Breath Versus Sound
My friend Janice and I sit on gray cushions in a stuffy, old house that smells of cedar and patchouli, and we wait for instructions. This meditation group is Janice’s idea. She’s giving up caring about what other people think of her. She invited me because I’m giving up indecision. Meditation will help us by creating “new neural pathways” — a phrase that makes me think of the parallel lines etched in a circuit board. I took apart a calculator once to photograph its insides. I work for a textbook company. My job is to create the graphics. Sometimes that means photographs. Sometimes that means computer graphics. I thought at the time, and many times since, I should do that with my kid someday. I should pry open the shell of one of his many calculators — he has at least half a dozen, I swear, because that kid has serious hoarder tendencies — and show him the guts, show him how the thing works. I don’t want him to be one of those people who shrug off technology and anything else they don’t intuitively understand as being beyond their comprehension. I imagine he’ll worry that by opening his calculator, I’ll break it. But once he sees the way the buttons contact the circuit board—that beautiful circuit board that looks like a maze, a crop circle, an alien civilization — his eyes will light up.
Janice whispers, “When you think about it, we’re giving up the same thing, more or less. I’m glad we’re doing this together.” Beads of sweat trickle down past the fanned corner of Janice’s eyes, and I think of the sloshing-bucket eyes of a cow.
Janice is an idiot sometimes. I want to set her straight that my indecision has nothing to do with caring about what others think of me, but I don’t want to have that conversation in this quiet roomful of strangers, not even in whispers.
Nevertheless, I whisper, “Gaining, not giving up. Remember: positive language.”
Janice whispers, “We’re both gaining contentment.”
I don’t believe for a second that Janice is going to succeed in her endeavor, and I feel a little bad about this, as though my not believing is a puff of air that could topple her house of cards. Also, though, I suspect Janice doesn’t believe I’ll succeed, either, so I feel justified in lacking faith in her. She deserves my doubt.
An elderly woman dressed all in white takes the seat at the front of the room and tells us to get comfortable and close our eyes. She says to gently rest our focus on either our breath or the sound in the room, but choose one and stick with it.
Psychologists say that the more choices we have, the more we agonize over a decision, but that despite experiencing this difficulty again and again, people still idiotically believe it’s better to have more choices. Not me, I know better. I’m not saying I don’t have my own idiotic tendencies, but in this one arena at least, I am not an idiot. I fully accept that my health and satisfaction improve upon having fewer choices. The problem is the world offers too many damn choices. The problem is that even two choices is often too many. I could easily make myself sick weighing the relative merits of breath and sound.
I decide not to weigh merits. I decide to choose sound. And for a while, I feel good about my choice. There’s something soothing about listening to the ceiling fan’s rattle and other people’s fidgeting.
But after a while, a thought intrudes: my breath, on the other hand, is of my body. I carry it with me wherever I go. Isn’t breath a better choice?
I choose breath. I choose sound. I choose breath. I choose sound. Someone coughs, and whatever this is, it shatters.
After we open our eyes, a guy raises his hand timidly and asks if when the instructor said we should stick with our choice, did she mean we should stick with it just for this one session or every time we meditate?
The woman laughs. “You mean do you have to commit for life?”
The rest of us laugh, too.
Then the woman says, “Actually, that is a good idea.”
I realize my leg is shaking, so I stare at my leg. My kid will dig his nails into his arms when he can’t decide — between burgers or pizza, between Avengers: The Age of Ultron or The Black Panther. Of all the things he inherited from me, indecision is the trait I most regret.
After a few more questions — Should you focus on a particular sound in the room or all the sounds? What if you have tinnitus? — the woman says we’re going to talk about why we’re here.
Janice turns to me and smiles. She can’t wait to raise her hand and spill herself onto these strangers, and this makes me want to kick her. Caring about what other people think isn’t my problem, but it isn’t Janice’s problem, either. Her problem is she’s afraid to change. Take her marriage to that dickwad husband of hers, Lawrence. Every four months or so, Janice talks about how maybe she should divorce him. I listen, I sympathize, I tell her I have her back. A few days later she’s all, oh, things are much better now. She says it was just perimenopause. That’s another idiotic thing about Janice. Perimenopause is her explanation for everything. If a meteor were to burn her house to the ground, she’d explain it off as a symptom of perimenopause.
The woman at the front of the room doesn’t ask us why we’re here; she tells us why we’re here. She talks about all the tragedy in the news every week. She talks about the stresses of modern life, of climate change, of being human. She talks about the pursuits of happiness, of perfection.
Janice nods her head to everything.
I’m thinking about how hungry I am, how I need to use the bathroom. I’m thinking this thing is about to wrap up any second now, but then the woman in white hands a stack of papers to a guy in the front row and instructs him to take one and pass the rest down. The paper contains a recitation, she says, and we’re going to say it together. She says there’s magnificent power in our collective voices.
Recitation is not a word I’m familiar with. Recite, I know, as in to recite a poem by memory, like how years ago I had to recite the opening to The Canterbury Tales for English class, in Middle English no less. Then there are my kid’s piano recitals, which, I suppose, are also acts of memory, of repetition.
When I receive my copy, I see that the sheet contains two lists. The first is a list of subjects: I, you, all humankind, all beings, all children, all parents, all those Awakened, all those not yet Awakened, etc. The second is a list of wishes for these groups: that they know kindness, that they know peace, etc. We are to wish every group every one of these things, the instructor says. Then, after we’ve exhausted the already repetitive list of groups, she will call on us to add any additional groups we feel may have been missed. The repetition is intentional, the repetition is a precaution, she says, because it’s better to repeat than to risk leaving anyone out.
I eye Janice, looking for acknowledgement that this is whacked. The flyer had read simply, “meditation group.” There’d been nothing about chanting, nothing advertising that this might be a cult. Janice doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are on the woman in white. She stares hypnotically at that woman as if she’s staring into a flame.
The whole thing takes about ten minutes, during which I’m awkwardly aware of my own voice — trying to speak neither too softly nor too loudly, trying to keep up with the tempo of the other voices, trying not to sound cynical or bored.
I’m thinking there’s no way anyone is not already covered by this list, there’s no way anyone in this room is going to come up with any group to add, but it turns out I’m very, very wrong. At the end of the recitation, one woman tags on people who are lonely, and we must repeat all the wishes for that group. Another tags on people who feel unloved. Then comes Earth itself. Then comes those who have passed from Earth. Then comes fucking marine mammals. Then plants. Then creatures not yet discovered by scientists. Then Janice raises her freckled hand.
When the woman nods at her, Janice says, “And people who want desperately to change but who don’t know how.” Her bangs are slick against her forehead. Her hands fist the edges of her skirt like wads of tissue.
Just as with everyone else’s add-ons, the woman at the front of the room doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t smirk. She opens her mouth and she leads us through the recitation all over again. This time it’s not my own voice I focus on; it’s Janice’s. I breathe her quivery voice into my lungs. I think that maybe breath versus sound is an illusion of a choice. I wonder what other choices aren’t really choices.