrew a recalcitrant jar lid, let your attention rest in that space between the metal and the glass as you twist. You may think that there isn’t any space there, but obviously there must be or the two would be welded together. I once applied this principle to pulling poison ivy roots out of the undergrowth. I let my mind travel the length of the root, allowing it to come to rest at the point where the root went into the ground, and I left my attention there in that space between the root and the earth as I gently pulled the plant toward me. And the long, white root came out of the earth without any argument.

The other place where there is a space and yet we overlook it is between ourselves and the situation. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa said, “Once one is aware of the space between the situation and oneself, then anything can happen in that space. Whatever occurs does so in the midst of space. Nothing takes place ‘here’ or ‘there’ in terms of relationship or battle.”

Over the years I have noticed a remarkable thing, and that is that I can trust each situation. What I am talking about is that I like to get things taken care of the moment I spot them, if not before. If there is dust on the sideboard, I want to clean it now and not wait until Sunday morning, which is when I would normally do it. However, from time to time something needs to be done (such as calling the painter to come in and repaint my son’s room now that he has left home. This is something I have been meaning to do since he left eight days ago), and I just don’t do it. When I first observed this seeming reluctance, I decided that it was sloth, but gradually I came to the conclusion that it was because it was simply not the right moment. If I am not taking care of something that is obvious, it is because I need to wait for the universe to get into the right mode. You certainly need to discriminate about this because for some people it may indeed be laziness. However, knowing myself the way I do, I find it amusing to watch how the days go by and I am still not moved to take action. So I just let whatever it is sit quietly in my mind for the time being. Then, suddenly, I make my move. I guess this is rather like a lizard catching its lunch. (Sorry: this is not the happiest of metaphors, but it is what sprang into my mind. I see this lizard immobile on a rock, and then its tongue streaks out and catches a fly or whatever.)

It is the same when you cannot remember someone’s name. It is no good searching for it desperately. If I do this I usually draw a blank. However, if I let everything go, a few minutes later the name will drift into my mind without more ado (well, more often than not). Things happen when they happen, in their own good time.

It is the nature of thoughts to circulate. If they have floated into your mind once, they will undoubtedly float in again, so there is no need to grasp them. I find that they operate rather like a Lazy Susan. When I sit down to meditate (or lie in the bath. I have trained myself to stay in the bath for a little while after I am clean—just lying there in the water with my mind at rest. I have discovered that all kinds of things come into my mind that I am normally too busy to entertain), there is a great temptation to open my eyes and make a note of something that I need to do once I get up from my cushion. But I have learned that this isn’t really necessary. Whatever it was that came up surfaced because I was no longer suppressing it or overwhelming it with a host of other urgent things. If I just allow it to be there along with all the other things that arise, it will still be there later. The same thing happens as I go to sleep. Whatever drifts in as I am about to go to sleep, will be right there first thing in the morning. There is no need to turn the light on and search for a pencil and pad and make your mind active again. A little trust is called for.

In 1972 I edited a translation of the Tao Te Ching by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. Eventually the time came when I had to write jacket copy for the book. This is the moment that every editor dreads because you have to find a way to express the essence of the book in a few sentences so that a reader will grasp immediately what the book has to offer. I was daunted at the prospect of reducing this sixth-century-B.C. classic to a single paragraph. Weeks went by, and finally I had only twenty minutes left. I sat down before the typewriter, and my mind went blank (not deliberately). I waited a little while and then began to type. What appeared on the page arrived whole. Now, thirty years later, I would not alter a word of the copy on the outside of the book:

Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is. Study the natural order of things and work with it rather than against it, for to try to change what is only sets up resistance. Nature provides everything without requiring payment or thanks, and also provides for all without discrimination—therefore let us present the same face to everyone and treat all people as equals, however they may behave.… We serve whatever or whoever stands before us, without any thought for ourselves. Te—which may be translated as “virtue” or “strength”—lies always in Tao, or “natural law.” In other words: Simply be.

After this I realized, somewhat ruefully, that it was not writing the copy that took time but the not-writing of it. The not-writing was a tremendous burden that I had carried around unnecessarily for weeks.

I have never quite understood what people mean when they say that making decisions is hard. My experience is that if I have to do something, I look at it as clearly as possible and just move forward. There seems to be only one possibility, and I pursue it. If I really don’t know what to do, then I do nothing. Eventually, as I said before, the universe shifts, and whatever needs doing becomes obvious. Until it is the right moment, there is nothing that can be done.

Think of all those days when you have gone shopping for a particular item and you are thwarted at every turn. We all have those days when nothing seems to go right, and the hard part is accepting that this is not one of those times when your plans are going to come to fruition. Yesterday, for instance, the painter was going to come to give me an estimate for painting the room, but he canceled. This left the whole day free for writing and other things, but everything I had wanted to do didn’t get done. My sister-in-law, Valery, had written me a long e-mail regarding a paper she had just given at a conference in Florence on the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino and his views on philosophy and politics. The paper contained the word myrobalan. I was mystified, and then I remembered that I had the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM and here was the perfect moment to refer to it. I had used it only a handful of times since I had received it as a present a couple of months back. That’s when the first disaster struck: The computer refused to read the data disc, and even though I uninstalled the program and reinstalled it, the whole thing kept freezing. I consulted the booklet and saw to my horror that the warranty lasted only sixty days and had therefore expired the day before. I kept hoping that a miracle would occur. I dusted the CD-ROM. I treated it gently. But however often I loaded it in, no miracle happened. I won’t bore you with all the other small things that went awry (but I will tell you that a myrobalan is a very bitter medieval plum). I just wanted to give you the flavor of how a myriad of details can appear to thwart the progress of a happy day. Of course, I did get some things done but not the ones that satisfied my heart. And therein lies the secret. We are so set on accomplishing the things we want to do—fulfilling our desires—that we don’t want to see what needs to be done right in front of us.

Yes, I walked to the farmers’ market (twenty blocks there and twenty blocks back; got my body energized). And I bought long, slim, mauve eggplants, crisp green beans, a bunch of young leeks, small sweet potatoes, and shining vermilion and yellow peppers, and then made three pans of roasted vegetables drizzled with oil and sprinkled with herbs, so that I have the makings of meals for myself for several days. I also cleaned some silver, re-covered a disintegrating cushion, and so on, but I saw all those things as hindrances to what I really wanted to do. Yet all the chores I took care of were necessary, and it would have been much more enjoyable if I hadn’t had this internal argument going on about the fact that I should have been writing, that I was “wasting” time. What we are doing right now is what we are doing right now. Wanting a different scenario is useless. This is the movie we have rented, so why not watch it? The other movies aren’t available or haven’t been released yet.

One of the most practical teachings I have received in my life is “Go through the door that’s open.” We get all kinds of ideas in our heads as to what we think we would like to do, and most of them bear no relation to what is likely or possible. This is not like trying to unlock a door to which you have no key; it is more like trying to walk through a wall. Have a clear look at what is in front of you, and you will recognize the way to go. But it does have to be a very clear look.

I have only just seen that this is the answer to one of my besetting sins. Those that know me well are aware that I have an annoying habit: I complain a lot—even though, as someone pointed out to me last year, there is really no point in complaining unless it is to someone who can remedy the situation. But (at least in my case) reason doesn’t always kick in when things seem unfair: I start to whine more often than not. This is something I know I need to work on, and I apologize now to all those friends to whom I should have apologized long ago. When we (read “I”) complain, it is because we believe that things should be other than they are. Who was it who said, “The rain falls equally on the just and upon the unjust, but the unjust has the just’s umbrella”? Why didn’t I take to heart the first sentence of that Tao Te Ching copy I wrote so long ago?

If the computer has a conniption and you are put on hold by the techies for twenty minutes, that’s the way it is. Complaining about it upsets you, and it also upsets those who have to listen to your complaints, so what have you achieved? It does not solve anything. In the end it all boils down to our attitude. If you eat nothing for two weeks, you could call it a fast or you could see it as starvation. If you are confined to one room for several years, you could view it as a punishment or as an opportunity. One of my favorite authors, Charles Morgan, was taken prisoner as a British naval officer during World War I and held captive in Holland for four years. He used the time away from the responsibility of earning a living to write a novel. He considered this period in his life a blessing and went on to write many more novels and win several prestigious literary prizes. Next time I am on hold, I need to remember this and put the time to good use.

I have a friend who lives in Arizona who tells me he likes to come to New York City, where he is constantly caught up in traffic. It gives him the chance to sit and meditate for a little while. This isn’t possible where he lives because in the desert there are long stretches of road with no traffic lights and no chance to do anything but keep driving. He is the only person I know who seems to enjoy stopping at the lights.

A key issue we often overlook is our own attitude. Someone once said to me: “Everything is fine as it is. Your view of it may or may not be.” In his book Travels, Michael Crichton pointed out that the most valuable thing we can possess is a perspective, a new way of looking at things. “The purpose of education is to provide perspectives.… Any new perspective alters consciousness.”

What I have discovered is that not only does a different view of things change the outcome but so does a different form. When I make bread, I always use the same recipe (whole-wheat flour, dry yeast, salt, water), but I don’t necessarily make a round loaf each time. Sometimes I make a long loaf, and sometimes I make rolls. When I take the bread out of the oven, the texture and the taste are different, depending on the shape and size. This never fails to surprise me. Early in the 1970s I shared a brownstone with some friends. Since we all enjoyed fresh bread, we would take turns doing the baking each day, and we signed up for however much we needed: half a loaf, two loaves, whatever. We were all using the same ingredients and the same recipe, but the bread always turned out differently, depending on who made it. In fact, you could tell who had baked bread that day by looking at it and picking it up. The taste and appearance of the bread usually reflected the character of the baker. Some people baked high, fluffy loaves with lots of holes in them but little taste. Others produced indigestible, stone-like offerings. What did I bake? Very compact, tasty loaves, of course. I could never make my loaves rise the way I wanted them to, but they always tasted delicious.

I encountered a couple of tai chi chuan teachers recently who focus on this principle. They have understood that if you free the body from mechanical movements, you also free the mind from mechanical thoughts. As one put it, “The moment you change your physical position, it changes the way you think.”

The opposite is also true: If you change the flow of energy, you change the structure. When a moment of clarity comes, we move naturally from a contorted position and vice versa. Straighten your back and become balanced, and your head will also clear.

A year or so after Neil left, I was at a party and someone came over and asked about my husband and new baby. I told him that my baby was fine but that my husband had left when Adam was a year and a quarter. He looked at me for a moment and then said, “So you must be almost over it by now?” The question hung in the air as he held my gaze. This was not the usual cocktail chitchat. I took a deep breath and replied, “I don’t think you ever get over it, but perhaps with time things recede into perspective.” And then I burst into tears. Perspective is indeed all-important.

I was just on the phone with my friend David, describing how events in my life seem to arise and make their way into this book within a few days. It is not exactly recycling; it is more like cycling. “Re” makes it sound as though something is being repeated, but that is not the way it feels. He suggested that I am calling these situations out of the universe (I am not sure how he expressed it, but that was what I heard). Come to think of it, one of my criteria for selecting a book for publication is whether what the author has written in the manuscript changes my own spiritual practice. If it can do that for me, I believe it can do the same for others. So much of the teaching I receive these days comes from the manuscripts that people send to me. I know that these writers think that they are looking for a publisher, but perhaps their manuscripts keep arriving here because they contain whatever it is I need to learn next. What a revolutionary idea! And yet the sages have always known this. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” (and vice versa). The teacher doesn’t have to be a flesh-and-blood person. Anything or anyone can be a teacher. In fact, whatever is right in front of you is your teacher.

The idea that whatever is in front of you has something to teach you is extraordinary. A few years back, Adam, who knows more about movies than I ever will, mentioned that he was going to see Pocahontas. I thought it strange that a college kid would go to see a Disney movie, but he doesn’t do things lightly, and so I inquired why he was going. I should mention that he was majoring in film and video. “I can always learn something from a movie,” he said, “even if it’s how not to make one.” It is sometimes hard to glean a scrap of wisdom from a trip to the supermarket or wherever, but it is there if you can spot it.

Whatever it is, you can learn from it. No need to waste any experience, even (particularly) the telephone conversation I just had with David. There I was bemoaning to him (I had already bemoaned to myself) that the morning had disappeared and I still hadn’t got down to any writing. I felt guilty. This happens day after day. I think it is because almost everyone has been telling me that good writing happens in the morning. Armed with that idea, I have been failing morning after morning for the last month or so. But the thing is: I find that the writing does happen spontaneously (providing I start typing. Without that, it certainly doesn’t happen at all), which is the way I had hoped it would when I decided to write this book. Earlier today, I didn’t have this material to write about. Now that David has called, I do. So we are back to just accepting things as they are and not wanting them to be some other way—or perhaps this is another way of seeing how we have no alternative but to go through the door that is open.

Sometimes I am not at all sure what circumstances are teaching me. As I said, I prefer to do everything immediately, just as soon as I think about it. This can be awkward because thoughts can distract you at any moment of the day. In an ideal world you keep your mind on what you are doing, and no stray thought would dare enter your mind, but the ideal often seems very unattainable. If you drop everything the moment a new thought occurs to you, you will just leave a trail of unfinished jobs behind you. The best solution I have come up with is to make a note of whatever it is and go firmly back to what I was doing before. That way, at least I haven’t completely lost track of it for the day. The thought will, of course, return at some later moment, but if you want to take care of whatever it was next, it is safer to make a note now (unless you are meditating or about to go to sleep). The main thing is not to panic when all kinds of new ideas come flooding into your head one after the other. Think of them as a plus rather than a minus: The juices are flowing. Hurrah! Oh, and make sure that when you make your note, it is legible. Far too often I have made a note to myself that I have not been able to read later. This is because I have very bad handwriting. I am ashamed of how bad it is. I think of myself as a very orderly person, and yet why is it that after all these years my handwriting is still so terrible?

One of the lessons I learned quite early in my life is that whatever you seem worst at is perhaps where an undiscovered talent lies. It is as though we deliberately ignore our own talents and go out of our way to deny them. I discovered this when I was attending classes at the philosophy school and I was the one chosen to go back to the London school for a week, learn the rudiments of a particular calligraphy discipline, and return to New York to teach it to the other students. At first I thought the person who had asked me to do this was out of her mind. I pointed out that I had the most dreadful handwriting in the whole group. But apparently that was one of the reasons I had been chosen. And so I flew to London, devoted an entire week to calligraphy, and went on to be in charge of calligraphy in New York for many years, delighting in the forms of the letters and the spaces they described. (It did wonders for my calligraphy but unfortunately nothing for my handwriting.) I observed the same principle in action with another student who was very feisty and always causing problems. Eventually this man was asked to teach the class on a day when the tutor was absent, and he took it over as if to the manner born. He never caused trouble in the class after that.

In order to see what is going on at any given moment, we need to have our attention directed out rather than in. Instead of being carried along by the flow of events or withdrawing from it, we just stay right here. There is only this moment. This is the only method of appreciating the divine.

We are always anticipating that something better (or worse) is about to happen, but we would do well to keep in mind that wonderful Gahan Wilson cartoon in which two men are sitting on cushions in the zendo and have obviously been there for some time. The monk leans over and whispers into the ear of the novice: “Nothing happens next. This is it.”

I don’t quite know how we got it into our heads that whatever is happening right now is probably not that important and can be dispensed with, but it is a very pervasive view even though in 1242 Zen Master Dogen observed:

Each day is valuable. … Do not compare it with a dragon’s bright pearl. A dragon’s pearl may be found. But this one day out of a hundred years cannot be retrieved once it is lost.

I just paused before I typed the last sentence. I was mulling over what Dogen had said and marveling that more than seven centuries had elapsed and that most people have still not grasped its significance. As I sat here, I suddenly heard the sparrows chirping outside my window, the trundling of the road-working equipment, the tires swishing on the wet street, as well as the underlying hum of electricity in my office. Up until that moment I had been deaf to all this, having narrowed my attention to the screen in front of me. What is even stranger is that as I started to acknowledge all these sounds, I realized that I had lost track of how my body felt or whether I could smell or taste anything. We have five senses, and we tend to use only one at a time. Such a wealth of impressions is available to us at any given moment, and yet we crowd it out by paying attention only to whatever is going on in our heads.

Our attention is either in or out. This is very clear in meditation but not always apparent at other times. If we are focusing on some idea or problem, we miss everything going on outside. If we welcome impressions from the outside, then we do not get seduced by our own thoughts. It is obvious when you think about it: You can’t be in two places at once. So, stay here. Don’t go away.

All of us can rise to an emergency. When such a thing happens, it does not occur to us to opt out. We just move forward to do whatever needs to be done, drawing on reserves of knowledge and strength we didn’t know we possessed. There is undoubtedly more than one factor involved. An emergency calls us into the present, and immediately the adrenaline necessary for the task floods our system. It is in many ways an impersonal thing; it has to do with the way nature preserves the species. What I find interesting about these situations is that once you are “there,” completely present, you feel as though you could do anything. This can happen even in very small ways. For instance, from time to time I have been standing at the kitchen sink, wiping glasses with a dish towel, and suddenly a glass has slipped from my grasp. I have very quick reflexes, and almost without exception I will catch the glass before it smashes to the ground. I may have been in a dream when the glass escaped, but immediately there is a need all my senses are working and I am ready to tackle anything. Most of the time we are off somewhere in our heads and don’t experience this sense of urgency, which is why accidents happen in the first place.