TWELVE

A Balancing Act

Nowadays most of us feel as though we are being dragged along at breakneck speed in directions we would really rather not go. Somehow we need to find a way of slowing down, stepping off this path, and reestablishing a balance in our lives. It might be helpful to think of it as reeducation in that it is not as though we need to introduce something new. We already have what it takes. It has just become a little buried, and we need to lead it out to pasture again. The Latin root of educate does indeed mean “leading out.” We need to slough off the accumulation of so many of the cultural ideas we have acquired over the years.

Balance has to do with remaining in the moment, neither looking back wistfully nor looking too far forward. The not-looking-back is a lot easier for some people than others. I happen to be one of those lucky people who don’t miss other people and objects once I am no longer in their presence. This may be because I went away to boarding school at a very early age and felt compelled to learn self-sufficiency. I don’t know. What I do know is that this sometimes causes distress to my mother. Every time I fly back to New York, she says, “I’ll miss you. Will you miss me?” And I tell her that I wish she would not ask that, because she knows that I rarely miss people. My answer can only upset her. If I am with people, fine, but if not, so be it. I don’t like to be torn between two realities.

The same goes for looking too far forward. I try not to think about what may happen at some event that I hope to go to. You never know these days. Maybe you’ll get there but maybe you won’t. There is an infinite number of possibilities in any given moment, but we endeavor to control our destiny most of the time. The older I get, the less set in stone things seem to be. If I don’t have expectations that are too high, I will not be disappointed.

For instance, when I knew that a friend from northern California was going to be in New York, I purchased tickets for a film festival. Later I discovered that she had changed her dates and would no longer be in town that day. I was disconcerted, but I invited another friend to go with me. Then, a few days before the event, I had to fly to London to be with my mother, who had suffered a stroke. I mailed both tickets to my New York friend, and she asked someone else to accompany her. At the last minute she herself fell ill and had to give both tickets to her friend. Luckily, neither she nor I had anything but mild regret over what had happened.

Living in the present doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t plan ahead. You need to have an intention in mind when you embark on something, but the thing to do is make plans and then wait to see what happens. There are no guarantees. For instance, last fall I gathered seeds from both the red and the pink hollyhocks in our community garden, and I sowed them all along the edge of the path. I had this vision of an army of old-fashioned blossoms guarding the path like sentinels. Now that it is early summer I am watching to see if any or all of them will come up. Life is just like this. You can sow all kinds of seeds but you never know which ones will germinate or what will befall any of them once they sprout.

Another way of allowing more freedom into the mind is not holding fixed ideas about people and things. This is a tough one. Over the years we observe how other people behave in certain situations, and we come to the conclusion that they will always react in the same way. But in our heart of hearts, we know this is not true. For instance, I have built up a picture of one of the doormen in my building as being an old curmudgeon, someone who never does the right thing. It is true that ever since he had a heart attack his behavior has been erratic, but he means well most of the time, and the fact that I carry around this negative idea most probably produces the result I expect.

I once published a book by Jean Liedloff called The Continuum Concept, which described how children almost without exception do what you expect them to do. If you are afraid that they will fall into the fishpond, they will. Just keep the idea in your mind. You don’t have to say anything out loud. Children have an uncanny ability to connect with what you are thinking and feeling rather than what you may be saying. Your mind is the environment in which they dwell. In the years when I was bringing up my son, I expected him to go to bed when I asked him to, and he always did. I myself had always gone to bed when I was told to when I was small. It did not occur to me that Adam would not go willingly to bed and then to sleep, and so it did not occur to him either. I had a theory that the reason so many American children seemed to have problems at bedtime was that the parents were not sure whether the children would go to bed, and so the children were not sure either: i.e. the parents created the problem in the first place.

What I am suggesting here is that we hold neither positive nor negative ideas, that we try to stay as present as possible and just see what happens. I know this is hard, particularly if you have a history with a friend who seems to cancel or postpone every appointment you make. But if you can bring yourself to do this, both you and the friend will taste a wonderful freedom in your relationship with each other.

Lately I have become very aware of the way we introduce stress into our speech, particularly in New York City. It is almost as though we are beating time as we speak. We come down stronger on some parts of a sentence than others. We probably think of it as “emphasis,” but it is a very different way of speaking than is customary, say, in England. If you listen to an English person say “the White House” or “the weekend,” you will notice that all the syllables have the same weight. They are evenly balanced. Yet in this country we put the stress on the first syllable, and the second one is almost insignificant. I suspect that we have built the stress we are all experiencing into the very way we speak.

Those people whose voices are most restful are those who do not add this push. You can hold people’s attention more easily if you neither drop nor raise your voice at the end of each sentence. Your audience is left hanging on your words. It is a fascinating phenomenon. Your voice floats on the air, and people’s minds have less of a tendency to get carried off into their own trains of thought. One person who seems to understand this is Toni Packer from the Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry near Rochester, New York. When I was on a retreat with her, once a day she gave a short talk (the retreat was otherwise silent). Her words and phrases came and went, the sound of her voice never falling at the end of each sentence, so that we all felt gentled, then released, and borne aloft like milkweed parachutes drifting up and away.

The way to walk the middle path in relation to money is not so very different. You need to find a way to stay balanced.

I have never made a concerted effort to make money but I was brought up during World War II, and it comes naturally to me to be frugal. So anything I don’t really need, I don’t acquire (well, of course, sometimes I slip from this, but I have to make a real effort!). When any money accumulates in my checking account, I either give it to a good cause or salt it away somewhere. When I salt it away, I make sure that it doesn’t just sit there. I treat it like one of the plants on my windowsill. I water it and watch it carefully, waiting for it to grow. If nothing seems to be happening after a reasonable amount of time, I repot it. This is the method I use for investing, and it has served me well. Although I was a single parent for most of the period during which Adam was growing up, I managed to pay all his school bills without taking out a loan and emerged at the other end with a tidy sum still in the account.

I remember one year in the 1970s when I earned $12,500, and the man I was working for earned $100,000 (I knew this because we were trying to get his tax return in on time). I had saved money out of my pittance and he hadn’t, but of course he had two more wives to support than I did. What I am trying to say is that I don’t save money in order to save it. It gets saved because I don’t spend it as often as other people seem to.

It is really a question of how you view money. I don’t make a budget, but perhaps on some level there’s a budget in the back of my mind. I don’t allocate a specific sum for this or that. If I need something, I always look for the best quality as well as the best value. If I don’t really need something, I simply don’t buy it.

Although the best quality is often the most expensive, in the long run this usually works out cheaper. The writer Laurie Colwin once took me down to Canal Street, where she frequented secondhand-clothes shops on a regular basis. She was astonished to find that I had never been to one. I trotted around after her all Saturday morning and by the time we sat down to lunch in a café, she was in despair, but I was elated and amused. She felt as though the whole expedition had been a failure. I had watched her buy a dun-colored cashmere cardigan for twenty-five dollars because she admired the buttons. In my opinion, the color was so awful, I couldn’t imagine ever choosing to put it on. If this was the case, why spend twenty-five dollars for the buttons? At one point she took me to a store where they had a sale on men’s alpaca overcoats. The coats were luscious, and I tried one on. Not surprisingly, it hung on me, making me look like a dwarf. She bunched handfuls of the silky cloth behind my back to show me how it would look if I had it altered, but I pointed out to her that the whole coat would have to be remade to fit me and so in the end it would cost far more than if I bought a coat that was the right size. In addition, I didn’t need a new winter coat.

I told her that I had really enjoyed accompanying her because I thought that perhaps I had been missing something by not visiting thrift shops, and now I knew that I had not. Also, it made my heart feel glad to have seen all those clothes and not bought any. I felt as though I had saved a fortune. I was not at all disappointed. I explained to her that I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent less money on clothes than she did, even though I usually bought good-quality garments in classic styles. I considered clothes to be a kind of investment. I bought the best, only if and when there was a need, in styles that I knew suited me, and then expected them to last for twenty years. She, on the other hand, sallied forth every week and bought something cheap that might or might not go with what was already in her wardrobe. I would have been curious to tally up what each of us spent over the year, but I didn’t want to push her too far. Also, of course, she was using shopping as a form of entertainment, and I was not.

I have to admit that there is one aspect of spending where I often get hooked, and that is with mail-order catalogs. These, of course, arrive in avalanches, but I have learned to distinguish at a glance which ones have clothes in natural—not man-made—fabrics that suit me (nothing tight; there must be plenty of room for movement). Mail order is less exhausting than traipsing around stores, and if you can discover a couple of catalogs that offer merchandise you are consistently happy with, buying this way is a real boon.

I tend to go through my favorite catalogs almost as soon as they arrive in the mail (if you wait too long, the things you want are often no longer available in your size). I turn down the corners of the pages of my selections, and I put the catalog aside for a little while. Catalogs are very seductive, and the only way to deal with them is not to pick up the phone immediately. Exercise restraint. Look at the catalog again about a week later and be honest with yourself: Will you actually wear what looks so splendid on the page or will it lurk in your closet for the next few years, haunting you each time you peer in? When exactly would you wear it? Once I have examined my conscience, I am ready to make my purchases. Sometimes I decide against everything I thought I wanted. Sometimes I go for broke. Sometimes it is half and half.

This is all about not being pulled too far in any direction. We are all subject to impulses, but if we are aware that we are being carried away, we can redress the balance and return to the fulcrum. From there we can move out when the need arises. We are level-headed—not up in the clouds or down in the doldrums. The point of balance is all-important.

One of the characteristics of the mind is that it is always expecting something, chasing after something it wants, or retreating from or resisting something it doesn’t want. It has an extraordinary tendency to slip away from the present moment. And yet it is only in the present that anything happens. All spiritual work takes place in the present at those times when we can disengage from the march of progress or whatever it is that is swiftly carrying us away from where we are. Perhaps the present could be likened to being in neutral, ready to move into another gear but not yet having done so. For a brief period we are “free, free at last.” No one can stay in neutral, but it is good to acknowledge that it is from this place that the next move comes and to this place that it will eventually return. This is the common ground. If we succeed in remaining still with a situation, a decision, or a problem, instead of scurrying after various distractions, both the mind and heart will open, and unlooked-for opportunities will emerge.

The other night I was caught unawares. I had two guests to supper, and shortly after they arrived, my phone rang. It was Adam’s girlfriend asking if he was with me. She had just returned home from work, it was 7:45 p.m., and there was no message from him. This was an unusual situation. Adam is very responsible, and I don’t remember any occasion when such a thing had happened before. If he is going to be late, he always calls ahead. I suggested that he might be stuck in the subway, but she uses the same line and had not had any difficulty getting home herself. She had already tried his office, and he wasn’t there. Not knowing what else to suggest, I simply asked that he call me when he did arrive home. As soon as I hung up, I started to panic. Earlier in the day he had called to say that he was not feeling at all well, and I counseled him to phone the doctor immediately. So now I envisioned him lying unconscious somewhere.

I tried to bring myself back to the dining room table and the conversation going on around it. I struggled to be a good hostess, but in vain. I was grateful for the demand on my attention, for the company, and for the support it provided, but I felt myself so far from what was taking place in the room that I could no longer connect to it. I was distraught, undone, frozen. My mind went wild, scrabbling around like a frightened animal, and paralysis set in.

Why is it that it is so difficult to accept the condition of not knowing? The times when all there is to do is wait are so hard. Energy arises to meet the need—any need—and the system is flooded, overwhelmed. So it simply shuts down.

Over the years there have been many occasions when I have stood silently at the window watching what was going on in the street below. Sometimes, years ago, I was waiting for my ex-husband and our toddler son to return from the beach. As each light changed and their taxi didn’t appear, I would try to calm myself and wait for the next light, the next cab to slow down across from our building. Sometimes I would wait there for an hour and they wouldn’t arrive, and I would try not to think of what disasters might have overtaken them. Sometimes I stood there waiting in vain for my lover to return. The truth is that I have stood there over and over again in different situations, but always the people I was expecting have eventually arrived and no harm has befallen them. Still, this time it might be different … Fear is always lurking around the corner.

On this occasion, Adam turned up after an hour. He had thought that his girlfriend was arriving home from work later. He had gone to a video store and lost track of the time. He seemed taken aback that we had been worrying about him. As soon as I knew that he was safe and that nothing was wrong, I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes, allowing all the anxiety to seep away. I became aware that one of the women had her arms gently around me and that the other one was clearing the dishes. I just let go.

Somehow I, we, need to learn to let go at the beginning and not just at the end. We have to find a way to remain centered. This is a big lesson that most of us put off learning all our lives.

There is something in the third chapter of Genesis that addresses the question of fear and presence. Remember when God calls to Adam and says, “Where art thou?” and Adam responds, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” This is the first time in the Bible that God asks man where he is. Until then, presumably, this had not been necessary because Adam and Eve were simply present. But once they had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they wandered and their minds wandered, and both God and they no longer knew where they were. Once fear enters, we are no longer present. Fear is fear of the unknown. In the present, fear doesn’t exist.

There is actually a reference in the next chapter that I have always found both fascinating and relevant. It says, “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod.” When I was studying Hebrew I discovered that the word nod means “restless” or “wandering.” I don’t know why the word was not translated in the King James Version. Giving it a capital letter like that makes us think that it is a country in its own right. I believe that what is meant here is that after killing his brother, Cain no longer knew how to be still and in the present moment, and that he became a wanderer, or nomad.

I always have the sense that traveling in a plane is very similar to being out of gear. The moment a plane lifts off the runway into the air is a moment of sheer delight. My heart experiences a release—of attachment to the ground, perhaps—and I am filled with a deep smile. Once you are up above the clouds with their fleeces turned toward the sun, you are in a hiatus, having left one place and not yet reached your destination. This in itself can be a very liberating experience. On one such journey to London about twenty years ago, I made the following observation:

I have just seen that it is attachment and identification that prevent true work. When one is content and there is no desire, no preoccupation claiming the light and strength of consciousness, then the mind naturally dwells in the present. Desire exists only when tied to a future, not-yet-arrived moment. The subtle attachment to an illusion is what produces tension—a net drawn tightly across the surface of the mind preventing entry.

We have all had the experience of trying to do something while our attention was still on something else, and thoughts seemed to bounce off our minds. It is only later that we realize that we were not open to whatever needed to be done. Recently someone brought me a publicity release to check through. I had been in an all-day meeting and was on the phone to an author. I read through the release and made a few grammatical corrections, but it was not until the following day at home that I came to and remembered that the reason for publishing the book in question had been completely omitted from the release. I had been so caught up in what I had been doing, in addition to everything that still had to be done, that I had forgotten to come into the present. The lines of tension surrounded me and prevented me from appreciating the situation clearly.

Perhaps the reason so many of us feel driven by exterior circumstances, be it household chores or the volume and intensity of our workload, is that we often have a fixed idea of what we still have to do (or are avoiding thinking about it) and when we believe we should get it all done. None of us can measure up to this “tyranny of the shoulds.” For some strange reason, we have the impression that everyone else is living a perfectly ordered life, even though it is obvious that they are not. We all have things that never quite get done, but the truth is that however long you live and however hard you work, you cannot finish everything. Susan Strasser’s history of American housework expresses this perfectly. It is called Never Done.

Some of the pressure we feel comes from the fact that we focus on what we haven’t accomplished rather than what we have. My friend Sarah Jane once pointed out that after God had worked for six days, he saw that everything he had made was very good and he ceased (shavat) from his labor, but that is not what we do. Almost all of us don’t see or don’t admit that what we have done is good (let alone very good), and we rarely stop working because we believe that whatever we have done is not quite good enough. The concept of a Sabbath, first described in the Book of Genesis, was and still is a revolutionary one. It is important to stop at a certain point, no matter what is happening.

Observing the Sabbath is in many ways like practicing meditation. When I began to meditate, it seemed as though I could not possibly fit it into my already busy life, but I found that if I put it first, then a measure of rest entered my life and from that place I was able to move on, refreshed and restored. It was as though the day expanded to accommodate these two half-hours.

It is the same with reserving one day a week for respite, one day when nothing is scheduled and we are free to delight in whatever arises—a day to acknowledge the divine and be glad. On this day we focus not on doing but on being.

It is our addiction to “doing” that causes much of the trouble and all the frenzy. We cram more and more into our days, and none of it ultimately satisfies us because we ourselves are the driving force behind it, seeking to achieve this and that, and coming up empty-handed every time. All this activity doesn’t bring us the serenity and contentment we seek. It just exhausts us. If we stop to think about it, whatever it is will either get done or it won’t. If we were to die today, either someone else would take care of it or not.

It is the claim that we put on this doing that is the problem. Somewhere deep inside us we believe that we are what we do. We identify with our actions. We invest ourselves in every action, under the illusion that if we are not doing something, then perhaps we don’t exist. Invest means “clothe in.” It is a habit, something we don. Somehow, we persuade ourselves that it is our responsibility to do every job. We become identified with both the work and the results. But the truth is that it is not our work: it is the work. If we can find a way to relax our grip on our actions and what comes out of them, there is great freedom. Just watching the activity rather than becoming completely identified with it is restful rather than exhausting. Nowadays people will claim almost any work they think they have to do. I hear people say that they have to do awash when what they mean is that they have to carry laundry to the washing machine and press a button. However, because they believe that they are doing the washing, they may be using up as much energy as they would if they had to go down to the river and beat the sheets on a rock.

The space in the mind that I refer to from time to time has many blessed qualities. In a way, it is this space that is the fabric of the universe. Everything we do happens in this space.

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

—Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu, chapter 11

In the Hindu tradition there are five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and ether, or space. Space is often the element that is overlooked, and yet it is the one we yearn for—the one where we feel at home. Without space, there would be no place for the other elements to manifest themselves. Or, to put it another way, without a “here” there can be no “now.” Once we begin to catch sight of our desires and then let go of them, we can take an extra step: We can actually rest. It has been said that true rest takes place only between one desire and the next, between the moment when you have relinquished one thought and before you have been hooked by the next. When worries awake me in the middle of the night, it is obvious that I have not been resting. I was not able to surrender my problems before I went to sleep. I am not resting either in my bed or in the infinity of space.