Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn’t the act of writing itself; it’s the part where you can sit down to write. The also applies to exercise, finding a job, joining a class, meditation, and prayer. The sitting down, the making time. The actual act of doing. It sounds so uncomplicated and straightforward, doesn’t it? Make a call. Set up an interview. Unroll the mat. Sit cross-legged on the floor. Just do it. Close your eyes and watch your mind as a thought floats by, or have a moment of gratitude. What’s so hard about that? Except — it is much more than hard. The usual distractions — the things to do among the piles of life — are suddenly, unusually enticing. The worst of it, I’ve come to realize, is that the thing that stops me — the shadow that casts a cold darkness across the best of my intentions — isn’t the to-do lists, the e-mail, the phone, the school homework, the things to clean, the to-do lists. It’s me that stops myself. Things get stuck, the osteopath once said with a shrug. He gestured to the area where the neck meets the head. The place where the body ends and the mind begins. Things get stuck. It sounded so simple when he said it. It’s me, and the things that are stuck. Standing in my own little way.
To overcome that I decided that I had to do something. If I get a meditative cushion or a small Buddha statue then maybe I would be inspired enough to work through my procrastinating spirit and so I did. I took my tiny little Buddha statue and placed on my bedroom cabinet right across from where I slept. I moved a small lamp holder from the living room, where it had been a decorative touch, into the bedroom too. I placed it hanging above the cabinet and it looked very fancy. I bought a simple scented candle at a dollar store on an impulse. A book of matches was laid out and ready. The evening came and went. Then another. And another. The candle remained unlit. CFA exams got in the way. We had a dinner to go to The India trip came and went. Netflix came up with a new season of Love is Blind. Each week, in the battle between things and time, things kept winning.
Becky ran ahead of us toward the wooded banks of the Piscataqua River, holding a hunk of pori (sweet bread) in her small hands. The air was soft, the sunshine was weak. It was a cold New England spring afternoon in the middle of April.. The river seemed more like a tamed beast, the water trickling slowly around dark gray rocks glittering in the brightness.
There were the four of us— our heels crunching the black snow and twigs as we made our way to the water’s edge. In this Portsmouth downtown park where boat trailers lined the water, where the cultural concert folks were setting up their instruments for the evening show, we must have been an odd sight: an assortment of adults and children, dressed more or less adequately for winter than a walk in the park would seem to call for, carrying bits of bread.
It was the Ava month in the Persian calendar — The month of water, and many years had passed since I had last visited the water on the day , as that tradition demanded, much less participated in this ritual of dropping the sweet bread in the water. I dragged myself to the Piscataqua River, fighting my own resistance every step of the way. I had better things to do. Virtually anything seemed like a better thing to do. I could have stayed home and organized my desktop folder as the last thing to do. But no — I was here. And not only had I come, but I had somehow managed — some might call it a miracle — to drag my family with me.
The tradition demanded that we toss small pieces of sweetened bread into the water — A mark of appreciation to the goddess of water who sustained us all year. I pictured small, sodden, morsels floating downstream, one by one disintegrating in the depths of the river. I looked around: a local woman was pensively watching the water had moved off to the side and was standing very still, her lips moving. My elder daughter Jenny stared intently at the trickling water, then hurled a piece of bread as far as she could.
I joined Becky at the riverbank, and stood next to her in silence. My own piece of bread was warm and moist in my palm. In the car, on the way here, I had tried to explain to her what we were doing; why she wasn’t at home doing homework, and instead was wearing an uncomfortable blazer and long pants on this cold April day. But I hadn’t done a very good job of it.
“Does throwing Pori in water cleanse our sins?” Becky now asked.
It was one of those Dad-needs-to-get-it-right questions. There had been so many of them, lately; so many questions that felt like tests of my own mettle. Where is God? Does he exist? How come I can’t see him? Can he see me?
“I was told so by my parents. Even the water goddess likes sweet things Becky”, I said.
But just as the words came out of my mouth, they felt inadequate. I was a phony. Play-acting the part of a spiritually inclined, or at least Persian inclined, husband and father who had cajoled his family into their winter clothes so that we could enact a ritual so distant from our daily American lives that we might as well have been kneeling at a Buddhist temple, or Catholic church, or wherever people kneel the world over.
I fought the urge to flee — an urge that was often with me, these days. Instead, I closed my eyes and breathed in the lingering winter cold, the sharp scent of the river.
Please.
With a single word, I felt memories from the past flooding backing up. I was instantly lost in the place I always found myself during the rare times I summoned up the nerve to reach back and grasp for a bit of the tradition I grew up with. Numb ,deeply alive, fighting it, fighting myself and the long line of ancestors waiting their turn, there to tell me that no matter how I’d like to think otherwise, this spring day at the river was important. I could practically see them: old men with skullcaps and beards. Unsmiling women with huge bosoms , white scarves wrapped around their dark, tightly pulled-back hair.
I tossed a few crumbs in. I wanted to make it last.
Please. Help me to understand.
It would have been so much easier not to come. If we hadn’t come here today, Becky would have been at home watching Dora the Explorer, I would have been at my office working , or maybe at the gym. Ana would have been in the kitchen or watching a Hindi soap on TV. A normal day. A normal assimilated day in our normal assimilated lives — lives that had nothing to do with ancient texts and metaphors as dusty and old-fashioned as the photographs of those very same solemn ancestors.
I want to do better.
The words were coming to me unforced, unbidden. Do better. The list of things I wanted to do better at was as long as this river itself. I wanted be a better parent, spouse, person. I definitely wanted to meditate. Oh, and have more patience, listen more and speak less. I wanted to be someone who wished to do good, to help someone, anyone, but actually make a difference in someone’s lives. There was no end to my desire for self-aggrandizement. But what was the end goal?
I glanced over at Ana, who was standing on a large rock jutting out over the river, and was surprised to see that my wife was holding a piece of bread and appeared to be — — involved in what was going on. She didn’t have that going-through-the-motions look on her face that I knew so well in other circumstances, and would have expected to see in these. She was focused, thoughtful.
“Do we have to take the kids out? It’s kinda windy” she had asked me earlier that morning, sounding a bit like she must have when she was fourteen.
Becky squeezed her eyes shut and tossed the first bit of bread into the water. Things you want to let go of. A school of silvery minnows darted around the bread as it floated downstream.
“Can I tell you what I wished for, Daddy?”
“Oh, kiddo, it’s not supposed to be a — ”
But then I stopped. What was the difference, really? What was the desire to let something go, if not a wish?
“I wished for that pink bike from Walmart,” Becky said. “The one we saw the other day.”
I looked at my little girl in her red jacket and green pants. She looked more like an elf than a kid . She was a thoroughly modern child. An American kid who barely knew she was Persian, who believed in Santa, who didn’t remember when it was Persian New Year. A kid who was now being raised in bucolic New England, in the land of white churches and liberal dreams.
Please. The word came to me once more. It seemed to emerge from some deep and hollow cavern. I threw my last morsel of bread away, then turned from the river.
That night, I suddenly woke up with a question boiling inside me. What do I seek? What is it that I am looking for? It wasn’t money, although lord knows I needed more of it. It definitely wasn’t climbing up the professional ladder — I abhorred it. What was I seeking?
Does a seeker ever stop seeking? Or is the very definition of a seeker one who keeps searching, driven by an insatiable hunger for knowledge, awareness, wisdom, peace? The very idea of craving peace struck me as a vague oxymoron. Craving, after all, was the antithesis of all things peaceful. It meant living with a constant itch. A dissatisfaction with what is. But could there be such a thing as spiritual satisfaction? Moving through procrastination and fear is its own leap of faith.
And so, at 2.30 AM, I finally pulled out my meditation cushion, dusted it off and sat down for the first time.
In the darkness of that night, I closed my eyes and leapt.
