On September 12, 2012, I gave a TEDx talk at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. I decided I was going to try something new and different, and not prepare anything. By then TED talks had become such a big deal that not even the English sonnet has had as much stuff written about it.
I got out there onstage and said, “You’re not going to believe this and it has taken some doing to pull this off, but I am before you now without the slightest idea of what I’m going to say.” I could hear this sudden sucking in of breath like, “What?” And then it occurred to me that what I could do was sit down like John Cage and let the audience experience eighteen minutes of nothing but silence.
Before I did that, I wanted to give them some context. Taking out my cellphone, I said, “This is kind of a cheap trick but I want you to listen very carefully to this quote by Franz Kafka. ‘You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen. Simply wait. You need not even wait. Just learn to become quiet and still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you, unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.’ ”
Then I said, “And so what I’m going to do now in the time remaining is grab the first story that comes into my head from all the stories I could tell you.” I began talking about the time in my life in 1989 when I was driving back and forth between Wyoming and California maybe twenty times a year. I kept trying to find other ways to cross the Great Divide Basin, and I was exploring one of them on a late September evening.
It was cold and I was driving through Fallon, Nevada, when I saw a guy who looked like hell sitting on the edge of town with a sign that said ANYWHERE BUT HERE. I was thinking, He probably doesn’t mean Eureka, Austin, or Ely. He probably means Salt Lake City, which is about seven hundred miles away, so if I take this fellow on, I’m going to have him with me all night long.
But I did take him on. He got in the car and looked a lot worse than he had by the road and smelled even worse than that, but a weird feeling of peace came over me and I felt perfectly okay about having him there. We started talking, and it turned out he had been born the day before me in a tough part of Queens, New York. He’d gone off to Vietnam and been shot up and fucked up and had come back home with both a psychological and physical disability but had been more or less making it in New York City.
He’d had a cab driver’s license and was actually a good enough saxophone player to play session gigs and had an apartment and a girlfriend and a functional life. Things had been working out for him, but at one point his landlord stopped providing hot water to his apartment.
Since he was still a little bit sideways, he quit paying rent because he thought that if he didn’t pay his rent, the landlord would start giving him hot water again. He came home one night and his door had been padlocked three different ways. All his stuff was gone, his girlfriend was nowhere to be found, and both his hack license and saxophone were inside the apartment.
Moreover, the landlord, in a particular fit of ugliness, had informed Veterans Affairs that he was dead, and so his benefits would no longer be coming and he had no identification. At that moment, he fell through the cracks. All this had happened a couple of years before I’d met him.
I said, “So you’re homeless.” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “What are you doing out here?” And he said, “Just because I’m homeless doesn’t mean I can’t take a vacation.” Solid point. He had already started this particular hitchhiking trip in San Francisco and so I said, “Why didn’t you just stay in San Francisco?” And he said, “I don’t know how to be homeless in San Francisco. I know how to be homeless in New York.” It was hard for me to argue with him on that point.
We kept on talking, and I found him to be lucid and interesting. In Austin, Nevada, I stopped for gas. It was one of those Bagdad Café gas stations with not much around it but tumbleweeds. I got out of the car and went in to pay for the gas and saw my passenger get out of the car, scribble something on a piece of paper, and put it in the coin return slot of the phone booth down in the corner of the lot.
I took a pass by there and grabbed the piece of paper. It was a little note that said, “Love forgives everything.” I got back in the car and drove for a while and then I said, “Why did you put that note in the coin return slot there?” And he said, “I figured somebody would be looking for money and get my note instead.” I said, “Yeah, right, man. But what motivated you to write ‘Love forgives everything’?” And he said, “Well, it does.” I said, “That’s a tall bar for it but yeah, I guess so. But this seems like a prayer or something. Do you have a very religious sense of things?”
He said, “Oh, yeah.” I said, “So you have a very personal God?” And he said, “Yup.” And I said, “If you’ll pardon me, the personal God you’re serving in this very humble way seems to be treating you like shit. Whereas I am doing okay and I don’t have one.” And he said, “You know, every soul comes into the world to take a curriculum. Some of us are taking Basket Weaving 101 and some of us are taking Astrophysics 406, and I’m pleased to be taking the harder courses.”
The next time you find yourself in trouble, this is something to think about. Because there is this weird notion of karma that is precisely the opposite of that, and I think he was actually closer to its reality than the image we carry.
I didn’t think about this a lot until some years later when I fell in love with someone like people only ever do in the movies or operas. I was deliriously, insanely, dangerously in love with this woman for a year until I put her on an airplane in Los Angeles two days before her thirtieth birthday and she died on the way to New York. Suddenly, I felt like I was now taking the harder courses. Much harder courses.
The truth is we come into the world from the other side, which is entirely made of love, where it’s all open and could not be more open, into this place of constriction and containment and closure and dogma and terror. We fight with our hearts in the high mountains of the Afghanistan of the soul in order for love to make sense. And we do this by not giving up and by not thinking the worst of ourselves or others, despite the fact that each of us seems to carry around with us for no good reason a terrible inner sense of self-loathing. I think that may be original sin.
Mostly to the extent that we are capable, we do it by learning how to accept love from other people; we win that battle for every soul born and unborn. And that is why we are all here. I think that what it will take to get through this dark time in human history is for us to become focused on allowing ourselves to find ourselves worthy and to make ourselves open to the love that all of us actually deserve.