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In any case, I have long held that books, like people, come into our lives when we need them, and that was certainly the case with Alan Watts. By the time Nao Kao suggested I read the works of the sage philosopher, we in America, in most of the world outside the tightly controlled countries of mainland Southeast Asia, had lived through months of pandemic and could only guess whether the light at the end of the tunnel heralded sunshine or an oncoming train.
Nao Kao resisted recommending anything at first, telling me that if I read books because he suggested them, I would be influenced simply by knowing he had liked the book. Nonsense, I argued, and either he got tired of the argument or decided to put his hypothesis to the test, because I woke up one morning to a list of titles he thought I might enjoy. Watts dominated, and spoke to me in ways that would prove to be a mid-pandemic balm.
As I read, I was shocked by Watts’s foresight – the fact of him writing in 1951, that the emerging technologies simply enabled one to pursue the future ever faster, while the planets, he remarked, were still circling the sun, and whether they got anywhere in the process or traveled faster in order to arrive yielded the same answer as it had decades before.
Like Jerry Maguire and Dorothy, Watts had me from his own hello: our lives are naught but a mere spark of life sandwiched between the darkness of eternities that come before and after we draw precious breath. Echoes of that favorite line of mine fromCutting for Stone, that we arrive in this life unbidden, ricocheted through my synapses.
It was in response to Watts’s musings that I shared with Nao Kao my own life’s philosophy, lifted so heavily from thatChicago Tribunecolumn-cum-graduation anthem: one could worry, if so inclined, but the act of worrying had the same effect on future events as trying to solve a math problem by chewing gum. The things we really needed to worry about were not the things that were likely to cross our minds, worried or otherwise.
“I think global pandemic qualifies for most of us,” I wrote to Nao Kao when I sent him a lengthy treatise on my thoughts.
“I like what you wrote about this book better than the book itself,” he replied. “If you read the others, you should send your thoughts on those, too.”
His own thoughts he kept to himself.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
My pandemic cleaningbinges had not merely unearthed old textbooks and term papers. The motherlode was the box of old journals. When I came to the little bound book whose dates should have covered the most consequential events of my lifetime, what I found instead was a binding shorn of its pages. From Labor Day until Thanksgiving 2001, only a few jagged scraps remained; I could not even determine how many pages had been so viciously torn from their home.
Perplexingly, I had left one final entry intact, hastily jotted, if the penmanship was any indication, on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
I must learn not to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. I must teach myself not only to forgive, but to forget.
When I shared those two dozen words with her, Stacy was elated. This was the answer to the nagging question of the blank spaces in my memories of Nao Kao, of that she had no doubt.
“One of the things I admire about you is that you take what you want. You set your mind to something and you do it, no matter the consequence. When you set a goal, no matter how improbable, you achieve it,” my therapist told me.
“I am not sure I follow what this has to do with why I can’t remember anything.”
“Liss, do you ever stop to listen to what you are saying? You set your mind to forgetting. You wrote it down. You left those words, that instruction to yourself, when you left nothing else.”
“But that’s part of the problem. I can’t remember why I didn’t leave anything else. Is it because I wanted to forget? Or is it because I may as well have slapped a sticker on the front that said, ‘Hester Prynne was here’ if I’d left it and anyone found it?”
She laughed. Even when my sentiments were serious, my delivery got her.
“It doesn’t matter. The point is that you set your mind to forgetting. Maybe if you wrote that you wanted to forget for twenty years and then remember, you would have done that. But you didn’t. And you have forgotten so thoroughly that we are having this obtuse conversation about the mechanism for forgetting rather than why it was so important to do so in the first place.”
Why it was so important to do so…
“Yes…I do always believe ‘mind over matter.’ And that when your back is to the wall, it’s always better to go out swinging than looking –”
“And if you are going to swing, it better be for the fences,” she finished for me. “For what it’s worth, in all the years I have been a therapist, I have never encountered a mind like yours, a mind so thoroughly capable of shutting the fire doors, slamming them! – and locking behind them anything you set your mind to – it certainly seems in this instance you’ve cleared the fences.”
“And just think – I don’t even like baseball.”
“But you do like him.”
I sat silently for a moment, contemplating the way she could do this to me. I hated the way she could make me squirm.
“And I’m going to venture that he likes you.”
I waited.
“Don’t scowl at me, Liss. You pay me good money to hear what I think.”
I laughed.
“Have you ever served jury duty, Liss?”
