Chronicles Of The Return

The last few weeks have been tough. I’ve been battling a recurrent infection, one that seems to crop up once a year. It’s pretty dreadful. By the time it is in full swing I am lethargic, full of malaise and generally feeling sorry for myself. I told myself, last time it occurred, that I would go to the doctor immediately once the symptoms appeared. Due to America’s horrible health-care system I had to wait two weeks to see a specialist, which was more than enough time for the symptoms to worsen. I walked into the doctor’s office with a significant gait in my left leg. He looked at me and shook his head. “Why didn’t you come earlier,” he asked.

“Had to wait for approval from my HMO. Took a week. You were booked the next week,” I said.

The doctor looked at me kindly and said, “next time call me and I’ll prescribe you something before you come in, okay?”

He’s certainly one of the best doctors I’ve ever interacted with. He has an exceptional bedside manner, listens to everything I tell him, queries me fully, often time spending upwards of thirty minutes with me. For a doctor that’s priceless.

The prescription is for a heavy anti-biotic. The kind where you spend 10 minutes in the sun and it leaves you feeling like you’ve crossed the Taklamakan without water.

As a side note, I’ve read on several occasions that ‘Taklamakan’ means ‘goes in, doesn’t come out,’ in an ancient Chinese, or possible Tokharian dialect. Having flown over the Taklamakan several times and circumambulated its edges, I have to say that I agree.

One May when my father and I were in Dun Huang, the last great oasis before the Taklamakan, I got to thinking about Xuanzang, a 7th century Buddhist monk who sneaked his way past the T’ang guards at the Jade Gate, into the Taklamakan. He then proceeded to cross it, disproving its meaning as a toponym, but no matter. He then crossed the Tien Shan, chilled at a Buddhist monastery in Samarkand–just a few years before the Arabs irrupted into Central Asia, and then did a backwards dogleg into Afghanistan and India where he spent a decade plus collecting Buddhist manuscripts to take back to China.

Buddhism was not new to China, but it’s safe to say its roots were nothing compared to those which dug deep after Xuanzang’s return to Chang’an, the capital of the T’ang empire. What course might Chinese Buddhism taken were it not for Xuanzang’s efforts at travel, discovery and exploration? And what course might my life have taken had I not been exposed to Chan Buddhism in China in 1999?

This diminutive monk spent his remaining days translating the Buddhist corpus is a spartan monastery cell, eschewing all glory and worldly goods and his good works echo down the centuries to my own time and my own debt of gratitude to him.

Now that’s a character with character. Central Asia is littered with them, from the monstrous Timur–aka Tamerlane, who left a trail of human skulls from Damascus to India–to the poignant Omar Khayyam.

I tend to think about people like Xuanzang and Polo and ibn Battutah when I am feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes it works: I feel better, realizing my pedestrian concerns, minor ailments and the general discontent I feel with my post-modern life do get the better of me.

But sometimes it fails: I want to be Polo, or Rabban Sauma, Wilfred Thesiger, people who lived a full life so far away from home. People who made the world their home, citizens of this great and tragic blue ball spinning off into eternity.

And then I get a text message and the world comes roaring right back at me.

It’s the first weekend I’ve had in about two years. It’s not like the recent past has been one long party, but the days have had a tendency to blend together, Saturday being no different from Tuesday and that sad, depressing feeling on Sunday afternoons is something I’ve forgotten. I suppose tomorrow I’ll be getting in touch with it once again. This morning laying in bed was odd: it was just before seven and the voice of discipline was telling me, “get up you lazy bum, shower, eat and then head to the coffee shop and WRITE!” But then there was another voice that said, “wait, wait, wait, enjoy the morning, take your time, don’t hurry. You worked hard this week.”

Soon both voices collapsed into a cacophony of dialogue and argumentation, most of which was about the show I saw last night.

Darrell Scott played at the Cactus Cafe and it was one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s for several years now. I’m not sure what it is about his music that moves me and touches me so. I grew up decidedly upper middle class: my father is a CPA and my mother was an executive with the State Government. Early in life we lived on a farm, but as my father’s career took off we sold it and moved into the city. Of course, we never really struggled–sure after the divorce things were rough for a couple of years, but we never wanted for much. So, it’s odd that Scott’s songs of working men and women, bruised and scarred lives, filled with doubt, alcohol and disappointment capture my imagination the way they do. (Oh, there are more reasons for this, but reasons I’m not willing to disclose just yet. Disclose is not the best word here: it’s story I’ll tell in due time, just not yet.)

Perhaps it’s kind of like my attachment to Bukowski and his story as well. Singing songs and writing poems about the hard edges of life in modern America. I certainly think a lot of it is due to the fact that while I went to school in Austin as a child, I was bussed over to the East-side schools and I learned early on that I could relate to anyone; anyone’s pain, or joy for that matter. I learned early on in life to value all life as a triumph of experience over hope–that the simple act of enduring for many people is vindication enough, like Faulkner’s ‘puny, inexhaustible voice’ echoing loudly at the ‘last ding-dong of doom . . . still talking.’ And while hope is that most essential of ingredients to life, in my opinion, and I have much–ever the eternal optimist am I!–for many hope is luxury they can ill afford. It’s the divergences that make life so rich, so potent and so full of potential.

But, I digress, back to Darrell Scott.

I smiled most of the show. It was just Darrell and his guitar up on stage telling stories. About half way through the show Scott played my favorite song of his, called “Uncle Lloyd:”

He was not my father’s brother
But he wished that he could be
Told us kids to call him uncle
And we would be his family
He had a wife and kids in Fresno
The youngest one was twenty-four
Dad had brought him into our house
They didn’t want him anymore

He helped us work the family business
Building fences in the sun
Worked just like a man of twenty
‘Til the working day was done
He and Dad would spend their evening
Sitting in lawn chairs in the yard
Where they’d drink a toast to Seagram’s
Seagram’s never went down hard

Won’t you wake up Uncle Lloyd
Got a lot of work today
We’ll get Don to make the coffee
Load that truck and be on your way
Friday night you can drive to Vegas
Maybe this time you will win
Buy a trailer by the river
And you won’t have to work again

He was sleeping in the workroom
With a mattress on the floor
When one night I heard him crying
As I passed outside his door
He cried, “Rita, girl I love you
Rita, Darling please don’t go
I’ve tried hard to make you happy
I’ve done everything I know”

Then I heard the bottle open
The tipping up and putting down
Heard the rustling of the covers
Then he did not make a sound
I thought of thirty years of Rita
Standing sternly by his side
All the years of hanging in there
All the emptiness inside

Then I thought of how their children
Have children of their own
And how a man at fifty-seven
Winds up living so alone

In so few words Scott tells the story about a broken man, who finds solace in his friends and his friend’s family. The most potent single word in the entire song is “want: when they didn’t want him anymore.” It sets up the entire story, the fulcrum the song launches out to us from, for us to earn it, or own it or just drink away our sorrows with. Sometimes people just don’t want us anymore and we become discarded like things. It’s this human land-fill which Scott mines for his best songs.

The whole night was like this: a veritable story-tellers feast. He played his standards, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” and “My Father’s House.” But it was “Banjo Clark” which blew me and the rest of the audience away: it was the consummate skill with which Scott played the guitar, one of the most amazing acoustic guitar solos I’ve ever had the pleasure to listen to. It was rich, not limited to any single genre, a touch of folk here, a pluck or two of jazz, bluegrass spilling off the frets and then the ever present Scott mix of blues and country. There were moments between verses where he just got lost picking away at the guitar, strumming, picking, plucking, hands moving up and down the rosewood-fretboard like a man finding love between the steel frets and the mother of pearl inlay, dare I say he was making love to the guitar. There wasn’t anything self-indulgent about the music, at all: even while he was lost in the music he carried the entire audience right along with him. Seldom do I leave a venue with such a large smile on my face. I felt like I’d been in the hands of a master-story teller, or better yet, a Celtic bard in the Middle Ages.

If you ever get a chance to see Scott do an acoustic set don’t miss it. Trust me on this one.

I know it’s not Tuesday, but I re-read Yeats’ poem again last night, which compelled me to write. But first, Yeats’ poem:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

~William Butler Yeats 1892

Few poems have stayed with me my entire life. Few resonate year after year after year. As a late teenager, early twenty-something it was love poetry, Petrarch and Catullus, unrequited, quite silly and partially mad. I didn’t have the patience yet for the great epics of Dante, Homer and Virgil. In my late twenties I found the aggrieved anger of Bukowski, and while many see him as a misanthrope and misogynist, I’ve always believed he was, at heart, a secret romantic, raw, shredded up and thrown into the dumpster of life, only to emerge from it, pristine, like an American phoenix.

After Bukowski came Rilke and all of his existential angst. I could relate to much of it, his peripatitc wanderings, his loves, his failures as a man, his disciplined lyricism and the visual feast his images conjured.

One year, however, stands out. On the cusp of my thirties I took a trip to Ireland and Northern Wales. I spent a month backpacking in the hills and mountains of northwest Ireland around Donegal and then in Northern Wales, a place that still haunts my dreams. The only reading I took with me was Yeats, determined to decipher the lyrical knot of his poetry. Of course, I’d read Yeats, and the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ many times before. Ed Hirsch had introduced the poem to me while teaching at the University of Houston.

One unseasonably warm summer day, as the car I was in sped north between Donegal Town and Killybegs, I saw the ‘Lake of Innisfree.’ No, it’s not called Innisfree, or maybe it might be. Memory is fickle and the lack of notes in my journal prevent me from recalling.

It was still a time when one could hitchhike across Ireland–before the great real-estate bubble obliterated much of the country with American-like track housing—when a lone Yank wearing a baseball cap, carrying a backpack could catch a ride with a pregnant mother, two howling kids in the back seat. A long time ago, indeed, another Ireland. But, my benefactor that day, a young man from Sligo named Tim Egan on his way to deliver Guinness to Killybegs, noticed a copy of Yeats hanging out of my pack. He pulled over and said, “Aye, you’ll be liking this. They say this is where Yeats wrote some of his finest poetry.”

We looked at the dedicatory plaque, which said Yeats had built a house of sorts here with his bare hands. I smiled, looking about. There were no hives for honeybees, or bean-rows, but the day was bright with the sun and the soft flapping of linnet’s wings. In short, peace did come dropping slow.

Tim whispered the words of the poem. Horripilations rose along the edges of my spine. The words caromed around in my head and settled in my heart and then I forgot it all and the years passed. My tastes in poetry changed once again. Dante called. And so did Homer. Czeslaw Milosz made a guest appearance as well. But Yeats was ever there, lurking, hiding, biding his time. And from time to time I find myself thumbing the well-worn pages of that summer journal, filled as it is with lots of not-so-good writing and equal amounts of even worse poetry. What that journal has in abundance, however, is a voice–for it was that summer that I found my writing voice.

And in that voice I still find ‘nine bean rows’ in the discipline of writing. And I become an engineer of cabins and bee hives with my words, memories and images. I can feel ‘peace come dropping slow’ after a long editing-session, sitting back with a glass of scotch, pride in a job well done.

And best of all, the soft sounds of ‘lake water lapping’ can be found anywhere I choose: watching the silent silhouette of ships skating along the blue waters of the Bosporus, hearing the crush and throng of humanity in all its glorious diversity on an Indian railway station, pacing back and forth along the dilapidated battlements of the Great Wall, but easiest of all when I am sitting on the deck of my favorite Austin coffee house in the cool air of late winter.

I choose, then I remember, and then I smile.

‘”Such a long trip,” he thinks, “and so many places I could have stayed along the way.”‘ Odysseus is clearly a man after my own heart. And in this sterling new retelling of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason, I feel, more than ever that I know Odysseus. He’s new, fresh, post-modern and so very real in all his complications.

The book doesn’t so much as read well, as it breezes by like the images that float in our mind’s-eye when we toss in those fitful moments before sleep overcomes us. The images aren’t logical, but they aren’t yet fantastic, either.

This is also the kind of book that makes me want to write, if I could overcome being green with envy. Sentences like this haunt the pages, jumping out like errant grasshoppers:

“He could be immersed in molten iron and wrought into an ingot to be dropped into the sea, there to spend eternity listing in the deep ocean currents.”

Or this:

“The gloaming had deepened and the orchard shook in a gusting wind that made his footsteps inaudible.”

What writer would not give a small portion of her life to write one sentence so rich and so laden with the power of verbal necromancy?

Mason’s novel is divided into 44 books, or short chapters. (It’s only 230 pages long.) Some are no longer than 600 words, others of several pages. I got the sense at times that Mason was single-handedly trying to conjure up allegory and symbolism as well. But none get bogged down. Effortless artistry carries the tales rushing ahead to their inevitable, crashing conclusion.

Each is a compact of narrative prowess. None uninteresting.

And if the language succeeds, the stories, the plot, the narrative are almost rashomon-esque. None of the stories contradict each other–Mason leaves the contradictions to Odysseus and others in the tale–while Odysseus remains, almost impossibly so, a unified character. It’s life that is contradictory, and in life, other people.

Odysseus always plays his part: but it’s the expansive imaginativeness of Mason’s devious story-telling that one finds laughter, smiles and cringes on several occasions. And perhaps, a few well-timed horripilations: Odysseus the assassin? Achilles the Buddhist? The quiet concatenations of Agamemnon’s heart? Penelope’s elegy?

Mason is all too aware of the post-modern predilection to get lost in the confusing and complicated, to overwhelm the reader with all sorts of nutty plot devices. But Mason’s language and stories are a throwback to a more ancient viewpoint. His book is fruitful with entanglements but never descends to the cheap trick of irony. And, unlike Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, we can all relate to Odysseus’ predicaments; we’re all everymen, without the novel being an esoteric exercise in the mundane.

This book is amazing. I bought the damn thing last night and already read it all. Homer meets Borges, all post-modern, poignant and telling, almost sweet and rueful at the same time and never stuffy. It’s the sum of a thousand tiny complications all rolled into one.

If you have even a passing interest in the ancients, I cannot recommend this book highly enough: a really brilliant retelling of an ancient but timeless tale. And brilliant is a word I seldom, if ever use, in a book review.

Last Friday while sitting at a local coffee shop awaiting a call back from yet another software company here in Austin—I got the job—I saw a young Middle Eastern woman. She had luxuriant raven hair tied in two long braids falling over her shoulders, like that of a school girl’s. She wore a heavy wool sweater and baggy pants that did little to hide her shape. Her kohl-lined eyes and deep brown irises were murderous and magnificent, much as I imagine Circe or the Sirens to have looked. But none of this compared to the sound of her voice.

I wasn’t paying her much attention until she spoke. She was teaching an old roughneck-oilman Turkish. It was that sound—a sound I’d heard a thousand, million times in Istanbul that never failed to bring a smile, and a winsome, poignant agony, a certain lilt to her voice, an inflection beating out the tempo of ages past, empires risen and fallen, wild horsemen on the Parthian Steppe. Born of the Earth and the long passage from the Land Of Darkness somewhere along the Orkhon River an age or two ago. Not nasal, more from the back of her throat, almost like the sound of a surprise or a poetess in rapture and while I listened, a thousand keening images from the city on the Straits rose before me, of kahvalti and chai, raki and an uskumru sandwich along the Eminonu docks; of crowds milling in and out of the great bazaar; the horn of the night’s last ferry crossing over to Uskudar; radical students playing the guitar and singing huzun songs along Istiklal Caddesi; of the green glass skyscrapers of Levent, the red-tiled roofs of my home district, Elmadag and the mirror-blue waters skipping across the Marble Sea.

The river flows and takes me away and as each cold day passes here in Austin I lament more and more for my city, the city and the simple sonorous carols of Turkish.

Thus my imprecation to the universe: I’m rotting here.

Call me a huge fan of new words and especially the internet’s ability to spread such words far and wide. I’m rather neologistic these days.

As you all know, I’m an avid reader of the Urban Dictionary. But there are several other daily stops in my search for the right word:

World Wide Words: International English from an British Viewpoint

A Daily Portmanteau

WordSpy

Schott’s Vocab

And finally, on Twitter, comes Mr. Dictionary!

And what are your’s, if any?

In late 2003 when I returned from my journey across the Silk Road, I made my first attempt to write a book. It was ultimately unsuccessful, for a number of reasons. First, I had no confidence in my writing skills. Second, my writing left a lot to be desired. Sure, sometime between 1995 and 2001 I found my voice, so to speak, but it hadn’t matured. I hadn’t grown into my own skin as a writer. To this day I still wrestle with what to reveal versus what not to. But the most difficult task was organization. I had no idea where to start. The longest attempt at writing was a 30 page grad-school paper on contemporary Russian foreign policy. Writing Russian foreign policy doesn’t lend itself to novelistic pacing, and autobiographical revelations, plus throw in historical oddities and my love of architecture? Putting something together with a hoped for 200 plus pages? Or around 75,000 words? Wow, I was intimidated.

After several fits and starts (I did manage to write a pretty good chapter on my time in Georgia and I put together a decent chapter on classical China and a fun ride over the Tien Shan in Kyrgyzstan but that’s as far as I ever got) I decided that to write about the Silk Road properly was going to require another trip and a whole lot of notes. It might even require two volumes. So I shelved the project. I will pick it up at some point in the near future—it is a project that is a labor of love and enduring fascination on my part. But that was then.

Today I’m officially three fourths complete on book attempt number two. I’ve covered most of what I hoped to in South East Asia. I gutted much of the story of my conversion to Buddhism as too self-indulgent, but surprisingly added parts of my divorce that seemed to gel with the narrative–of course this may change when the first draft is complete and an editor has her way with it. Some of the history is is really interesting, even to me still–and I wrote it. The India chapter is complete. That was a revelation. It’s equal parts autobiography and romp through the architectural traditions of the sub-Continent and the story of spices in India–mostly Kerala. And my amazing adventure in Turkey is pretty much done. No spoilers there. It’s too much fun to contemplate. The Turkey section of the book was the easiest to write for one reason: by the time I arrived in Turkey I had gotten very, very good at keeping copious notes and was journaling at least 750 words a day. Throw in several dozen long emails to friends and the source material almost got overwhelming at one point. I had to make some serious executive decisions on just what I wanted to include in the manuscript, as opposed to struggling every day with adding stuff to it, as I did with the Singapore and Malaysia portions.

When it comes to travel writing I think one key—probably the major key—is keeping copious notes and keeping them up to date. Jotting down observations is good–it’s also a potent way of creating vivid and living metaphors. Some of my best lines came from esoteric and barely legible scribbles, often times meandering across the whole page, lines written while on a bus, a camel or a train, the rocking back and forth evident in the ferocity of punctuation. But ending the day by writing up my perceptions and observations, which is something I was doing religiously by the time I arrived in Istanbul—but failed to to after I arrived in Denmark—was critical. The travel narrative, after the autobiography, is the most self centered of all writing forms. And when I lacked proper notes, the narrative suffered.

The last quarter of the book is going to be a tough task. First because I’m rejoining corporate America next week (for a short time only). And because my notes from Budapest to Amsterdam are sketchy, to say the least, the narrative has to be reconstructed via memory, which is a frail and often complicated thing. And considering the debauchery of Amsterdam? Ha! Anyway, the last quarter of the book is more about ‘the return’ than it is about travel; it’s the most ruminative and reflective portion of the book. It’s hard to maintain narrative pacing while ruminating all the time.

I may scratch it, in the end. But I’m loath to do so. As my friend Lex says, “the hardest part, after all, is the return.” He’s correct, which is why I think I can get it right. I’m confident that a chapter or two on ‘the return’ will help put all the changes that I underwent on the journey into their proper perspective. But more importantly, I think writing about ‘the return’ is critical for another reason: it answers, to a great degree why I travel.

To not include it might be like telling a story without the climax. That’s no fun. Then again, in real life, there often is no climax. Just a random series of ever befuddling events.

Such is the ennui of modernity, is it not?

It was a gorgeous day today. After three days of drizzle and heavy rain and 35* cold the morning dawned with promise. The clouds were thin and wispy, scuttling across the sky. Just beginning to break up with hints of blue here and there, with enough silver and gray in the clouds to remind one that it was still winter. But by noon all had dissipated. Nothing but blue skies and sunshine.

I’m sipping a warm, smokey scotch, re-working portions of the manuscript tonight, trying feverishly to complete the India portion before I head back to cubicle-land Tuesday.

Last night I had a long conversation with a writer friend about India and it helped put into perspective much of what transpired there. I’ve certainly been hard on India in many of my latest posts. But I think it’s important to note that I’m not so much hard on India as trying to correct the huge mis-perception corporate and political folks in America have about the place. A few days ago I alluded to some of the good things that happened to me in India and felt like sharing.

There is no place on the planet where culture is so raw, in your face and real. India, if it is anything at all, is its culture. And that’s what makes the place so rich in paradox and so attractive. I did, after all, visit the place three times. And after writing fifty pages on the country I have a strange desire to return–but only to Kerala. If I never see the Gangetic Plain ever again, I am okay with that. And yet . . .

There is an unspeakable attraction to India. No where in the world are the colors as vibrant, the fruits and vegetables as colorful (and poisonous), and the characters as diverse as they are in India. India, in many ways, encompasses the world. The Chinese have often spoken of their country as the Middle Kingdom, with the implication that all that is the world is in China. But that’s not the case. There is a lot of diversity in China, but not like there is in India. The last forty years of economic growth in China have homogenized vast swathes of the country. China isn’t as diverse today as it was the first time I visited in 1995. White tile and blue glass windowed high rises litter the country. A certain uniformity is a work. But not in India.

In India anything goes. In the West, (and in the Far East) we tend to hide, lock up or punish societal deviancy. And I use a small ‘d’ here. I am not talking about sexual deviancy, although that is a part of it. I’m talking about non-conforming deviancy; people who deviate from the societal norm.

For example: cross-dressers in India have a cultural role to play. They show up at weddings and children’s birthdays as entertainment. They are paid–more like bribed to leave. And yet, I talked with several Indians who said, “it’s horrible luck if they don’t show up.” But here’s the thing: once you are a cross dresser, once that choice is made, you can never go back to any other kind of life. India institutionalizes its deviancy. It doesn’t physically lock its deviants away, but it does lock them into a societal role, where they have a larger purpose in the chaos that is daily life in India. They are accepted. And tolerated. (Of course there are always exceptions.)

Another example is potheads. Marijuana and hash are illegal in India. Unless you buy it from a government sponsored shop. For foreigners its okay. And the only Indian allowed to purchase it legally are the multiplicity of sadhus wandering around the country. Again, for everyday Indians: no go. But if you are a Holy Man? It’s understood. So, if you are a pothead, in essence, you are a holy man. And your deviance from the norm of society is institutionalized. Order is restored.

These are but two small examples of the larger cultural and societal role of the caste system. There are serious problems with the caste system. Is India addressing it? Yes. But India is probably the most cultural static place on the planet. Culture changes very, very slowly in India. There is no judgement in this. It is what it is. It’s also what makes India an amazing and infuriating place. The modern world is colliding with India and the Indians are just as bewildered as the foreigners are who visit there.

Of course, I didn’t go to India for spiritourism. I discussed this with a friend a while back. I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop a few weeks ago when Reyes showed up.

“Whatcha writing, white-boy?” Reyes asks me.

“I’m writing a story about how filthy and poor India is and why you don’t want to visit,” I said.

“You are always complaining about India. Didn’t you derive at least some spiritual benefit from the place? I mean, you’re Buddhist, right?” he said, wiggling his pug nose in disgust. His brown eyes were bloodshot after a long night of tequila, Tecate and football.

“Indians are Hindhu, you ugly Mexican. And No,” I said. “I didn’t go to India to find myself spiritually or to hang out in an ashram or learn the meaning of life or any of that nonsense.”

“Why did you go, then?” He asked.

“Cuz it was there.”

And that is why I went. It was on the way. It was either cross the Bay of Bengal on the Tiger Breeze and up through Central Asia, or go through China and Russia. Of course it worked out differently, but I did go to India because it was on the way.

But, something strange, even kind of spiritual happened to me while I was there. It was a subtle development, if anything can be subtle in India. I learned new things about myself.

As I said to my friend last night when asked, “what did you take away from India?”

“I learned that I have a deep, deep, deep well of patience. I have more patience than I ever thought I had. All kinds of craziness can be going on around me, all kinds of annoyances, all kinds of expectations can be dashed, and at least 95% of the time I was completely calm,” I said.

“Oh, listen, I am not mother Theresa, nor do I have the patience of a Buddha, okay? I did have a few India moments. That happens to everyone. But I learned very quickly that there was nothing I could do to change any of what was happening. No matter how much I pouted, moaned, yelled, snapped at people, nothing changed. I had to accept life for what it was. For that very moment.”

I smiled. Took another sip of my drink, and continued, “And there was another gift: I gave up on the world. I came to the conclusion that the fabric of the cosmos was going to be just fine without me. Without my worries, without my complaints. No matter what I thought, the world would continue to spin on its axis, the sun would rise and the moon would set. The waves would crash and the birds would chirp. The monkeys would howl and jabber all night. Dogs would bark. Drivers would pull in front of me. Politicians would lie. Life would go on. My job in life now was simply to observe.”

To observe. Or, as my Zen master would say, “Attention!”

The music is fading and it’s growing late. The melted ice spoils the taste of good scotch. The ashtray overflows.

But good things happened to me in India. And for that, I am grateful.

This search came up today: “Sean Paul, human.”

Yes, I am. Thank you for noticing.

Yesterday some readers asked, “why not talk about compassion more?”

It’s a good question. In light of its being asked, I’d like to add my two cents worth.

Compassion? What is compassion? Is compassion forgiveness? Is it charity? Is it tolerance? Is it kindness? Is it simplicity of living in the face of overwhelming complexity? Clarity of thought? Altruism? Piety? Right-action? Justice?

In a sense it is all these things bundled into a selfless act. But one thing that compassion is not: it’s not easy. Not remotely.

Take modern America for example. Many people confuse charity with compassion. Of course, there is an element of compassion in charity. But all too often, charity—at least in its American check writing to charities form—seems to be an easy way out of actually showing compassion for others. It’s not just in the giving, nor is it in the intent to do something nice for others. There is much more to it than that.

“Compassion,” my Zen master says, “is multifaceted gem, shining in many directions at once, so long as the heart of the vessel it is viewed through is bright. Is your heart bright?”

Putting aside the mixed metaphor, there is a great deal of truth in Master Ma’s statement. And for me, the easiest way to show compassion is simple: showing an interest in another human being. I found, or relearned, during my trip from Singapore to Denmark last summer, that the easiest way to show compassion was to smile and ask questions. People, as we all know, love to talk about themselves. The simple act of acknowledging another human being is the essence of compassion. And taking an interest in their daily life, their trials and tribulations, brought more rewards to me than I ever anticipated. Valuing and validating their opinions, even if they are not my own takes compassion, in my opinion, to another level. That is why I always made it a point to smile and to ask as many questions of people as possible. To be open to the moment, but act within it to make a better world.

There are other forms of compassion, of course. End of life, or hospice care, is probably the most difficult but quite possibly the most rewarding. It’s something I have never done, but something I have and continue to ponder doing. Will I? I don’t know. While I was on my journey I acted with compassion many, many times. India seems to have brought out the most compassion in me, which came as a surprise. India was a rewarding and life enriching experience, even though I don’t often talk about that side of it. I’m reluctant to do so, perhaps it’s humility, or faux humility. I don’t know.

But my reluctance underlies a problem with compassion—well, not a problem with compassion itself, just a problem with discussing it. Sometimes I find it simply better to not talk about it.

Why, you might ask?

Often times when I hear people talking about all the wonderful things they have done for others—in the name of compassion, or charity, or whatever—it feels like they are bragging, as if they are asking for some kind of cosmic credit. I believe in karma, to a degree, but I prefer serendipity. I also believe, as a Buddhist, that it is both right and good to strive for merit. I’ve done things in my life that I take pride in, acts of kindness that were not asked for, and actions for which I want no credit. It was simply in the doing. I don’t like to talk about them because I did them for my own sanity, my own soul. Not for the consumption of others.

Ultimately, any act of kindness has this paradox embedded in it.