Brother B., who directs Campus Ministry at the Franciscan college where I teach, asked me if I would write and record myself reading a short mindfulness message as part of an ongoing interfaith dialogue initiative.
“Sure,” I said, without fully considering, I see now, the conflict between the focused awareness inherent in mindfulness and my peripatetic, provisional self.
The friar rejected my submission with praise-forward censure: “Beautifully honest and making a great point about mindfulness being messy and imperfect,” he wrote, “but I think we want to keep things simple and direct.” He asked if I would be willing to try again with, “an eye towards emphasizing the positive?” I agreed, but then changed my mind. It’s not that I’m giving up the mindfulness ghost, but all future efforts to fathom its depths and intricacies will be, until future notice, on my own terms and to be shared with Brother B. on a purely need-to-know basis.
I do not seek the approval of Brother B., or anybody else, but I also don’t want to be misconstrued or misunderstood. I am not incapable of recognizing and embracing simplicity, directness, and positivity, nor am I resistant to their charms. I accept them when appropriate, but I am wary of prescription, ecclesiastical or otherwise: virtues, when mandated, lack integrity.
I stopped by the school chapel and offered a mea culpa, of sorts, not uncontrite, to the ever beaming and berobed Brother B., who, hands together as if in prayer (or perhaps actually so), bowed in my direction and said, “Wonderful!”
Take 1(Rejected)
When I tell my wife what I am up to and explain why I can’t join her for a walk in the park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, she says, “What do you know about mindfulness?” She’s right: not much. I am, no doubt, closer to nirvana than my friend who considers mindfulness “an essential tool in the managerial toolbox,” but I don’t meditate, have not read deeply on the topic, and am dubious about the Dharma talks she listens to while navigating traffic on the BQE or wide awake at three in the morning. “Fine,” I say. “You tell me.”
“Being aware of the moment and knowing that your reality is being viewed through your own lens,” she answers.
I nod. “What about judgment? Should I say something about judgment?”
“Yes,” she says. “That too: judge not. And don’t forget to talk about noticing.”
My wife’s understanding is a good place to start, but for me mindfulness remains vague and aspirational, a moving target.
And maybe that’s a problem. Is vague a feature or a bug? Can aspiration and mindfulness even coexist? My yoga teacher says, “Try and don’t try.” I get it and I don’t.
I do have my moments. When I hike—or cook or drive a long distance, in the shower or a dark movie theater—I can lose myself, for the most part, to and in the experience, all noticing, no judgment, but then my mind wanders. How much longer until we reach the summit? Are we lost? Did we forget the trail mix in the trunk of the car? Should I stop and pee? What do I have to do tomorrow?
Mindful? Mindful-ish? Half-assed variation on a theme? An entirely unrelated state of being? Am I going about this all wrong? I don’t know.
Take 2
Try, try again.
Early last December, in front of Hungry Ghost Coffee, as the first snow of the year began to fall, I bumped into Doc, the spiritual healer who lives, intermittently, in my wife’s sister’s basement. He was wearing a red beanie and a Peruvian sweater, brown and rust with rows of zigzag diamonds. He looked to the sky and said, “What a beautiful surprise!” He looked down at my boots, then noted my gloves and hat. He rubbed his hands together and smiled. “You knew about this?”
I nodded and shrugged. “It was supposed to snow,” I said.
This encounter, parable or paradox, or both, has been a niggle in my brain, and I can’t stop recounting it.
I tell Lovely, of course, who says, “Weird.”
My sister-in-law says, “Doc is amazing! I love Doc.”
At my regular Old Jews Diner Lunch, responses run the gamut: oddly beautiful, sort of scary, he must have been pulling your leg, whatever floats your boat. I say, “I bet there’s a Yiddish word for such cluelessness, or naivete, or whatever it is,” to which the other three respond in unison, “Or German!” And then, a burst of possibilities: schneblind, farwundert, kopferloren, vettershlock, himmelblöd. I’m the youngster at the table, my Yiddish, not to mention my German, is merely atmospheric, residue of long-ago holiday meals and Holocaust films. I can’t tell if these are actual words, but they might as well be.
My students give me blank stares. My father says, “I missed something.” My mother says, “It snowed here too.” My Bukharan barber—Jewish, Orthodox, fatalistic—says, “People are crazy.”
My older son laughs and says, “Hysterical.” The younger wants to know, “What does a spiritual healer do?” My friend down the street says, “Aren’t we all just seeking the experience of the numinous?” My philosopher colleague quotes Hegel: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”
Before we hug and go our separate ways, Doc says, “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy, but still the same amount of snow.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, wanting to explain, wanting not to be misunderstood. “I love snow.”
On the one hand, I’m jealous: who doesn’t love a joyful surprise, albeit one that comes with cold and wet feet. On the other hand, maybe oblivion is bliss. And on another other hand, dude, what the actual fuck?
Take 3
Memento mori: remember we must die.
It doesn’t matter if you are young and healthy, ideating immortality or thanatophobic, busy-busy-busy, or on the road to Damascus: all is vanity, think only on death. Even if I wasn’t so inclined, the High Holidays provide annual reminder. Brisket, matzo ball soup, apples and honey, herring and kugel to break the fast, penance and atonement and (it can’t hurt to ask) forgiveness. And what even is forgiveness, what does it entail, what does it actually do?
We read the foreboding yet oddly comforting Unetaneh Tokef, a prayer describing the awe of the Day of Judgment with exacting specificity. Who shall perish by water and who by fire / Who by sword and who by wild beast / Who by famine and who by thirst. And so on, accordingly, on the page and in my imagination. As Leonard Cohen sings it, the ultimate question: “Who shall I say is calling?”
Addled from hunger and caffeine deprivation, I listen to a young rabbi chant in Hebrew. I do not understand any of the words, but I get the gist. I look around the sanctuary at the oldest members of the congregation. Where will I be next year, the year after, in year x, y, or God willing z? What will I look like? I make plans to grow old—mechanisms are in place aimed at maintaining mind and body, finances and relationships—and I relish having not died young, while considering, it’s all a jumble, that I may die tomorrow. Reality is reality, and, for what it’s worth, quantifiable: ten percent of people born in 1967, as I was, are dead, and I have a one percent chance of dying in the year ahead.
There are many things, on any given day, that might put me in mind of death: frost, the smell of overripe fruit, Lovely’s grandmother’s fine China gathering dust in the basement, bar and bat mitzvah parties, my father, my children, playing basketball, snoring, a melting glob of ice cream on the sidewalk, my face in the mirror. My cohort of hoopsters includes several doctors, and I always feel better when at least one of them shows up for our weekly, coed, socialist game, not just hooping but on call for any related exigencies. My birthday is on Halloween—yes, Scorpio, you may have guessed that—and so, or just incidentally, I have always found a certain poignancy in pumpkins.
According to experts, these are the things to say before you die: thank you, I love you, forgive me, I forgive you. Of course, there’s no time like the present, no need to wait to say what needs to be said, though that, like so many important things, is easier said than done.
My roommate one summer in a crappy apartment in Sunderland, Massachusetts, sang “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” for hours on end. He accused me of stealing his mail, his girlfriend, and, most oddly, a watermelon. I did none of these things. He threatened to hang my cat, but I did not have a cat. A few days after I moved out, he hung himself. Maybe it was my presence, his only audience, that had kept him going. He had a beautiful voice—melodious, plaintive, pleading—a beauty I did not fully appreciate at the time. I can’t remember his name or what he (or his girlfriend, if there even was one, for that matter) looked like, just his voice, still in my head, still singing.
Take 4
I wake to either a cat’s head or her ass in my face. I can’t tell which at first, but as my senses rouse, I realize that it’s the latter. The current paroxysms have got me down. Whirl is king, as my poet friend says. Demeaning words and phrases permeate the air. I am overwhelmed by categorical imperatives and unappealing gestures, affronted on all sides. It’s hotter than it should be.
I surf the net. Sports news, election news, war news: winners, losers, truth, untruth, salvation, catastrophe. Everything in the eye of the beholder, but I struggle to behold anything. Pile drivers pound incessantly, digging down to build up, thuds and echoing thuds, a cacophony of imagined futures. I stomp on a lantern fly, but I can’t kill them all.
A man in his 20s, wearing flip flops, shorts, a dress shirt, and a tie, paces back and forth on the sidewalk in front of our house, screaming into his phone: “I want an apology. You owe me a fucking apology. I deserve an apology.”
A mother kneels in front of her toddler in the park and barks like a dog. A friend has terminal cancer. My favorite pizza restaurant is going out of business. My wife accuses me of killing her petunias. The zipper on my jeans won’t say up, the milk is curdled, I cut myself shaving, and, how could it be otherwise, the dog has diarrhea.
None of the usual remedies work to bring me out of my funk: nap, walk, food, self-love (as Coach Z. called it back in sixth grade Health and Hygiene), watching on YouTube as a “Puffer Fish Constructs a Masterpiece of Love,” blasting Tom Petty. I try everything I know to try.
“How was your day?” Lovely asks.
“Not good” I say.
“Why?” she asks.
“No why. Just here,” John Cage said.
“Just was,” I say. I do not burden her with particulars. I don’t use words like bereft or terrified or discombobulated, as if withholding the extent of my emotional state can save me—or her, or any of us—from the end of the world as we know it. Full disclosure doesn’t feel like a viable option.
I make BLTs for dinner, as promised and planned. I bought the tomatoes a few days ahead, of course, and now they are perfectly ripe. I marinate them briefly in salt, a pinch of sugar, and a squirt of lemon. I lay a bed of crisp lettuce on a piece of white toast slathered in Hellman’s mayo, nothing fancy, then the tomatoes, as many slices as possible without compromising the sandwich’s structural integrity. Warm bacon, cooked through but not crumbly, then another piece of generously dressed toast. I make three sandwiches. I will be happy if Lovely doesn’t want her fair share, and happy in a different way, if she does. I cut the sandwiches in triangles, which we both agree makes for a more balanced and appealing eating experience.
We listen to the Red Sox-Yankees game in the backyard while we eat. The game ends when, with the tying and winning runs on base, a Yankee batter hits an “at ’em ball”—a sharp line drive directly at a fielder—according to metrics, it should be a game-winning knock for the Yanks, but tonight it’s the last out of a winning Red Sox effort. Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good.
Lovely shares a variation on a recurring dream in which she is trying to get to Tokyo, but never gets there. There’s a dog involved this time, a new development. It’s either chasing her or she’s chasing it. I’m only half listening. “The dog is an interesting addition,” I say.
“I thought so, too,” she says, “but it’s funny that you didn’t ask what kind of dog it was.” She’s smiling, but there’s at least a hint of annoyance lurking. I ask, and she tells me: a German shepherd, like the one her father had when she was a kid, his first move after calling from God knows where to announce that he wasn’t ever coming home. As the story goes, her mother wasn’t a dog person, among a myriad of incompatibilities. Lovely always resented her father but remembers the dog fondly.
“Adds a twist,” I say.
An unsatisfying day seems to be coming to a satisfying enough end, but then something changes, tensions rise, not clear how or why. Cleaning up, we squabble. Maybe it’s something I said or did, or something I didn’t say or do. Maybe it’s nothing. But nothing is never nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing can be everything. All that nothing has something to do with the Law of Causation, if memory serves, or maybe it’s another law I’m thinking of: Unintended Consequences? Diminishing Returns? Thermodynamics? Not sure whether I once knew and have forgotten or never knew at all.
“You never say, ‘I love you,” Lovely says. “You never tell me I’m pretty.” It’s as if these words have floated out of the ether.
“I love you,” I say. “And not just because you’re pretty.”
“Fuck you,” she says. I am on the verge of asking whether she has yet thrown out the leftover curry that I made a week ago, but I think better of it. I’m learning, if slowly: not every grievance needs to be aired. Instead, I call for the dog: “Anybody want to go out?”
The dog shits, solid and steaming, her stomach issues now, thankfully, a thing of the past. As I am appreciating this development, I discover that the poop-bag pouch is empty. I am trying to decide, or remember, whether I am responsible or Lovely is to blame and, either way, what to do about it. Should I go home for a replacement roll or just leave it? I become aware of sounds: a buzz, a rustle, a voice, silence. I look up at the brightly lit buildings, newly constructed and not yet inhabited, rising above the Gowanus Canal, dwarfing the sliver moon. I look down and notice a plastic bag at my feet. How could I have missed it? Has it been there the whole time, or, in my moment of need, did the universe provide?
I reach down, scoop my pup’s excrement, and laugh, not my usual restrained chuckle, but a full-on guffaw. I text Lovely a Basho poem, one of my favorites: “The moon / unlike anything / they compare it to.” She hearts my text, which I take to be a good sign.
Take 5
Memento vivere: remember you must live.
A video of a woman I knew briefly a long time ago pops up on Facebook. I had a formidable crush on her the summer we both worked at The Bite, a fried fish joint on Martha’s Vineyard. She was out of my league, at least that’s what I thought. I’m pretty sure there was consensus on that point. She sent me what I considered a flirty, even provocative letter at college, but that’s as far as things went. She did not respond to my initial epistolary response, nor my others, and I soon got word that she was dating a Beastie Boy.
Now, middle-aged, she is standing on a beach, ocean and clouds and sun behind her. I can barely make out her face in the glare. She looks good, as far as I can tell. She crouches, then leaps, forward and up, dancing. “I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive!” She twirls, her head dipping this way and that, arms waving, reaching toward the sky. Her mantra continues: “Alive, alive, alive!”
I can’t stop watching. Her Facebook bio reads: Full of wonder. Lit from within. Truest self.
I don’t know if she’s in recovery from cancer, manifesting an epiphany, or just wackadoodle. The intensity of her effusiveness makes me anxious and irritated, but I am drawn to it: jealous and confused. I feel like I dodged a bullet. As much as I wasn’t the one for her then, she wouldn’t be the one for me now. Though who knows: if I’d been a more confident and less awkward seventeen-year-old, things might have gone differently. Impossible to know who she would have become, who I might be.
She prances this way and that. The gaps between the words of her exclamation increase: “I,” pause, “am,” pause, “alive.” And then, without warning, she switches up her affirmations, a fresh shibboleth and no more pregnant pauses. “I am beautiful!” she proclaims. “I am powerful! I am divine!” She stops moving, her arms drop to her sides. She squats and looks directly at the camera. “You are beautiful,” she says. “You are powerful. You are divine. You are alive.” Who is she talking to? Is she talking to me? A ghost? A higher power? Acolytes? Herself? A flock of hungry, honking seagulls?
Take 6
On my last birthday, my younger son, D., Sweetie, gave me two books: The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. It’s reassuring, I guess, to know that my 20-something son thinks I have potential. I haven’t read either one yet, want to, mean to. Every few weeks I note their presence on my shelf: beckoning, threatening, reproachful.
The other day he and I were playing tennis at Leif Ericson Park, that neither here nor there spot where the neighborhoods and cultures of Sunset Park, Dyker Heights, Bay Ridge, and Borough Park converge and collide. I was on a bit of a roll, hitting freer and easier than usual, keeping things simple: see the ball, hit the ball, reminding myself to move my feet and stay loose without admonishing myself for previous failures to do so. I was in the zone, winning my fair share of games, an ace, a good get, a well-placed volley. Between serves I began to think about dinner. I’d planned on grilling a steak and vegetables, but now I found myself in the mood for spaghetti puttanesca. We almost always have capers and anchovies on hand, pasta and canned tomatoes, but I would have to get some oil-cured olives. Was it possible Caputo’s was closed for vacation? Where would I find the proper olives? There was basil growing in the backyard, but maybe parsley would be better, and I wasn’t sure if we had any. Should I save the steak for another day? Cook the peppers, eggplant, and zucchini in the oven, or make a simple salad instead?
And then I hit a ball wide. There was no need to go for the line, but I did. My son aced me on a second serve, nothing to do with velocity or placement, but because my mind was elsewhere. The pock-pock sound coming from the pickleball courts, which I hadn’t noticed before, begins to annoy me. A man playing on the adjoining court doesn’t see, or ignores, a ball of ours that had rolled his way. “It’s the pink one!” I yell, pointing as he—asshole, fuckface, shit for brains—either doesn’t see our ball, or feigns incomprehension. Self-absorption is magical thinking.
I’d been up 4-1 in our first set, but ended up losing 4-6, and by the time we got to the second set not only did my focus continue to waver, but my legs were gone too: 1-6, Sweetie in a romp.
In the end, I grilled the steak, with hardly a second thought. It was delicious.
Take 7
Everything is in flux. Everything is personal. Everything is shit. Everything is always becoming otherwise. I can’t keep things straight. What’s familiar feels unfamiliar and what unfamiliar feels familiar.
I often don’t know what’s okay and what’s not. Is it okay to hate everybody who votes for Trump? Can I cancel a dinner plan because at the last minute I realize that I’d rather stay home in my sweatpants, order in sushi, and stream Curb Your Enthusiasm? Is it reasonable to think that if I’m on my phone, nothing else matters?
My therapist has been trying for years to get me to focus on the intersection of “things that matter” and “things I control.” In theory, I’m on board with his Boolean logic, but in practice not so much. I’m at my wit’s end and so is he. Exasperated—I can have that effect on people—he suggested that I try a more “fuck it” approach to life. He quoted Kierkegaard: “Do it or don’t. You will regret both.” The point is, don’t sweat it: tomorrow is another day.
What magnifies my spirit? What will I praise today? What can I do to make the world a better place? What the hell is water? My mind is blank. I am mute, paralyzed, agnosic. I see myself dying alone, choking on an undercooked piece of broccoli, toppling over, writhing on the kitchen floor, blue in the face.
Haven’t we all in a moment of pique taken a dump on a frenemies lawn or soaked the interior of an ex-lover’s car with milk on a hot summer day? Or, at least, considered it? Wanted to? Who hasn’t wondered, as Clarice Lispector did in her novel The Hour of the Star, “Am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
I want to have sex with the Amazon delivery woman, the one my wife calls, “cute but not that cute.” Maybe I’ll buy her a falafel instead.
Don’t ruffle me. I choose not to be wistful. I’ll hold my tongue, if that’s what it takes. I can be penitent. How about I don’t acknowledge your anger, and then you won’t have to acknowledge mine? Not everything has to make sense.
I can’t escape myself. I am ineluctable.
You are not as smart as you think you are. What’s going on with your teeth? Actually, I don’t have a second. Please don’t call your moment of privilege a moment of Zen. That thing you do—in class, when you hand me my change, when we pass on the street, when it rains, when we have sex—it doesn’t serve you well. Stop, please, I’m begging you.
George Carlin said, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster is a maniac?” Yep.
Are you afraid of the future? Don’t be. I am.
I am afraid that nothing is ever going to get better. I am afraid that nothing will ever be the same.
Some days—I don’t know, one out of five?—I hate the world and everybody in it.
I pretend to care. I pretend to understand. I pretend nothing’s wrong.
Accept that the past is irrelevant, pain is self-inflicted, time is finite. Where did this come from? Who said it? Was it me?
Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. Our roofer, four stories up, says, “I love clouds.” One morning we discover a possum in our garden. Lovely, a landscaper painter says, “The sky begins at the earth.” All sunsets are kitsch, but not this one.
What would Brother B. think about all this? I just, I really don’t care.
I have a terrible sense of direction. I am often confused by a “You Are Here” icon, turning this way and that, taking a step forward or backwards, in an effort to orient myself. Lost but making good time. Lost, but then I turn a corner and am reassured by things that look and feel familiar, until I realize that they look and feel familiar from a previous time when I was lost.
A friend, apropos of nothing, or perhaps everything, texts, “Time’s getting away from us faster than the wind from a duck’s ass.” I text back, “Meant for me?” And he replies, “Yes.”
I am beginning to think that perhaps the failure to find meaning is the meaning. In which case, eureka.
As Donald Barthelme said, “Fragments are the only form I trust.”
Thank you. I love you. Forgive me. I forgive you.
Brooklyn, fifty-something, writer, professor, husband, father of two adult sons, oldest of seven siblings—Jason Dubow is a confused Jew, tangled mind, unfinished stories, questions abound. At work on Egress, a hybrid “novel.” He writes at The Jason Dubow Project on Substack.
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Heavy Feather Review 