The Way Back Home is a Circle

My friend is trying to control his mind.

He tells me on a weeknight, in the sideways way men tell each other the true things. The words arrive almost by accident, folded into talk about something else. Something is wrong at home; he doesn't say exactly what, and I don't push. He has started taking something for the anxiety, the doctor's small mercy, the pill that takes the edge off the days. And then he asks me the question he has clearly been carrying for weeks, the one he trusts me with because he thinks I know about these things.

How do I control my mind?

I want to give him something good. He is in pain, and he trusts me, and the wanting-to-help is the most natural wanting there is.

So watch where my mind goes. It goes up. Straight up — past him, past the table, all the way to a battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna asks Krishna the same thing, and Krishna answers that the mind is restless and turbulent and strong, harder to control than the wind.

I almost reach for it. It is a beautiful answer, and there is a clue buried inside it I have always loved: the wind is the breath. To still the wind is to still the breath, and the old yogis knew a still breath stills the mind beneath it. Breathlessness is deathlessness, they said: men who could slow the heart to almost nothing, sit at the edge of their own death, and walk back from it at will. Saint Paul knew the door too, in his own vocabulary: I die daily.

All of it true. All of it ancient. And all of it, I realize, about to float clean over the head of a man who just wants to get through Tuesday.

But my friend isn't asking how to die daily. He's asking how to get a grip.

Here is what I didn't say, because I only understood it later, standing at the sink after he'd gone.

The grip is the problem.

Control is a dam. And a dam is a strange thing to build across a life, because the nature of water is to flow. That is the only thing water has ever wanted to do. The river does not need to be managed. It needs to be let. But somewhere we get the idea that a feeling is a thing to be handled, that an unwelcome state is an emergency, that the move when the heart floods is to throw up a wall and hold the water back by force. So we do. We build the wall. We hold.

Have you ever felt the exhaustion of a calm you were maintaining? That is the dam. The water is still rising behind it; you are spending everything you have to keep it from showing on your face.

Michael Singer has an image I keep returning to. The heart, he says, is like a younger sibling, and the mind is the older one who cannot bear to see her cry. The instant the heart is troubled, the mind rushes in — who did this to you, what do we do, how do we fix it — and goes to work building the case, running the scenarios, drafting the speech you will never give. It is trying to help. It loves her. But it has mistaken her weather for an emergency, and in rushing to dam the feeling it turns a passing rain into a permanent construction project.

This is what anxiety is, underneath: not too much feeling, but the refusal to let a feeling pass through and be gone. An experience arrives — it was only ever meant to move through — and instead of letting it pass we catch some of it and keep it. And the next one. And the next. Until the holding becomes a structure, and the structure becomes a weight, and one ordinary morning, with no particular trigger, we overflow and we blow up. Then we call the flood depression, and reach for a stronger wall.

My friend asked me how to build a better dam. Almost everything I believe says the dam is the thing drowning him.

But it is too easy to lay this at his feet, as though the dam were a personal failing he could simply choose to stop building. He did not invent the wall. He was handed the blueprint by a world that does almost nothing else.

Consider the ground he is standing on.

In Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen takes Alice by the hand and they run and run and go nowhere, because the ground is moving under them as fast as they can move on it. It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. That was a child's nonsense in 1871. It is now a fair description of a Tuesday.

The ground beneath us — the tools, the feeds, the expectations, the speed at which a skill goes obsolete — moves faster every year, and lately, with the machines learning to do in seconds what used to take us years, it has begun to move faster than a person can run. So we run harder. Not to arrive anywhere. Just to keep our place. And we wonder why we are tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch.

This engine does not run on nothing. It runs on us.

Somewhere in Harari I came across the observation that a company, past a certain size, stops being a tool and becomes a creature, an organism with one law written through every cell: grow, or die. Cut off its head and it grows another. And the imperative it lives by — grow at all costs, take and take, return only what keeps the taking going — is the exact behavioral signature we would flag, in any other organism, as a cancer, or a virus. We have built our civilization in the shape of the one thing in nature that does not know how to stop.

And it needs us not to stop either. A body has few needs: warmth, food, rest, touch, something to give itself to. Few needs, but limitless wants, and the whole apparatus we live inside is engineered to keep us confusing the second for the first, to keep the wanting topped up so the running never ends.

We buy things to quiet the wanting, and the things begin to own us back. An old line from Fight Club slides from joke to diagnosis somewhere in your thirties: the things you own end up owning you; you buy things you don't need to impress people you don't even like.

And underneath the whole accelerating machine is the cost nobody puts on the invoice.

We stop being astonished.

The mathematician John von Neumann is supposed to have told a struggling student that in mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them. He meant it as comfort. I find it quietly terrifying, because it is true of almost everything.

We do not understand the apple falling; we have simply gotten used to it. Most of us could not explain how a toaster turns a wire and some electricity into bread, down to the metal and the atom. We have gotten used to toast. We have gotten used to the arm that lifts when we decide to lift it, that small impossible relay where a thought becomes a motion, which ought to stop us cold in the street every single time and never once does.

Put a grain of sand under a microscope and it turns out to be a jewel: fractured, shining, a small architecture no one built for us to see. We walk on billions of them and call it the beach. The speed builds the familiarity, the familiarity is the anesthetic, and a mind with nothing left to be astonished by has nothing to do but run its own loops, faster and faster, on the moving ground.

I know those loops from the inside. I have written elsewhere about my own descent — the voice that rode in the passenger seat, the year the machinery stopped, the mornings I could not lift myself toward the gym I used to live in. I won't tell it all again here. What matters for my friend is the shape of how it ended, and the shape is not flattering to anything I would want to sell him.

It did not end because I climbed out. It ended because something reached down and carried me.

The medicine that lifted the dark cloud was not a discipline I had mastered; it was a plant in the Amazon, found at three in the morning through a search bar, and it did in one night what years of effort had not. I have come to think of it as a helicopter. It cannot teach you to climb, but it can lift you off the canyon floor when you have no climbing left in you. That is its mercy and its danger both.

But the flight is not what I want to give my friend. It's what I found at the top of it.

The morning after the first ceremony, I could not form a sentence. Someone asked me a simple question and I opened my mouth and what came out was not language. The machinery that turns a self into a paragraph had been switched off, and I sat there in the wreckage of my own grammar, sentence does not compute, and I was not afraid. I was the opposite of afraid.

I lay in a hammock outside the lodge and a bug came walking up my shin. The man I had been all my life would have flicked it off without a thought. I just watched it. Let it. My leg is just a thing for it to climb. There was no border between the bug and me, between me and the morning, between the morning and whatever the morning was happening inside of. I had been emptied so completely that there was no one left to defend. Into that emptiness walked a guest I had not seen in twenty years.

The child. The actual felt fact of being a child.

It was the whole shape of a day of childhood: out the door in the morning into a neighborhood that was an entire continent, no plan, no clock, the day assembled hour by hour out of pure invention — a stick becomes a sword, a fence becomes a frontier, you are a pirate, you are an explorer, you are nobody's idea of anything yet. You spend the whole bright store of your energy on it.

And then the light goes long and gold and you turn for home, and home is there, and there is a grandmother and there is a meal she has been making the whole time you were gone, and you come in from the adventure into the warmth of it and the day closes over you like a hand. A whole completion of the day. You went out, and you came home. That is the entire feeling, and it had been gone so long I had forgotten it was a thing a body could feel.

I saw it again recently, from the outside, in a friend's younger boy. He has a habit his parents find baffling and I find holy: he moves things. He fills a bucket with sand and dumps it out and fills it again. In the garage he found a second bucket and moved shoes from one into the other, one shoe at a time, until the first was empty and the second was full, and then moved them back.

No goal. No product. No one he was performing for. Just the pure, serious, unselfconscious work of a creature who has not yet been told that an action has to get you somewhere to be worth doing. A grown man doing it is someone we worry about. A child doing it is the most natural thing in the world, because the child has no dam yet, no ledger, no preconception, no future to fund and no past to defend. He fills the bucket and he empties it. He lets the sand flow. He is the un-dammed mind, playing.

And here is what the child knows that the accelerating world has forgotten, the secret folded inside that completed day:

You go out, and you come home.

The treadmill never comes home. That is its whole nature: to depart and depart and depart, to grow at all costs, to run to keep its place, and never once arrive at the warm table and sit down. The Red Queen has no grandmother's meal. The company that cannot stop growing has no evening. But the child arrives every single night. He still has the rhythm the machine erased: the going-out and the coming-back, the adventure and the hearth, the spending and the rest. He completes the day. And a completed day, strung after a completed day, is the only thing I have ever seen that adds up to a life instead of a race.

So is that the answer? Be like the child. Go home.

If it were that simple I could have told my friend across the table and we could have gone back to our drinks. It is not that simple.

You cannot decide to be a child again. The door back to that garden is not one you can walk through by wanting to. The child's wonder was innocence: the gift of having nothing yet to defend, no conditioning, no history. The moment the world starts teaching you the past and the future, the moment the dam begins going up, the innocence is spent, and it does not return by nostalgia or by force. The man who tries to will himself back into the child's mind only builds a newer, subtler dam: a forced and brittle innocence, the spiritual version of the magic pill. You can take that pill forever and never once come home.

There is an old distinction I have come to believe is the whole map: the fool and the sage look the same from the outside; the inner is completely different. Both are simple. Both unguarded. Both, in their way, astonished. But the fool is simple because he has not yet been anywhere, and the sage is simple because he has been everywhere and come back. Between them lies the entire road: the conditioning, the dam, the running, the descent, the long fooled middle of a life. The sage is not a man who refused the road. He is a child who walked all the way around it.

This is why the grandmother and the grandchild recognize each other across the length of a family — why the very old and the very young are so easy in each other's company, while the parents run the dam-years in between. They are standing at the two ends of a circle that has quietly closed. Eliot saw it:

Know it for the first time. Not return to it. That would only be the fool again. Arrive at the beginning having become someone who can finally see it. Lao Tzu kept pointing back at the newborn, at the uncarved block, at the soft thing that outlasts the hard, and he was not telling grown men to be infants. He was describing the far rim of the circle: the simplicity you reach by going through complexity and out the other side. We leave the child to become fools. The whole long seeking is the road home to the child. And if we walk all of it, we arrive at the end as sages: the child's wonder in the eyes, and a lifetime in the hands.

Which leaves the hardest question, the one my friend's face was really asking under the words, the one I still don't have a clean answer to: if the road is the only way home, and no one can skip it, what do I do, right now, at the bottom?

Here I have to tell him the two things I most wish weren't true.

The first: I cannot give him the helicopter. The lift that saved me cannot be handed from my life into his. Grace is not a gift one person passes to another; it is weather. It arrives or it doesn't, and the most a friend can do is fail to be the reason it stays away. His pill, my plant: the same machine, the same mercy, and still I cannot dose it into him. We're all walking our own unique path, many paths, one journey. I can walk beside him. I cannot walk for him.

The second is harder, and I am a little ashamed of how long it stopped me: do I even have the right to take his suffering away? Because I have come to believe, against everything in me that wants to fix the people I love, that the suffering is not the enemy. It is the material.

Thich Nhat Hanh said it in the language of a gardener. No mud, no lotus. The flower does not grow in spite of the muck; it grows out of it, and has no other soil. The skilled farmer, he said, does not curse his rubbish and haul it off to the edge of the property. He composts it. He turns the rotting, stinking, unwanted refuse of the season over and over with his hands until it becomes the black earth the next crop feeds on. The unskilled farmer can't stand the smell of his own waste, so he carts it away and buys clean compost from someone else. And his crops never taste of his own land.

See what that does to everything I said about the dam. The accumulation was never the sin, and the holding-on was never, by itself, the failure. What failed us was letting what we held go to rot: sitting on a life's worth of unfaced experience until it soured into the flood. But the same material, turned and broken down by attention and time, becomes the only soil you have. The dark cloud I came back from is the richest ground in me now. The descent was the compost.

And my friend's anxiety — the thing he came to me wanting gone — is his mud. It is the exact, particular muck his particular lotus is going to need, and it is his to turn, with his own hands, and no one else's.

So what do I do at the rim of his canyon, loving him, unable to fly down?

I hold a frequency. We're all tuning forks, and the truest thing I have ever learned about helping another person is that you help them least with your words and most with your state. Strike a tuning fork, set a silent one beside it, and the silent one begins, on its own, to sound the same note. Sit with someone in genuine calm — not advice, not the cathedral of theory I build to avoid my own feelings, just an unforced steadiness in the next chair — and something in them starts to tune toward it. I cannot fix him. I cannot fly him out. I cannot compost his mud for him. I can sit close enough, and still enough, that his own note has something to find its way back to.

My friend texted a few days later. Still anxious. The pill is helping a little; home is still home. He didn't ask me anything this time, which I have decided to take as its own small grace — the question had loosened its grip enough that he could just tell me how he was.

I never did give him the good answer. There wasn't one. The mind is harder to control than the wind, and the cure for the wind was never a stronger hand. It was the long way around: out through the conditioning and the dam and the running and the dark, and back, if you keep walking, to the small astonishing fact of a grain of sand, a lifted arm, a meal someone made while you were gone.

The way home is a circle. It is longer than anyone tells you. There is no helicopter that closes it. And it runs straight through the mud.

I think he's on it. I think we all are. I only wanted him to know the road comes back.

From the Road

This began as a conversation with a friend I love and could not fix, which is, it turns out, most of the conversations worth having. I wrote it to understand why I felt so helpless offering him such beautiful, useless answers, and what I found was that the helplessness was the point: the most you can do for someone in the mud is stand near them and compost your own. If you are the friend at the table, or the one holding the frequency at the rim, this was written for you. Send it to the person whose mud you would sit beside.

— The Pilgrim Age