with the urge to jump.
But I stayed there in the silver puddle of my own boots.
And rather than get on the train and return to the small apartment where I would spend the evening in a treacherous cat-and-mouse game with Charles, a voice inside me told me to walk up the subway stairs and out into the damp Manhattan dusk, then a few blocks downtown to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble.
I went straight to the self-help section.
Riding the escalator up to the second floor, I thought, This is what it feels like to hit bottom. I had considered myself a feminist, an intellectual, a poet. But here I was, at the mercy of a man, with nowhere to turn, no more poems to write or read, looking for a savior like every other sorry sucker.
I had been working with a therapist named Grace, whom I loved. I’d sit in her cozy, dark, leathery, book-lined room and search her kind eyes.
“He threw his Kleenex on the floor,” I cried, “and I knew that was me. I don’t matter to him at all.”
“That must have hurt terribly,” she said.
But ultimately, even her loving gaze wasn’t enough. When the fifty minutes were over, invariably I was back in a loop of obsession, the walls closing in. I needed more; I needed something else.
I stood there before the sea of pastel self-help-book spines. They all looked the same. And then I glanced to my left, to the “Eastern Thought” section. I saw one book that was face-out on the shelf. It was lovely—white, with purple flowers and ginkgo leaves, feminine but understated. My draw to the book was almost zombie-like, predetermined. When I reached it, I read its cover: Nothing Special: Living Zen, by Charlotte Joko Beck. I opened it and read the first chapter:
We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life. In flowing forward, a river or stream may hit rocks, branches, or irregularities in the ground, causing whirlpools to spring up spontaneously here and there. Water entering one whirlpool quickly passes through and rejoins the river, eventually joining another whirlpool and moving on. Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself…
Ninety percent of a typical human life is spent trying to put boundaries around the whirlpool. We’re constantly on guard: “He might hurt me.” “This might go wrong.” “I don’t like him anyway.” This is a complete misuse of our life function; yet we all do it to some degree.
Reading these words, I felt a rush of relief, as if my breath were getting knocked into me. I was that rushing, crazy, dangerous river. I experienced a brief flash of complete physical aliveness. And then it faded away and I was just me, sitting under fluorescent lights on a hard chair among people walking across the carpeted floor of a windowless room.
But I was no longer alone. I had a new book, a new idea, a new reality—a secure base—to check back with when the current of my obsession threatened to pull me under, as I knew it would. I couldn’t stop thinking about this: Being on guard is a misuse of my life function. I wasn’t sure what my life’s function was, though I knew it had something to do with love.
chapter seven
One day not long before Charles finally left me, I tried zazen, the Japanese term for meditation, for the first time. Sitting on my bed in the middle of the day, legs folded, back straight, hands resting in what’s called the “cosmic mudra,” for the briefest moment I made contact with my very own breathing self. After so much scrambling to avoid the pain of my anguish, it was a relief. Seeing myself in the plain light of day wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined.
In fact, I immediately saw—even in the state I was in—that being present was in some strange way delightful. It felt so good to let my guard down. What a surprise! This was, as Mary would say, “a sudden, total, and permanent change in perspective.”