Late one morning, on the way to work at Mission Street in downtown San Francisco, I spotted a middle-aged man in the light-rail station wearing one of the octopus-cat hoodies. He was sitting upright on a piece of cardboard, a soggy paper cup beside him, and was not wearing shoes. On his ankle was an open wound — Red, blistered, raw. Below us, I could see a train, maybe mine, pulling in. I rushed through the turnstile, wondering if I should have given him money, then wondering if I only felt that way because of pity, not compassion. I found a seat on the train and pressed my head against the window like a child.
The train emerged above ground and onto the Embarcadero, curving past a gigantic pop-art sculpture of a bow and arrow. The bay glittered and lapped, seagulls descended on a neglected bakery bag, and I felt disturbed. The man seemed like a novelistic apparition, a hallucination.
When I got into the office, I tried to describe my thoughts to a coworker — how surreal it had been, like whiplash. It was the city’s socioeconomic gap personified, I said. I felt like I was back in India, walking under the Lower Parel bridge. It felt even more significant that the man in the light rail station was black, a stereotype of poverty in my head. To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees.
“Maybe I should have done something. Taken him to the hospital”, I said. My coworker nodded. “That is really sad,” he noted. We stood there as if observing a moment of silence.
“I wonder who he was…,” he said.
He was someone’s brother too.
I was having lunch with one of my intellectual friends when he asked me out of the blue — Did I believe in God? I knew he was an atheist. He knew about my search for something — A higher power, a semblance of something that actually made sense. He had been dubious about my search from the beginning. “Why,” he wanted to know, “would you take on such a thing? I mean, is this something you’ve thought a lot about? You can’t meditate your way out of your head.”
For me, there’s nothing trickier than trying to talk about personal beliefs. Add on top of that trying to talk about personal belief with a very smart atheist. But I had an answer for him.
“I would say yes,” I said hesitantly with a certain degree of confidence. It was not the garden variety god who keeps score that made sense in my head. Nor the one sitting in a temple. Neither was the one that I beseeched to when things went south. Yet there was something that nagged me quietly.
“So what exactly do you believe, then?” He sipped his tea and waited for a better answer. I wanted to tell him that exactly and believe didn’t belong in the same sentence.
“I think that there is something connecting us,” I said. “Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we’re gone.
I looked at my friend for any sign of ridicule but saw none. He was nodding.
“An animating presence,” he said.
That was as good a word as any: presence. As in the opposite of absence. By training my thoughts and daily actions in the direction of an open-minded inquiry, what emerged was a powerful sense of presence. It couldn’t be touched, or apprehended, but nonetheless, when I released the hold of my mind and all its swirling narratives, this was what I felt. Something — rather than nothing. While sitting in meditation, practicing coming back to my breath, the paradox was increasingly clear to me: emptiness led to fullness, non-thought to greater understanding.
“Where does belonging to the Parsi religion fit into all this?” he asked.
“It doesn’t fit in,” I answered. “It just is. I’m Parsi. Ana’s Parsi. Jenny and Becky are Parsi.” I thought of someone’s elegant phrase — Complicated with it. We were complicated by our history, by the religion of our ancestors. There was beauty and wisdom and even solace in that. There was a sense of identity, a particular quaintness in that. There was a binding glue in the little customs we followed, the ceremonies we made — In birth or death, and the weird jokes we cracked that only we understood. There was a sense of belonging going to the fire temple, seeing those other Parsis wearing those little red caps, the small kids wearing their little silver topi. I no longer felt that I had to embrace it all — nor did I feel that I had to run away. I could take the bits and pieces that made sense to me, and incorporate them into the larger patchwork of our lives.
I reached into my pocket for my credit card inside the worn black leather wallet I carried with me sometimes, thinking of some of the passages I had come across that had resonated inside me.
“‘Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of you and, by myself, cannot even imagine how to go about knowing you. If I imagine you, I am mistaken. If I understand you, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain that I know you, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough.’”
Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror — The nightmare of those hanging legs. But here I was. It was two in the morning, and the monsters had crept their way out from under the bed. Every thought led to a thread into the past and the past led to nowhere but despair. Three in the morning. Then four. I tossed and turned. Got out of bed, and went to the kitchen. Drank a glass of ice-cold water right from the tap. Came back to bed. Turned on my phone. Read news headlines, went on Facebook, and scanned through the status updates of perfect strangers. I couldn’t soothe myself. I wanted to be a person who would curl up in an easy chair with a book, or sit and meditate without a thought in my head. Perhaps listen to some instrumental from Ennja. Ride out the storm. But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn’t have been in the state I was in, to begin with.
What had set it off? It was a random Tuesday night — nothing special. Ana had made some good dinner as usual. We’d all tucked in early. A single nightmare from the past and my mind had become a flip book of the most painful, devastating thoughts and images. I never thought about waking Ana. I could hear her light breathing on the other side of the bed. But I didn’t want to ruin her night, or her life. I never wanted to introduce my monsters to her.
I tried to remember the ancient wisdom of Annica: Everything that exists in this world follows an existential law — That of arising and passing away. But the simple truth, which I usually found centering, was slippery. I couldn’t hold on to it. I felt as if I were scrambling up a muddy incline. There was nothing to grasp. Just handfuls of dirt.
How had I gotten here — again? All the meditation, the learning. All the brilliant teachers, the searching, seeking, reading — all the goddamn thinking, and still there was this: the waiting out the night. Face-to-face with my absolute lonesomeness. With the certainty of change. With precisely the suffering of which the Buddha spoke. We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, Heinrich Heine once wrote. That new circumstances, new joys, and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.
In the darkness of my apartment, as my family lay sleeping, all I could feel was the anguish of the unknown. Its uncanny attractions seemed like a mirage that could only be made out in the light of day. Anicca — Everything arising and passing. Arising and passing, I kept repeating until finally the sun began to rise. The lesson of something a Tibetan master had once said while teaching the lessons on impermanence, which had later been repeated to me by one of his students: This too, this too, …
This too will rise.
This too shall pass.
