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.