What happens in a Quaker meeting, unlike in a Buddhist meditation hall, is if you feel moved to speak—if a message rises in you—you speak. And the others listen. The meetings last an hour. Within that hour, sometimes no one says a word. You just listen to the glorious silence all around you. Other times a lot of people have something to say. Either way, I found that the experience enriched my life. I was moved by the depth of what people said, the way they struggled in their search to live with compassion and understanding. In addition to working at Omega, I was a seminary student at the time. I found at the Quaker meetings a meaningful way to tap into the spiritual and personal transformational experiences I was helping Omega offer and studying in the books I was assigned to read.

In 1999, I moved several miles away from the meeting room when I bought a house. Not only did the miles get between me and the Quaker meeting room; the house did, too. It required work—lawn mowing, painting, cleaning, small repairs—that took up my Sunday mornings. I stopped attending the meetings pretty much altogether. And this is when I experienced an even greater appreciation of the Quaker tradition, or at least of the group I’d found myself with.

As the weeks, months, and years rolled by, I was kept on the mailing list, I was phoned when people I knew at the meeting were hospitalized or died, and I was sent invitations to special events. This past year, I was invited to participate in a series of small dinner parties hosted by individual members at their homes. All during this time—and even at the dinner parties I attended—no one chided or scolded me for not showing up at the meetings. I was missed, but never made to feel guilty or that I would somehow suffer in my afterlife for being a backslider.

I began to see these people as friends in the deepest sense—they accept people for who they are and the lives they lead. It’s good that we have people who, when we are young or going down some dangerous path, nudge or question us. But when it comes to the spiritual journey among functioning adults, more often than not we need to find our own way.

Early in my exploration of Buddhism, I went to a number of different retreat centers where I experienced Zen Buddhism, Theravadin Buddhism (Insight Meditation), and Tibetan Buddhism. One of my first retreats was in 1994 at a Zen retreat center. It was a small place and the only accommodations were dorm rooms. I was in a room with 10 other men, eight of whom—guessing from what I could count in the dark—snored through the night. I do not snore and I did not sleep a wink. The next day during a break between the many meditation sessions, I told a resident monk I needed to “sit the next one out” and take a nap. He turned sharply toward me and snapped, “That is not an option. We are all in this together.” If I wanted to “sit this one out” then I had to leave. So I went to the meditation session, delirious to the point of passing out. I have not been back to that place since.

Later, I found myself at retreat centers where the meditation sessions and teachings were presented as a gift to be enjoyed, not a form of punishment to be endured. And you partook of the gift as you were able. Nobody was taking attendance, no one was making you leave if you didn’t show up. I’ve since found myself going to these kinds of centers a lot while staying connected to my Quaker friends to the degree that my time and energy allow.

I am finding that I am most grateful for the things, people, and experiences that show up in my life, sometimes out the blue, that reveal to me more of who I really am and what I have to give to the world. Work and family demands on our lives are stressful enough without having to follow an individual’s, a group’s, or an institution’s demands on how we manage the manifestation of our deepest, truest self. That passage comes from individual revelation, which speaks to each of us through the beating of our heart. We are each Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, we are each Buddha at the palace door. If we are paying attention, our lives are called into question and called to a higher cause that has nothing to do with being forced to sit in a meditation hall, barely conscious and nauseous, simply because those are the rules.

To me, when it comes to spiritual awakening, there are no rules and little conscious design, and to be told what to do in such circumstances is absurd, if not damaging. It is a violation of our deepest, individual, divine will. We turn down a path for apparently no reason, find a book that seems to have fallen off the shelf and into our hands, meet people in a seemingly random chain of events who subsequently and permanently transform our lives. And who’s to say when and how that will happen? We may blunder, find ourselves puzzled by our own actions, and even wind up troubled by a bad conscience—all of which offer unique and powerful opportunities for self-discovery and spiritual growth, and thus a healthier and more beautiful and meaningful life.

What’s more valuable to our awakening, a solitary walk among the autumn leaves or being told you have to sit in a meditation hall because “we’re all in this together”? The answer is that neither is more valuable than the other. What matters is what you feel you need to do—sit or walk—at any given moment according to the still, small voice within. And when we allow others in our life this free rein, we are giving them our unconditional love.

I recently pulled from my bookshelf M. Scott Peck’s classic 1978 book The Road Less Traveled. I found I’d earmarked dozens of pages and underlined dozens of passages when I read the book in the mid-1980s. One passage I underlined in red pencil reads, “Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey, to peaks that can be climbed only alone.”

We are “all in this together” only if we’re left alone to pursue what we feel is best and right for us during our encounters with the sometimes irrational and numinous factors of the psyche. And in our individual independence, we connect with others at a soul level, like people gathering round a well, and everyone knows exactly what you are going through, have been through, and, quite possibly, will go through. And these people are your friends.

Harry and his wife, Gabriella, lived in a house down the road from Gampo Abbey, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the northern tip of Nova Scotia I’ve been going to once a year since 2005. This year, I made it there twice, once in May and once last month. I stay in a small cabin on the grounds for a silent, solitary retreat for about two weeks each time. I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone. But sometimes when I go out for a walk down the long, remote dirt road and see someone, I’ll say hello. And hello often evolves into a bit of conversation.

I’d met Harry and Gabriella walking toward me one lovely August afternoon my first time at the abbey. They had been affiliated with the place for years before, and in their retirement years, had chosen to live nearby. I thought it brave of them to pick a place where the winters are cold and long, and told them so. I remember Gabriella waved away such petty concerns. “If it’s cold, you put on a coat.” I liked that simple logic. And agreed with it.

On another one of my walks during my retreat that summer, I saw Harry working in his garden, which was across the road from their house. The garden was lit by a small patch of sunlight surrounded by pines, and Harry’s thin, tall frame threw a shadow toward me and the road while he worked. He didn’t see me. I kept to my vow of silence and continued walking.

During my subsequent retreats, the couple’s health quickly declined. They were not young when I’d met them. Both were in their eighties. Turns out, I rarely saw them again. Maybe one or two more times. Gabriella’s mind started going, a victim of Alzheimer’s. Harry tried to take care of her till he died last year. Then the resident monks and nuns tended to Gabriella, offering a rotation of 24-hour care at her house. I saw Gabriella one more time. It was last year at the monastery’s main building, where she was going to have lunch. I said hello to her. She said hello to me. She had no idea who I was. That winter she was moved to be closer to family in Ontario.

On this retreat, I’d brought along I book I’d started reading on my last retreat, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, by Patrul Rinpoche. The book is a translation from a Tibetan teacher Patrul Rinpoche had studied with, so it’s an old classic. Patrul Rinpoche lived and died in the 19th century. A few days after I was struck with sadness when I saw what was left of Harry’s garden, I turned a page to a chapter called “The Impermanence of Life.” What follows are 20 pages on the Buddhist teachings on impermanence, focusing mostly on our death, from which nothing and no one escapes. One of my favorite passages:

No soldier’s army, no ruler’s decrees, no rich man’s wealth, no scholar’s brilliance, no beauty’s charm, no athlete’s swiftness—none is any use. We might seal ourselves inside an impenetrable, armoured metal chest, guarded by hundreds of thousands of strong men bristling with sharp spears and arrows; but even that would not afford so much as a hair’s breadth of protection or concealment. Once the Lord of Death secures his black noose around our neck, our face begins to pale, our eyes glaze over with tears, and our head and limbs go limp, and we are dragged willy-nilly down the highway to the next life.
There are pages on the impermanence of everything else—the seasons, towns and cities, great empires, friendships and other relationships, buildings, fortunes, sorrows, happiness, poverty. “Everything is subject to change,” Patrul Rinpoche writes, “everything waxes and wanes.”

The purpose of these teachings are to, quite simply, point us toward living good, virtuous lives. Patrul Rinpoche quotes one teacher, Geshe Potowa, thus: “Think about death and impermanence for a long time. Once you are certain that you will die, you will no longer find it hard to put aside harmful actions, not difficult to do what is right.” So the lesson here, which is not always easy for me—or for others, I suspect—is to simply be kind.

During my retreat, I took plenty more walks, sometimes on the monastery grounds. Harry had a small Bonsai tree garden on the grounds. The wooden tables are all still there, but the trees are gone. A cabin I used to stay in—called Cliffhanger because it sat on a cliff 200 feet above the Gulf of St. Lawrence—was closed last spring. A chunk of nearby cliff had washed away into the gulf and the cabin needs to be moved back before anyone can stay in it again. One evening when eating a simple dinner of rice and steamed vegetables I’d prepared and put into a bowl, I dropped the bowl, and it shattered into four pieces. That evening I watched the sun go down in a blaze of vast, oceanic beauty. When I walked back to my cabin, I saw more leaves turning.

The only thing we can really do with change is get used to it, as much as we often don’t like it or want it to happen. Death and impermanence are not things we normally think about, I know. But here in the deep north when your life slows down, you see it. If you stand still long enough you can see how the world is changing all around you all the time.

It feels like a sort of training, and that’s exactly what Buddhists call it. It’s a training because we can learn to dispel our illusions that life goes on forever, or that anything else lasts forever. Then when we experience a loss, it won’t seem like the end of the world. Which doesn’t mean we won’t be sad when people we love die and things we hold dear break or disappear. Sadness is not the same as despair.

And we can always keep ourselves attuned to what we might gain from our losses. Regarding this, one 17th and 18th century Japanese poet, Masahide, said it best:

Barn’s burnt down—
now
I can see the moon.

On of one my last days at the abbey, I took another walk past Harry’s garden. A part-time neighbor from Halifax hours away was working nearby. I stopped to say hello, of course. Turns out he was rescuing an old rhubarb plant Harry used to tend to, and he was going to transplant it near his own house in anticipation of getting fresh rhubarb come spring.

I was traveling East on Interstate 80 in a Westfalia, a Volkswagen camper, which I had just purchased in Colorado from my brother. He’d started a business refurbishing old Westfalias. This past spring he found a 1985 model on Ebay in El Paso, Texas, bought it, and had it shipped to Colorado. As he told me all about it in conversations over the phone—its excellent condition and what he had planned for it (including installing a new fuel-efficient Subaru engine)—I started to think I wanted it before he sold it to someone else.

I’ve always liked Westfalias. I’ve always liked any sort of small home. When I was young, my aunt and uncle sometimes visited from Bronxville, New York. On Sundays we all drove around the Connecticut countryside and pointed out “Jimmy houses.” A Jimmy house came to be any small house, the more remote the more true to form. My mother says a Jimmy house also had few windows, but I don’t recall including that feature in what I liked.

In winter, after a big snowstorm, I built igloos. In summer, I built a couple of tree houses. One summer years ago a neighborhood girl and I walked upstream from our family homes and made a little stick hut to sit in and talk and listen to the water. My mother once asked me if the girl and I were kissing out there—the girl and I were about 13 at the time and certainly of an age to experiment—and the question struck me as odd. For some reason, it never occurred to me to do that with my friend. There was something about the little hut we made that was for talking, communing with the woods and the stream that rushed by. In my first few years on the Omega staff I lived in a trailer, and loved it. Perhaps that whetted my appetite for getting a Westfalia, the manifestation of which was years away.

One Sunday afternoon this past June I woke up from a nap and knew immediately I wanted to get the Westfalia. Perhaps I’d been told in a dream, just like in the days of old when people had dreams and did what they instructed because the dream was held as a message from the heavens. A couple of weeks later, I was in Colorado and my brother and I were putting the finishing touches on the Westfalia—my Westfalia now. And the next thing I knew I was driving it East across the continent.

Western and Midwestern states are huge compared to the matchbox-sized states of New England, where I grew up and went to college, and you don’t appreciate their immensity until you drive through them. I’d spent my first semester of college at the University of Denver, driving there with a friend in his car. When I got there the landscape and sky were too vast for me. The only patterns I’d known from spending my life among hills and rivers and meadows all crowded together and connected by old, narrow, winding roads, made me feel alienated and lost out there. In four month’s time I came home to be where I felt at home.

Now, some 30 years later, I was back on Interstate 80 waking up at the edge of a cornfield in Nebraska. I’d pushed open the top of the camper—it has canvas sides, like a tent—climbed up on the mattress there, and slept soundly, having exhausted myself from the long drive the day before. It was a sunny morning, and cool; the muggy heat that can plague the Midwest had not yet arrived. I heard the distant whine of traffic on the highway and didn’t mind it; it was the sound of my people—my tribe—at the moment. Travelers. But what I remember most is the feeling of fresh air on my face. I’d slept outside, I suddenly realized.

It had been years since I’d slept outside and now found myself missing the thousands of nights I’d not done this. On summer nights when I was young, I used to have a friend over to sleep under the stars in the backyard of my parents’ house. As a teenager, I slept on the screened porch. Throughout my 20s and 30s, my wife at the time and I hiked all over the place—the Adirondacks, Maine, Utah, Washington State—and slept in a tent. Outside you wake up to whatever the weather is, and accept it. You’ve no choice in the matter. I’ve found that if you spend the night outdoors, then whatever the weather is, you’re not separate from it; you embody it in a way that does not happen inside.

What I began to realize was that I was happy and content not only in the moment but also in the memories of all the earlier times when I’d slept outside; the past and present merged into one wonderful sensation. There was something else to ponder. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in his book, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, of what he calls the “oneiric” house. The word “oneiric” has to do with that which belongs to dreams. The oneiric house, Bachelard writes, is “a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.” The oneiric house, he says, is “the crypt of the house that we were born in.” It is where we are “in the unity of image and memory.”

I spent the first three months of my life sleeping in a baby carriage in a motel room in Buffalo, New York, where I was born. My hard-working father, then at the lowest one or two rungs of his climb up the corporate ladder, was shuttling between there and Connecticut, where he’d just landed a new job and was looking for a place for us to live while my mom stayed in Buffalo taking care of me and my older brother. The carriage was my little home on wheels.

Perhaps rooted in the core of my being, the Westfalia is like the baby carriage I spent my first few months of life in—it’s imbued with memories of home beyond my conscious reach, of a house that is gone but in which I used to dream my dreams and rest content with my own company.

I was reluctant to leave that campground. But after my second cup of coffee, the morning was well on its way toward noon, and I still had 1,500 miles and at least another three days to go before I reached my house—my so-called permanent residence, my mailing address—so I needed to be off.

I lowered the top, started the engine, backed out, and drove away. In the driver’s side mirror I saw the empty rectangle of grass where I’d spent the night, leaving no trace but two parallel rows of pressed grass where my tires rolled in and out.

It was a Friday evening after a long day at the office. For some reason, I had a little time on my hands. I was too tired to read. Too tired to write. I don’t have television except to watch DVDs but I had no DVDs. I didn’t feel like going out. I figured I’d go online for a while and call it an early night. And then it happened, almost before I knew what I was doing. I joined Facebook.

I’d been meaning to join for the past few months. I felt I was missing out on something. This normally doesn’t bother me. But this did. Launched at Harvard in 2004, Facebook now calls itself the most trafficked social media site in the world. It has more than 250 million active users. That’s just about 50 million shy of the entire population of the United States. I’m a social guy (for the most part) and I am easily impressed by big numbers. When 250 million people are doing one thing, I get curious. And, if it’s something good, I check it out. I checked it out.

Signing on was easier than I feared. Too easy. After I created my “wall”—that’s what your page is called, although there’s nothing solid about it—I did what everyone else does when they first join. I looked up the years I graduated high school and college to see who I might know who was also on Facebook. I saw a few vaguely familiar faces, older now. I even thought about asking them to be “my friend.” That’s how it works; Facebook will send friend requests for you to other members. It can also comb through everyone on your e-mail address book, and if they are Facebook members, you can click on them and Facebook sends them an invite. These people then need to accept your invitation on their Facebook page. Or not.

But I didn’t ask any of my old classmates to be my friend. I hardly really knew these particular people, hardly called them my friend back then. So why would I ask them to be my friend now? Truth is, I hated high school. Why do I want to relive that particular miserable episode in my life? Once was enough. College was better, but not much—what I can remember of it. In those days I drank way too much tequila and beer and, as if caught in a strange dream from which I could not wake up—one of those dreams in which you are running but can’t get anywhere—I was in love with the same girl for the entire four years even though I knew she had a boyfriend out of state and would never return my affection for her. I’m not going back there, even in cyberspace.

By the time I was done inviting all the people I knew and liked to be my Facebook friend, the sun had gone down and the moon had come up. I’d begun at about 7:00 p.m. and now it was after midnight. I was shocked by how the hours had fled by. I didn’t feel like I’d wasted time, though. I’d done something I’d wanted to do, and felt good about the accomplishment. I went to bed tired but content.

Come morning, something happened. What happened is that now I was a member of Facebook.

Normally, I stumble out of bed, get some water boiling for tea, shuffle to my desk, and, as I rub the sleep from my eyes, check my e-mail. I cannot recall when I began his routine. Probably a long time ago because I can’t remember. I open e-mails from family members or friends and then open the Writer’s Almanac newsletter to read its poem and short sketches about the birthdays of writers and other illustrious people and celebrated events down through the ages. While I sip on my tea I sometimes answer e-mails if I am thinking clearly enough. After that, and before I get ready for the day, I read a few pages in whatever book I was reading in bed the night before. Sometimes, if I am working on a specific project, I write.

Now, there was something else I felt I needed to squeeze in between checking and answering e-mails and the book I wanted to get back to reading: check my Facebook page. That morning, I joined all the others around the world whom, according to one statistic provided by Facebook, spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook each day. When I saw that figure I grabbed a calculator to figure how many years that is. If I did my math correctly—and I double checked it with some colleagues—it comes to 9,506 years.

For the next hour, I read posts from my Facebook friends from all over the place telling me what they are having for breakfast, where there are going, where they’ve been, what sort of shape they were in upon waking (numb, hungover, perky), random thoughts that shoot randomly through the mind, and the results of these strange tests you can do online to find out, say, which Harry Potter character you are most like or which Batman villain you are. Then there are comments from others on these posts. So, for example, if I say I am in Starbucks sipping on a grande coffee mocha with the morning sun streaming through the window and warming my face, someone else might say, “Sounds heavenly!” Or “Wish I was there. I’m just home from the dentist and can’t drink anything hot and I need some caffeine really bad!”

If I wanted to, I, too, could comment. But what would I say? Or more to the point, why say anything? Or even more to the point, why are people writing this and why am I reading it? I’ve suddenly traded in my morning dose of Kierkegaard for a coffee klatch. I used to have this sort of centering prayer of waking, reading, and writing. Now I’ve become a spectator of a very bizarre parade. I started wondering what else we could all be doing for those 9,506 years we spend on Facebook every day. Clean up the litter in our neighborhoods? Feed the poor? Help the homeless?

I have to admit, however, that I am enjoying Facebook. I’ve been using it to contact current friends I hardly see and to make new friends of people I know in my professional circle. I quickly gloss over the things people write about what they are doing or how they are feeling, but it does not mean I’m totally uninterested. As I was writing this column and in the midst of the rant above, a friend and colleague of mine, who happens to be a heavy user of Facebook, came into my office. I explained my rant to her. She defended what I was attacking. “It’s like a huge party,” she said. “Yeah, some of it is lame, just like at a party, but some of it is really fun. You just sort of hang out with people, and you can make some really cool connections.” I agreed. I’d actually been having the same experience she was describing.

My father used to tell me that the best way to get a job done well is to use the right tool. You don’t use a regular screwdriver on a Phillips-head screw. All technology is a tool. We need to be careful not to be used by the tool that is supposed to be used by us. We are all familiar with dystopian science fiction stories that point to the horrors of man being ruled by the machines we created. One of my favorite stories of this sort is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. In that story—Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel while Stanley Kubrick created the film—a mission to Jupiter is thwarted by the computer (nicknamed HAL) that’s operating the ship. HAL gets wind of the crew’s plan to disconnect it after they realize HAL might be malfunctioning. Unknown to the astronauts, HAL reads their lips and discovers their plot and then sets out to destroy the very men it is suppose to serve.

My guess is that most of us are not aware of how subtly and insidiously this kind of technology is actually taking over our lives. Key in the wrong password at your computer or an ATM and what happens? When this happens to me I always hear in the back of my mind the calming yet assertive voice of HAL when one of the scientists, Dave Bowman, after making some repairs on the hull of the spaceship, asks HAL to open the door to be let in. HAL does not want to let Dave in because Dave is in the process of disconnecting HAL. The exchange goes like this for several rounds.

DAVE: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.

Eventually, Dave finds his way back into the spaceship, but the expedition is doomed after HAL is finally disabled and the ship speeds off faster than the speed of light into other, dreamlike dimensions in both time and space.

Another early memory I have about technology and the future is Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read this book during college (it was one of the few things I liked about those days) one summer I was working for the county road crew where my family lived at the time. During lunch breaks, I’d pull the book from my brown bag and read. Leafing through its brittle, yellowing pages now, I can see that much of what Toffler wrote before the personal computer and e-mail and Facebook presages much of what is happening now, and it was not good news for us.

There’s one more recent and more optimistic prediction than Toffler’s about the effects of technology on our lives. Over lunch another friend recommended to me a 2006 book by Ray Kurzweil, called The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil describes his idea of the “singularity” thus: “It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.” Like Toffler nearly four decades ago, Kurzweil writes: “Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory.”

Facebook is one manifestation of this sort of change. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. And it is up to us to use it to our benefit—to not be taken over by it, become addicted to it, or somehow find ourselves unable to live without it in order to be engaged in the world, to develop our inner lives, and to be happy.

There’s an old and a somewhat shocking adage in the teachings of Buddhism that suggest if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. The idea is that the Buddha you see is an idol, a projection of your own image of who or what the Buddha is, which is not the real Buddha. The real Buddha is behind that Buddha, and even behind the other Buddha behind that Buddha. And so on.

At the moment, I’m feeling much the same way about Facebook. It’s a projection of what we think it is. In some way, it is just a party, as my friend said. We can drop in anytime. And if we don’t like it, we can leave.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. This truth is universal among the spiritual branches of study. I’ve been thinking that even when you are not ready, your teacher might show up anyway. In fact, if you are really paying attention, you’ll find there are teachers everywhere all around you all the time. Take The Bachelorette, for example.

Let me explain. After a day at the office I was driving to a friend’s house to watch The Bachelorette. I don’t have cable at my house, but I am not a television snob. You cannot be both a television snob and driving to a friend’s house to watch The Bachelorette. I’d call that more than being hypocritical. I’d call it something like a dissociative disorder. And I don’t think I have that.

During the drive, I was listening to XM radio 136, a station called Remix Radio. The station features a smorgasbord of radio documentary programs from across the country. I discovered it a few weeks ago and have rarely strayed from it since then. The program on when I was driving was called “Dial A Stranger.” I’d never heard of it. What happens is that the radio announcers (a man and a woman) call a stranger, introduce themselves to whomever picks up, then ask a question.

On this particular show, the announcers began by asking the strangers about their day, much like any of us would do with someone when we got home at the end of the day or with a friend on the phone. And that was what this sounded like; a lighthearted conversation between family members or friends. But it did not end there. At one point, one of the announcers would suddenly ask, “So, who saved your life?” And, to my surprise, the people would respond in a heartbeat. “My daughter,” said one man, who before his daughter was born, said he did “stupid stuff” like get drunk and pass out. He wrecked four cars. (That’s a lot of cars, I thought.) The daughter made him “grow up,” he said. A woman who was called said her stepmother saved her life by teaching her to be “kind and gentle.” Another woman said doctors and her mother saved her life; she had attempted suicide at the age of 12. The show was still going on when I had arrived at my friend’s house, and I had to turn off the program before it ended.

As I walked down the driveway, I thought about what I might say if someone called me out of the blue and asked who saved my life. The first person that came to mind was an Australian-born middle-aged Tibetan Buddhist nun I met during a retreat in Nepal in 1993. I was new to Buddhism then. In the old, steamy, dimly lit brick and concrete meditation room festooned with colorful silk drapes and paintings and statues of Buddhist icons—as I listened to this nun speak to about 70 Americans and Europeans gathered there—I could feel the synapses in my brain firing in new and exhilarating ways. I felt like I was being freed from a sort of prison of my own thoughts even though, up till then, I barely knew I was in a prison of my own thoughts. I was just weeks away from plunging headlong into a difficult divorce, and what I took home with me to upstate New York from the Himalayan foothills probably saved me from a complete and, perhaps, irreversible mental and emotional collapse.

The next day I did a Google search for “Dial A Stranger” and found its website. The show I listened to was originally aired last year on March 31, 2008. It was called “Life Savers” and the summary on the site reads: “Julie was saved by Zach, Virgil was saved by his daughter, Melissa is saved by her step-mom, Angela was saved by her husband, and Dahlia was saved by her mother.” I listened to the whole show online and heard the beginning and the end of it, which I had missed in my car. It turns out Julie was caught by Zach as she was falling out of the back of speeding Ford Bronco. But more often than not, the others seemed to have been saved from their own self-destruction and sense of despair.

Over the next few days I began to think of all the small life-saving things that happen in our lives, things that make us feel alive, grateful, and loved every day. The previous weekend I had visited a friend in Queens. He and I met as students at Union Theological Seminary in the late 1990s. We’ve stayed in touch ever since—he is a Jungian analyst now—and about three or four times a year we get together, often meeting in Manhattan first to eat lunch, have a few beers, visit a museum or gallery, then end the day with his wife, who meets up with us in the Lower East Side for Indian food at one of their favorite restaurants. I can think of a dozen things that saved my life that weekend, like hearing the breeze play in the trees of the restored and beautiful Bryant Park, looking at the ancient Tibetan thankas in the Ruben Museum of Art, eating that Indian meal with my friend and his wife and a friend of theirs who, I later learned, could recite the entire Heart Sutra in Chinese. Granted, the woman is Chinese, but I’d lived in China and met hundreds of Chinese people and none of them could recite the 250-word Heart Sutra, one of Buddhism’s most sacred texts. What saved my life that weekend was the pure and simple pleasures of friendship, the beauty of the natural world even in the middle of a teeming city, cold beer on a hot day, art, meaningful conversation, and awe and appreciation over the idea that someone would make the momentous effort to learn to recite from memory a long and beautiful piece of literature.

It may not be the Heart Sutra or a thanka of Kali, but The Bachelorette saves my life every Monday night in many ways. It brings me to a dear friend I might not visit as often without that show occurring each week. We share a simple meal, sip on some good wine, and laugh at the antics of Jillian Harris and her suitors. I feel in some way that Jillian is looking for a man to save her and the men are looking to her to save them. From what? Loneliness, perhaps. Meaningless, maybe. “We marry for ambiguous reasons,” the author Edward Hoagland wrote recently, “most of us—partly because we’re lonely, we’ve reached a dead end, we feel that we ought to have children already, or perhaps we’re afraid of some unfathomable element in our makeup…or a more general malaise and panicky despair.” As my friend and I get drawn into the high-strung, amorous drama of Jillian and the hungry men courting her, I see in them how I once was and, thankfully, am no more. I know now that no one—no friend, no lover, no spouse—is going to save me from loneliness or meaningless or despair. That’s an inside job for us all, one we need to do on our own. The Bachelorette reminds me of this like a sage who comes to see me every Monday night with his ancient words of wisdom.

I recently heard another friend tell a story of how a group of crows flocking around her—a murder of crows, she said, as a group of crows is called—once drew her into a grove of trees, and how the trees, with their natural, inherent beauty, made her suddenly think of her own natural, inherent beauty. And in that moment she was bowled over with a profound sense of self-acceptance that she’d never had before, and that has stayed with her ever since. “You never know what your teacher is going to look like,” she said of the experience.

A cool breeze rustling the leaves in Bryant Park. Cold beer on a hot day. Tibetan art. Meaningful conversation. The Heart Sutra. The Bachelorette. You never know what your teacher is going to look like indeed. And as long as we keep paying attention—like any good student anywhere, anytime—those teachers are going to keep showing up.

In the summer I know the place is packed. The full-time resident population of Martha’s Vineyard is 15,000. In the summer it goes up to 105,000, and this does not include the tourists who come and go. As I stood on a bluff overlooking the huge Katama Beach just south of Edgartown, a couple and their young boy trudged on the sand. The man and the son started to play catch while the woman and I watched them and gazed out over the open water. We were all dressed for winter because the wind was stiff and biting. Turns out they were local.

“I bet this beach gets really crowded in the summer,” I said.

“Oh, it does,” the woman said. “In July and August, forget about it. The roads are jammed. We don’t even leave the house unless we have to. We draw straws to see who has to go out and get groceries.”

After the three of them left, I had the beach to myself. Miles of it stretched in either direction farther than the eye could see. On the western side of the island in Gay Head, it’s the same. Back on the other side, Oak Bluffs, too. I am amazed and thrilled at the same time.

***
Late one afternoon I took the short ferry from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick Island. And I mean short—both the boat and the trip. The ferry holds three cars in a line. The thing is almost like a big toy. The ride takes two minutes. I went there looking for the small bridge that Edward Kennedy drove off with Mary Jo Kopechne in a car on the night of July 18, 1969. The car flipped and sank in a shallow tidal pool. He got out. She didn’t.

I was 16 years old that summer. I remembered some of the story, but not too clearly. In my hotel room in Edgartown I did a little online research about the event. I remembered there were many conflicting accounts of what happened, even from Kennedy himself. And I read about them now, almost 40 years later.

I had a small tourist map to guide me. I figured I’d find it easily because the whole of Chappaquiddick has about five roads. I would just drive them all if I had to. But I didn’t have to. After one wrong turn I drove from the main paved road down a sandy road; it was the road I was looking for, Dike Road. I drove for a couple of miles through tall pines and mixed hardwoods, then came out into the open as I approached a beach. There was a small bridge in front of me. It spanned a narrow tidal pool before the beach. The bridge was about 20 feet long.

It looked nothing like the bridge in the old black and white photos I’d seen online. That bridge was nothing more than planks laid together with sides that came up only a few inches. This new one was made of hefty timbers, and the sides were railed with posts and more thick timbers. I took a few photos but I was not sure if this was the same bridge Kennedy drove off of. Here, as all the other beaches I’ve been visiting, it was empty. Not a living soul around. No one to ask. I looked at the map through my sunglasses, held it open in the cool breeze coming off the glistening water. I saw the name of the road on the map: Dike Road. I looked up. There was no marker, not a word about the event anywhere. Could it be? It must be.

Like so many sites I’ve visited that are the locations of significant events in the annals of human history or of famous art—the (supposed) birthplace of Christ in Bethlehem, the Great Wall of China, the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbor—this one also seemed to hold a larger place in history and imagination than it appeared in reality. I was looking at a small, wooden bridge. That was all there was.

This was eerie, too, but in a different way. I felt a sadness and emptiness for both Kennedy for having made such a horrific mistake and for the Kopechne family, whose daughter—a member of Robert Kennedy’s Presidential campaign staff when he was assassinated the year before—must have had a bright future in front of her. And for all the others who were drawn into the tragedy and its aftermath.

“The mysteries of the case continue to haunt Ted Kennedy as well as the authorities who investigated them,” writes Leo Damore in his 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege. “Charges of ineptitude and lack of diligence abounded, as did insinuations that the machinery of justice crumbled beneath the power and prestige of the Kennedy family. George Killen, former State Police Detective-Lieutenant, and chief of a never-revealed investigation, lamented that the failure to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion was ‘the biggest mistake’ of a long and distinguished police career. Senator Kennedy, he said, ‘killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.’”

I got in my car, turned up the heat, backed up, and drove away. I pressed hard on the accelerator, worked my way quickly through the gears in my car; the winter schedule of the ferry is sporadic and I didn’t want to miss the next one. I was the only one to get on. I climbed out of my car and approached the ferryman. He seemed to be in his sixties and I suspected he would know about the bridge. I buttered him up a bit with a comment on the lovely weather. He nodded. “Yep.” Then I made my move. “Hey, which bridge is the one Kennedy drove off of?”

“It’s back down the road. By the beach.” His words were clipped, his tone and expression utterly unanimated. He peered straight ahead either to see where was he going or because he didn’t want to look back.

“Dike Road, right? I asked.

“That’s right.”

And that was that.

***
A couple of days before, I’d found a long beach open only to residents of Chilmark, a rural section of the island, during the summer. Now, there was hardly anyone else around so I went there with my New York plates, unconcerned about getting towed or ticketed. There are clay cliffs that rise high from the beach so narrow I could see that there was no beach at high tide. The cliffs were eroded by wind and water; the surface looked like cookie dough. In some places I could see the rooftops of houses and the remains of wooden stairs and ladders that had been trashed by winter storms, perhaps the rising sea. I took a few photos. It looked to me like a portent of things to come; more beaches disappearing, the bluffs and dunes getting wiped out, the real estate built too close to the water getting hammered.

Sometimes it seems that it’s only unheard echoes that survive, memories. And even the memories will go as the people who witnessed events or cast an eye on the ever-changing landscape of the natural world pass away, leaving us with the only an incomplete record of what they saw. Their photographs, their books. Perhaps someday, someone will look at the photos I took and be amazed that there was ever bridge over a tidal pool on Dike Road, a pool that during one epic storm got flooded by the ocean, which then never retreated. And those houses at the top of the bluff at Chilmark beach will, too, be gone someday.

I’d gone to Martha’s Vineyard to surround myself in the natural beauty of the ocean’s shorelines. I found that. But I also found remnants of frightening encounters of the human kind amidst such beauty, as well as of the destructive powers of the same natural elements that give the area its splendor.

“When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in fresh and vital ways,” writes the late John O’Donohue in his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. But so too with encounters that end with death and destruction. The heart attunes to the sadness that runs through our mortal lives like a silent, underground stream. The heart also quickens in gratitude for the gift of the life that we have been given, and speaks in words unspoken the noble command for us not to waste a minute of it in the shallow grid of artifice, small-mindedness, and bogus wants.

It is late spring, early evening. I notice the light is lingering, taking on summer’s languid, honey-colored glow. That makes me happy. But I wonder if I am seeing things because I am traveling north, in the wrong direction at this time of year after having just endured a long winter. I am going back into the cold, maybe back in time—back to some winter long ago and to something I’d dropped in the deep snow, the blizzard of my thoughts and emotions and desires, could not find, got busy, and left it there. Maybe it is something I love.

So, back I go. I must have been 8 or 9 years old when I began to like driving. On some summer Sundays my aunt and uncle would visit from their home in Bronxville, New York and we’d all spend a leisurely late afternoon roaming the winding roads through the Connecticut suburbs where my family lived. On some evenings my dad would drive us to town for ice cream. We owned a convertible in those days. I was thrilled to be out in the open, in the wind that whipped my hair and the sun that flashed though the trees that canopied over the roads. It was perhaps my first love—inspired, emotional, instant.

One day when I was 12, I asked my mother to show me how to drive. We were coming home from the grocery store and had just turned onto the dead end road we lived on. I slid across the bench seat and she made room for me, let me take the wheel. Eventually, she showed me how to use the gas pedal and the brake. We would do this often over the years. By the time I turned 16 and was old enough to drive on my own, cars had become second nature to me, like someone who’s trained on the piano and can play anywhere, any time. Put me in a car and I’m at home. Friends are amazed at the lengths—measured in time and miles—that I can sit behind the wheel and enjoy it.

I enjoy the motion of going somewhere—as I am doing now. It does not matter where I am going. I am here. And though I am alone I feel as if everyone and everything I care for is with me—in my head, my heart. It’s as if, by some strange Newtonian law of physics, the more miles I put between me and the presence of these people and things, the more they crowd inside me. It is a lot to carry, I know. I do not travel light.

But this is a floating world, what the Japanese call ukiyo, “pictures of the floating world.” It was a popular art form in 17th-century Japan. Asai Ryoi, a 17th-century Japanese writer, describes ukiyo as “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.”

The Mass Pike has drifted away behind me. Interstate 495, too. Interstate 95—Portsmouth, Portland, Augusta, Bangor—are all gone over the horizon that I glimpse in the rearview mirror from time to time. Nothing back there now but this narrow slice of road that cuts through the deep woods of Maine and rolling carpets of wild blueberry scrub. There are long grades up and down. On either side of me, the sun angles in the tall pines and on the still, dark ponds that shine black like polished ebony. The radio is off so I can hear myself think, pay attention to what’s around me. I can feel my pulse settle into a slow, steady beat as if corresponding to that distant drum that beats just below consciousness, leading me onward, inward.

We often dream of places we’d like to be, of what we will do when we get there. But it’s often the getting there that I dream about, that makes me happy, that I tell my friends and family about. Downpours, rainbows, animals, sunsets, the moon.

“There is always hope, always something better, if you keep moving”, I’ve heard people say with a snicker of cynicism. But that’s not what this is about for me. Sometimes when I am on the road, life just doesn’t get any better. I’ve no hope because I don’t need it. I’ve no expectations about any place because I am already there. And I am never disappointed because the motion always gives, and gives, and gives.

Night after night I’ve been waking up several times just after having dreamed of being in a meeting, going over my schedule of appointments or list of things to do, driving to work, emailing someone about something important (or so it seems), and impatiently waiting for a reply. Then the following morning, I come into the office and the same thing starts happening all over again, only now it’s in real life and real time. When people feel busy, they often complain they’re working 24/7. In my case these days (and nights), it seems that’s what’s happening to me. And there’s no comp time for dreaming of work.

It’s been so long since I’ve dreamed of anything but work that I’ve sometimes found myself humming “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” even as dozens of yellow-headed daffodils are popping up outside in my garden. A white Christmas on Easter would at least be a change of scenery.

I’m feeling so desperate that I’ve resorted to setting intentions just before I go to sleep. I ask whoever or whatever might be listening (and this is a real question for me since I live alone and have no pets) that I be visited by dreams of a sunny beach, the open road, a night on the town, falling in love—anything but a day at the office in the middle of the night, please. No luck. If there is a God, my requests are either falling on deaf ears or being ignored. I feel like I’m trapped pacing up and down the middle aisle of an all-night convenience store.

I am not having the same dream. This is not my own version of Groundhog Day, the hilarious movie in which the character played by Bill Murray wakes up each morning only to find it’s the exact same day as the day before. Each night my dreams are different. What’s the same is the theme: Work and more work. This is not funny. When I’m on vacation, I never dream that I’m on vacation. I sure hope that when I’m on my next vacation I am not still dreaming about work.

Buddhists speak of the “non-self” not as lack of identity but as an identity that is fluid. “It appears that human beings are wired to create a separate self,” writes Polly Young-Eisendrath in her book The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering Into Insight and Renewal. We grasp onto a passing quality and make it, she writes, “into the essence of who we are.” What Buddhism teaches is that the idea we have of a separate unchanging self, of seeing oneself apart from others, is a fundamental root of our suffering. “We do not allow ourselves to be fully who we are; we want a definition of a self that exists and continues,” she writes.

In dreams, too, there is a sense of having this Buddhist “non-self” because you cannot tell your mind what to dream for you, as much as I’ve pleaded for that to happen. In our dreams, we don’t have a “definition of a self that exists and continues.” Your mind goes where it wants to go and you become who it wants you to be. And you can learn and grow from where you go and what you do in your dreams.

“People go to wild places in search for their true nature,” the Zen teacher John Tarrant said at a recent Omega program, Mindfulness, Love & Relationship, in New York City. “Where is my true nature?” he went on to ask. This is what he called a koan, an ancient Buddhist practice of posing a question that has no definitive answer because it has aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding. Here’s a koan of my own: Of all the things my mind can conjure up when I am dreaming, why in the middle of the night does it take me back to the office I just left a few hours before, and will return to a few hours hence?

Maybe I can train myself to have lucid dreams. “A lucid dream,” according to the website luciddreaming.com, “is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. This awareness is referred to as lucidity or being lucid.” When you are having a lucid dream, you are supposed to be able to manipulate the experiences you are having in the dream. I think I like this idea. If I could lucid dream when I am dreaming about work then maybe I can see myself out of the door, get into my car, and drive home to a wonderful wife who’s just prepared a wonderful meal. We are sitting outside, the weather is warm, blue birds are singing in the trees, and the beads of condensation on the glass of a tangy Sauvignon Blanc are picking up the last salmon-colored rays of the setting sun. Talk about dreaming.

Then again, it seems to me that if you lucid dream, you miss the whole point of dreaming. Dream images come from the unconscious and, as such, have much to tell us about our lives—our desires, needs, problems that need to get resolved, even illnesses. I remember in a psychology class when I was a student at Union Theological Seminary the teacher, a psychotherapist, told a story about a man who kept having a dream of seeing a huge pumpkin on the side of the road he was driving on. Turns out the man had a huge cancerous tumor in his stomach. The moral of this story, the professor concluded, is that the man’s recurring dreams were trying to tell him something he needed to know in the symbolic language in which dreams speak. As much as I don’t like dreaming about work, I really don’t want to tell my dreams what to do. I’m thinking that lucid dreaming is just another control issue that I really don’t want to deal with right now.

“No one on his deathbed ever said ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,’” the late U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas, once said. So perhaps what I need to do is let a little reverie into my life, to take a moment or two out of my day or night to give myself what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called a “psychic détente.” Instead of burning the candle at both ends, perhaps when I wake up from a dream in which I am at the office, I need light a real candle and gaze into its flame and soft pool of light for a while.

“There is no well-being without reverie, no reverie without well-being,” Bachelard writes in his On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. “We discover, by reverie, in the first place, that being is good.” And a lit candle can take us there. “One may well be interested in the inner swirls surrounding the wick, and see in the depth of the flame stirrings where shadow and light struggle,” Bachelard goes on. “But every dreamer of flame lifts his dream toward the summit. It is there that fire becomes light.”

During the nearly two years Wanda and I were there, we were able to set aside many of the concerns and questions we had about our careers, about where we’d like to settle down, about whether or not we were going to have a child. We went to China at a point in our lives when we wanted to do something really different, to have an adventure. We got that. Also, Wanda was a Chinese-American who still had distant family in China whom we wanted to get to know. We got that, too.

When it came time to leave China, we decided to make our way back to the States by going West through the Soviet Union (it was still the Soviet Union then), as well as Scandinavia—to see some of my ancestral land. We would then get a cheap flight out of Amsterdam back to New York.

Our arrival in Copenhagen coincided with a visit there by my aunt and her husband from North Carolina. We met them in their hotel restaurant, an expensive place with white linen tablecloths and candlelight; it was the sort of restaurant Wanda and I had not set foot in for almost two years. And it was this particular evening that stands out in many ways above the so many of the other things that had happened to us while we’d been away simply because, perhaps, of its blow.

I don’t remember, but I’m sure we looked quite shabby. I do remember that we felt worn out. If life in China wasn’t enough to grind us down—it was in many ways a soul-killing, back-breaking, totalitarian country then—we’d just spent three weeks on an Odyssean journey aboard trains and crashing in cheap hotels and even spending the night in a couple of plastic seats on a small cruise liner during a sleepless overnight trip, all of it with a ton of luggage in tow. We must have looked like refugees. Even our best clothes had become threadbare and stained, and our hair had been hacked at by a Chinese friend back in Beijing, who had something of a knack for hairdressing. That was fine for China, but I know we did not look nearly as well-coiffured as the people around us now. We were also broke—we would stuff our pockets and daypacks with food from the continental breakfasts we got at the small hotels we stayed in along the way so we’d have something to eat for lunch and dinner—and we were looking forward to a lovely, relaxing, sit-down meal paid for by someone else.

It didn’t take long for the conversation about our “China thing”—that’s what my aunt called it, our “China thing,” like it was something you did when you were young and irresponsible, and then moved on—to draw a bead on what Wanda and I were planning to do when we got back the States. My aunt was an academic. She had a doctorate in education and worked in the administration of several colleges and universities in her career. My uncle was an executive with Dupont. My aunt had married late and never had children of her own. He was on his second marriage (his wife had died several years before) and had two grown daughters who were now married. My aunt’s reference to our transformative, mind-boggling time in China as our “China thing” struck a nerve in me from the get-go, and I was about to learn that it was just the beginning of a conversation that I soon wanted to stop, even it meant getting up from the table and walking out.

“So what are your next plans?” my aunt asked.

It seemed like an innocent question and I answered cheerily, “Your guess is as good as mine. Got any suggestions?”

“Don’t you think it’s about time to start thinking about little ones?” she asked suddenly.

“I have thought about them quite a lot, actually,” I said, trying to be polite. It was true. It was the subject of many conversations Wanda and I had been having for several years—even before we were married—and I always came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t interested in having a child, but still remained open to the possibility. But I did not want to talk about that just now.

“And?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, it’s time you decided, don’t you think?”

“Wanda and I made an arrangement in which I have to tell her by April 2 whether or not I want to have kids,” I said. This conversation in the restaurant took place on August 13, 1987. I have no idea now why we picked April 2. I don’t even recall making that agreement. But it’s in my journal that I was keeping of that time and in which this entire conversation is recounted.

“Good for her,” my uncle chimed in, winking at Wanda.

“How old are you?” my aunt asked me.

“I’m thirty-four.”

“Too old,” Wanda joked.

“Not too old,” my aunt said.

“Shucks,” I said.

“The trouble is this,” my aunt said. “My father had me when he was 33. By the time I reached 20, he was already in his 50s.”

“You can’t turn back the clock so you don’t have to go into that,” I said, my bile rising. It might have been the wine. Did I have wine? I cannot recall.

“What I’m saying is that there is a point in which you have to get on with your life,” my aunt continued. “It’s important that you do something, have commitments, or make a contribution so when you are old you can look back and say you’ve done something to make the world a better place.”

Jesus Christ. “What do you think I’ve been doing in China all this time?” I snarled. “You have no idea what a foreigner can do for people there. I personally got one person into the United States to study.”

“A drop in the ocean,” my uncle sneered.

“So be it,” I said.

“You’re afraid of having children because you’re afraid you won’t be a good parent,” my aunt went on.

“That’s part of it,” I admitted.

“That’s all of it,” she shot back.

“It’s not all of it,” I replied. “I don’t necessarily even like children.” It was not entirely true. I just didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of children.

“I know you and you’ll be the first to fall. You’re such a softie,” my aunt said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a very short temper. I can’t stand to hear a baby a cry. Every time I hear a baby cry my blood begins to boil and my heart starts pounding and my palms begin to sweat. I have to get up and leave the room.”

“It’s different when it’s your own,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s worse because you can’t leave the room.”

“There’s a change that takes place,” my uncle said. “You feel different about it.”

“I don’t have a very good image of family and child rearing,” I said.

“I know that,” my aunt said. Yes, she knew that, I thought. “But why deny yourself a family just because you have a bad image of one?”

“Here’s a chance for you to start over, to prove that can have children and be happy,” my uncle added.

“That’s a good point,” I agreed. They’d touched a soft spot in me. “I’ve heard that before and I think it’s a good point.

“Kate’s husband didn’t want children,” my aunt said. Kate was one of my uncle’s daughters. “But now you can say no wrong about his little John. He just adores the boy.”

“Listen,” I said, getting my back up again. “I know all about what you are saying. I know we’re a selfish generation and a lot of us run around afraid to make commitments. But that’s not my reason for not wanting children. The reason is not because I’m afraid of being a bad parent or afraid of making a commitment. It’s because I don’t want to spend my life raising children. I just don’t think I would enjoy it all that much.”

“Well….” my aunt began, and then let her sentence drift off.

“And I don’t like this thing about getting on with one’s life,” I continued. My final salvo, the last of my ammo. “There is no point in which one gets on with life. This is my life. I went to China and it was part of my life. So I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say one has to get on with one’s life.”

The conversation suddenly stopped. Had I won? After a moment of uncomfortable silence, my aunt made some comment about the food or the weather—like a white flag of surrender, the delirium of someone in the throes of death—and my uncle either agreed or disagreed, I don’t recall because my mind was spinning and overheated. If I had won, what did I win?

Finally, I wanted to say something that spoke to the journey we’d just made, to get back to what was really most important for me at that moment and about which I had some authority that they didn’t. I was feeling desperate to tell people what I saw—things that they had no knowledge of and I felt needed to be known about real life in Communist China and the Soviet Union—and it came not from books or from other people telling me about it; it was based on my own experience and nothing and no one could refute what I knew simply because it had happened to me.

“You might be interested to know that everything bad you’ve heard about the Soviet Union is true,” I started, a bit lamely. “There are lines for everything.” I knew because we had to wait in them.

My aunt immediately replied, “The longest line we’ve had to wait in was to go to the bathroom. The bus pulls into a stop and everybody gets off and runs to the john.”

“There’s a toilet on the bus but they don’t let you use it because it has to be emptied,” my uncle added.

And that was the end of our talk about the Soviet Union, China, and everything Wanda and I had done and seen and that was now so much a part of my life it inhabited my viscera like nothing had before. I could feel that my brain had been rewired by the experience, but there were so many loose wires still. Even so—or because of this—I had so much to tell. And neither of them cared a jot about any of it.

I don’t remember what I ate or drank that night. I’m sure my aunt and uncle picked up the tab and I’m sure I thanked them for it, and I really was grateful. But when I left them I felt embittered. It wasn’t simply the subject of the conversation—children—that irritated me. It was their lack of curiosity in who I was and what was really on my mind then.

***
It wasn’t long after that meeting that my aunt, a heavy smoker most of her life, was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time it was discovered, it had metastasized to her brain. The last time Wanda and I saw her in her hospital bed—and the first time since our dinner in Demark—she was a bald, emaciated form with wide eyes that stared blankly out the window at the yellow pines outside. Now she did not even know who we were. After her funeral, I never saw my uncle again. Always a bit of a drinker, he besotted himself in his years alone and presently died from complications due to alcohol poisoning.

I don’t know what, in their final hours, they believed they’d done to make the world a better place. My uncle gave the world two daughters, and giving life is always a blessing. Perhaps my aunt was so keen on me having a child because she knew the pain and longing it had caused her to not have one herself. If this were the case, I wish now she’d just come out and said so. As it was, I felt so resentful about that talk we’d had in Copenhagen that I’d snubbed them. I hate to admit it, but I’d snubbed them. Which is too bad—for me and for them. We missed so much life we could have shared.

They used to visit my family and I remember when I was getting ready to go to college my aunt kept insisting that I apply to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she was working at the time. I never did; I didn’t think I could get in. I am thinking now that perhaps she had a higher opinion of me than I had of myself, both as a student and as the father she wanted me to be—and I never have become.

I may have pushed them out of my life—perhaps unfairly; maybe we were poor company then—but they taught me a valuable lesson that evening: The way they’d harped on me in Copenhagen taught me that it is sometimes better to listen rather than to talk because sometimes people just need to be heard. I would have greatly appreciated it if my aunt and uncle had deferred to me a little, and let me tell them about what’d I’d just been through. Someone once said there is no pain greater than an untold story. I had a story. And I so much wanted to tell it—the invigorated yet, at the same time, the strangely sad if not wrecked version of myself who was in no way ready to start having children, for heaven’s sake. They were the first people Wanda and I met up with from back home, and they seemed more bent on getting us there and resettled than on hearing anything about where we’d been, what we’d seen, what we’d been through. It was as if they’d showed up with a clean, crisp map to suggest places for us to go when I wanted to pull out my ragged, torn map to show them the places where we’d been. So we just of sat there in the middle of nowhere, lost and arguing which road would get us where we wanted to go. Thing is, my aunt and uncle wanted us to go one way and I wanted to go another way.

Listening a little more would make the world a better place no matter what else you might want to leave behind—stadiums in your name, endowments, a park bench with your name engraved into a brass plaque. Even children. It’s usually not what you do that people remember, a friend once said to me. It’s how you treat them. And, frankly, I can’t think of anyone at any time who couldn’t use someone to hear them out.

The other night at home I read a magazine article about Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah.” The article was a sort of a tribute to the song, offering a description of how the song came to be and about the many performers who have covered it over the years.

The first time I heard the song was 20 years after Cohen recorded it. This version was on NPR during a live performance k.d. lang was giving at Carnegie Hall during a tour promoting her 2004 CD, Hymns of the 49th Parallel. I was in my car and nearly had to pull over. I felt a soft explosion in my heart and my entire body seemed to get caught up in a vertiginous swirl of thought and emotion I couldn’t stop—and didn’t want to stop because that kind of surrender just felt so good. I bought the CD and listened to it—and “Hallelujah”—on and off (more on) for about two years. Then one day I took it out of my CD changer and gave it a rest. I’d had enough.

When I opened that magazine article the other night, I lost myself all over again. Maybe this is what an alcoholic feels like if he or she takes a drink after having been on the wagon for a while. There’s this gripping feeling of delight and dread, the cartoonish angel on one shoulder (Better not) and the devil on the other (Go ahead, do it). I did. After I read the article, I clicked on youtube.com to see if there were any videos of anyone singing the song.

Turns out were plenty of them. There’s not only lang’s version but there’s also one by Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allison Crowe, Rufus Wainwright, Sheryl Crow, and even Cohen himself. Of course, I had to watch them all. Then I clicked through to some other sites to get the lyrics (they change slightly depending who is performing the song), which led me to sites that explored the meaning of the word “hallelujah” (it’s Hebrew for “praise the Lord”) and examined the song’s allusions to the Biblical stories of David and Samson. This started at about 9 p.m. When I next looked up from my computer at the clock, it was close to 1 a.m.

Where did those four hours go? People who study obsessions and addictions say when met with the object of our desire we go into a sort of trance. Is that what happened? And, if so, is it such a bad thing? What’s the difference between getting lost in a trance and simply paying attention? In Buddhism, what happened to me might be called samadhi, which is Sanskrit for the sort of mental concentration that leads to an awareness of ultimate reality and complete freedom from suffering. My mind was not wandering, scheming, wishing, dreaming. I was nowhere else but right on task with what I was doing.

I love good music. And I love to learn. I spent hours online that night because I wanted to hear a song I love played many times by many performers. And I wanted to know more about the song because that would deepen my love and appreciation for it. Is there a crime in that?

What about getting caught up in a good book? “I couldn’t put it down,” people say about reading a novel into the wee hours of the night. We commend people for that—both the writer for telling a good story and the reader for finding so much pleasure in an activity our culture holds up as one of humanity’s highest achievements. The other morning I found myself so engrossed—obsessed?—in reading a book on obsession and addiction that I forgot I had put the stove on to heat a skillet to scramble some eggs. I laughed. But if I had been online then chasing “Hallelujah” down a rabbit hole, I wonder if I would been so kind to myself.

Now, days later after giving it all some more thought, I am wondering if clicking through sites online is just another form of page turning, and I am wondering if my little adventure with “Hallelujah” was just as compelling an adventure as reading a good book. It was a sort of story I was wrapped up in—the song, its performance, creation, and hidden meanings.

The song has many others who can’t seem to get enough of it. When I last checked, one of lang’s performances had gotten 1,091,990 hits on youtube.com (I must have contributed to about a hundred of those); Buckely’s has 8,405,694 (which is more than the entire population of New York City); Cale’s (which appears on the soundtrack of Shrek) 1,763,840; Allison Crowe’s 2,973,259 views; Wainwright’s Irish performance 3,758,095 views; Sheryl Crow’s 994,143 views; Cohen’s own version (and not the best, by my lights), 6,359,846 views.

When I first heard lang sing “Hallelujah” on the radio back in 2004, I was in a relationship that wasn’t going well. It eventually ended—and it did not end well. I listened to the song a couple of years later while in the throes of another relationship that ended barely before it began. Amidst all that listening, the song gave me a profound insight into the nature of love. There’s a line in the lyrics that says “love is a cold and broken hallelujah.” I’d heard that line dozens of times before, but it struck me anew after my second break-up and has stayed with me through the years, like a tuning fork whose sound never changes—or goes away.

“If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks,” writes Daniel J. Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music. “If the composer is skillful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be; his knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain ‘hooks’ in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds.”

I wonder if I listened to the song so much during those couple of years in an attempt to imagine a better outcome for either relationship, if only in my own mind. Change not the events but my perception of the events. Locate within me a level of acceptance that certain relationships—like certain roads—are not always smooth and do not necessarily lead you where you really want to go. Or maybe I listened to find solace in a world in which my broken heart felt like the only heart that was ever broken. One website I found examined the lyrics of “Hallelujah” and pointed out that the song speaks of the fact that “people are imperfect and wavering in their affections.” And those people include not just others, but also ourself.

The dictionary defines obsession as “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” So I’m thinking that this is the line in the sand between a healthy enjoyment of something or a pathological compulsion. On one side there’s joy. On the other “a persistent disturbing preoccupation.”

Given that, I don’t think I’m obsessed with “Hallelujah.” I just like the song. A lot.

Amen.

***

Purchase k. d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel This CD has a lovely studio recording of “Hallelujah.” The entire CD, a collection of songs by Canadian musicians, including Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Jean Sibbery–all of them beautifully covered by lang–is unforgettable.

Puchase k.d. lang: Live with the BBC Concert Orchestra [Blu-ray] This DVD has an awesome live version of “Hallelujah” and many other k.d. lang favorites.