over the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I was going to be turning ten years old
in July, and there was something about the transition from nine to ten--from single digit
to double digits--that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for
people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast. It seemed
like only yesterday I was in kindergarten, and here I was, about to turn ten. Soon I would
be a teenager, then middle-aged, then elderly, then dead. And everyone else was aging in
hyperspeed, too. Everybody was going to be dead soon. My parents would die. My
friends would die. My cat would die. My older sister was almost in high school already; I
could remember her going off to first grade only moments ago, it seemed, in her little
knee socks, and now she was in high school? Obviously it wouldn't be long before she
was dead. What was the point of all this?
The strangest thing about this crisis was that nothing in particular had spurred it. Nofriend or relative had died, giving me my first taste of mortality, nor had I read or seen
anything particular about death; I hadn't even read Charlotte's Web yet. This panic I was
feeling at age ten was nothing less than a spontaneous and full-out realization of
mortality's inevitable march, and I had no spiritual vocabulary with which to help myself
manage it. We were Protestants, and not even devout ones, at that. We said grace only
before Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner and went to church sporadically. My dad
chose to stay home on Sunday mornings, finding his devotional practice in farming. I
sang in the choir because I liked singing; my pretty sister was the angel in the Christmas
pageant. My mother used the church as a headquarters from which to organize good
works of volunteer service for the community. But even in that church, I don't remember
there being a lot of talking about God. This was New England, after all, and the word
God tends to make Yankees nervous.
My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some
massive emergency brake on the universe, like the brakes I'd seen on the subways during
our school trip to New York City. I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody
just STOP until I could understand everything. I suppose this urge to force the entire
universe to stop in its tracks until I could get a grip on myself might have been the
beginning of what my dear friend Richard from Texas calls my "control issues." Of
course, my efforts and worry were futile. The closer I watched time, the faster it spun,
and that summer went by so quickly that it made my head hurt, and at the end of every
day I remember thinking, "Another one gone," and bursting into tears.
I have a friend from high school who now works with the mentally handicapped, and he
says his autistic patients have a particularly heartbreaking awareness of time's passage, as
if they never got the mental filter that allows the rest of us to forget about mortality every
once in a while and just live. One of Rob's patients always asks him the date at the
beginning of every day, and at the end of the day will ask, "Rob--when will it be
February fourth again?" And before Rob can answer, the guy shakes his head in sorrow
and says, "I know, I know, never mind . . . not until next year, right?"
I know this feeling all too intimately. I know the sad longing to delay the end of another
February 4. This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we
know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift--or curse,
perhaps--of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're
just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day. How are you going to cope
with this information? When I was nine, I couldn't do a thing with it except cry. Later,
over the years, my hypersensitive awareness of time's speed led me to push myself to
experience life at a maximum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I
had to do everything possible to experience it now. Hence all the traveling, all the
romances, all the ambition, all the pasta. My sister had a friend who used to think that
Catherine had two or three younger sisters, because she was always hearing stories about
the sister who was in Africa, the sister who was working on a ranch in Wyoming, the
sister who was the bartender in New York, the sister who was writing a book, the sister
who was getting married--surely this could not all be the same person? Indeed, if I could
have split myself into many Liz Gilberts, I would willingly have done so, in order to not
miss a moment of life. What am I saying? I did split myself into many Liz Gilberts, all of
whom simultaneously collapsed in exhaustion on a bathroom floor in the suburbs one
night, somewhere around the age of thirty.I should say here that I'm aware not everyone goes through this kind of metaphysical
crisis. Some of us are hardwired for anxiety about mortality, while some of us just seem
more comfortable with the whole deal. You meet lots of apathetic people in this world, of
course, but you also meet some people who seem to be able to gracefully accept the terms
upon which the universe operates and who genuinely don't seem troubled by its
paradoxes and injustices. I have a friend whose grandmother used to tell her, "There's no
trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey
and the Book of Common Prayer." For some people, that's truly enough. For others, more
drastic measures are required.
And now I will mention my friend the dairy farmer from Ireland--on the surface, a most
unlikely character to meet in an Indian Ashram. But Sean is one of those people like me
who were born with the itch, the mad and relentless urge to understand the workings of
existence. His little parish in County Cork didn't seem to have any of these answers, so he
left the farm in the 1980s to go traveling through India, looking for inner peace through
Yoga. A few years later, he returned home to the dairy farm in Ireland. He was sitting in
the kitchen of the old stone house with his father--a lifelong farmer and a man of few
words--and Sean was telling him all about his spiritual discoveries in the exotic East.
Sean's father listened with mild interest, watching the fire in the hearth, smoking his pipe.
He didn't speak at all until Sean said, "Da--this meditation stuff, it's crucial for teaching
serenity. It can really save your life. It teaches you how to quiet your mind."
His father turned to him and said kindly, "I have a quiet mind already, son," then resumed
his gaze on the fire.
But I don't. Nor does Sean. Many of us don't. Many of us look into the fire and see only
inferno. I need to actively learn how to do what Sean's father, it seems, was born
knowing--how to, as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand "apart from the pulling and
hauling . . . amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary . . . both in and out of the
game and watching and wondering at it all." Instead of being amused, though, I'm only
anxious. Instead of watching, I'm always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer
I said to God, "Look--I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you
think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"
Buddhist lore has a story about the moments that followed the Buddha's transcendence
into enlightenment. When--after thirty-nine days of meditation--the veil of illusion finally
fell away and the true workings of the universe were revealed to the great master, he was
reported to have opened his eyes and said immediately, "This cannot be taught." But then
he changed his mind, decided that he would go out into the world, after all, and attempt to
teach the practice of meditation to a small handful of students. He knew there would be
only a meager percentage of people who would be served by (or interested in) his
teachings. Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of
deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. A few others
(like Sean's Da, perhaps) are so naturally clear-eyed and calm already that they need no
instruction or assistance whatsoever. But then there are those whose eyes are just slightly
caked with dust, and who might, with the help of the right master, be taught to see more
clearly someday. The Buddha decided he would become a teacher for the benefit of that
minority--"for those of little dust."
I dearly hope that I am one of these mid-level dust-caked people, but I don't know. I only
know that I have been driven to find inner peace with methods that might seem a bitdrastic for the general populace. (For instance, when I told one friend back in New York
City that I was going to India to live in an Ashram and search for divinity, he sighed and
said, "Oh, there's a part of me that so wishes I wanted to do that . . . but I really have no
desire for it whatsoever.") I don't know that I have much of a choice, though. I have
searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these
acquisitions and accomplishments--they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep
chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time--when pursued like a bandit--will behave
like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and
hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging
through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in
the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to
admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as
Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to
you.
Letting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world
revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if
we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well--that would be the end of the
universe. But try dropping it, Groceries. This is the message I'm getting. Sit quietly for
now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash
dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do
not run red with blood. Life continues to go on. Even the Italian post office will keep
limping along, doing its own thing without you--why are you so sure that your
micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don't you
let it be?
I hear this argument and it appeals to me. I believe in it, intellectually. I really do. But
then I wonder--with all my restless yearning, with all my hyped-up fervor and with this
stupidly hungry nature of mine--what should I do with my energy, instead?
That answer arrives, too:
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for
water.
50505050
The next morning in meditation, all my caustic old hateful thoughts come up again. I'm
starting to think of them as irritating telemarketers, always calling at the most
inopportune moments. What I'm alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually
not that interesting a place, after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things,
and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is "brooding." I brood aboutmy divorce, and all the pain of my marriage, and all the mistakes I made, and all the
mistakes my husband made, and then (and there's no return from this dark topic) I start
brooding about David . . .
Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean--here I am in this sacred place
of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I,
in eighth grade?
And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in
the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer
psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees--boat people--who had
recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly
daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can
inflict on each other--genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives
before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West
where people died and corpses were fed to sharks--what could Deborah offer these
people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?
"But don't you know," Deborah reported to me, "what all these people wanted to talk
about, once they could see a counselor?"
It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I
thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up
with my cousin. Now he's married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps
calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can't stop
thinking about him. And I don't know what to do . . .
This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met
an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two
questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you
love me? And Who's in charge?" Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two
questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.
And both of them, unfortunately (or maybe obviously), are what I'm dealing with at this
Ashram. When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing
and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving
forward.
When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my
