Hiatus

I will not be posting between now and Monday. I leave this morning for a weekend in the mountains and will not be taking my laptop. It would be too much of a distraction at a time when I need to be fully present for the task at hand, serving on staff at a training weekend offered by the Los Angeles Community of The ManKind Project. If you're interested in reading more, here's a piece I wrote after the last time I served on staff. It's good work. There are many men out there in the world who could benefit from the two things we offer with oft-proven success: healing, and a sense of powerful, purposeful intention in their lives.

800 Years Old

It's not often you get invited to an 800th birthday party, so Ellie and I were keen to accept the one we received a while ago, and have been eagerly anticipating the occasion. Last night we dressed up in "business attire"--Ellie looking her usual brilliantly put-together self and myself in a jacket, button-up shirt and tie for the first time in as long as I can remember--and showed up for the event at the stately residence of the British Consul General, Dame Barbara Hay. The honoree? My alma mater, the University of Cambridge.

It was a gala evening--minus, thankfully, the long speeches. Dame Barbara took the microphone very briefly to welcome us, graciously, and to introduce a representative from the Cambridge in America organization, who made the obligatory pitch for funds. A current billion-pound (sterling!) effort has apparently already reached 800 million--an impressive achievement. And Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame and a Cambridge alumnus, gave us all a couple of hearty British laughs. It was a good idea, then, to hand the microphone to representatives of individual colleges to bring together their members from among the substantial crowd. I made an appeal for alumni from my own college, Gonville & Caius, to check in with me but alas, with no result.

(For those unfamiliar with Cambridge, the university is a loose assemblage of a good number of colleges, each with their own campus and facilities. Students are members of one college or another for living, dining, and other collegiate activities, but the instruction and course work is offered by the university at large. As a member of Caius, I lived in college for one of my three years--the full length of study for a Cambridge degree, as opposed to the usual four years over here--and most of my friends and associates were fellow Caius men. Yes, in those days, men. Today Caius, like most of the colleges, also welcomes women. The professor who directed my studies over the years was also a Caius don, but several of my other tutors, with specialties in their fields, were affiliated with other colleges; and the lectures were offered by the university in university facilities. I was shocked to discover that there are now new colleges I had never even heard of!)

My appeal from the podium produced no results, as I say. Ellie said it was barely audible above the din of socializing voices as the drinks and canapes were passed around. But I did run into a couple of Caius men, one of whom I already knew from the party Ellie and I gave for my fellow alumni a couple of years ago; he teaches yoga in a variety of venues. The other was a man I had not met before, who lives up north but owns a communications business down here in Los Angeles, located close to us in the Silver Lake area, so I do hope to get together with him on one of his frequent visits south.

I am particularly sensitive, these days, to the privilege we Cambridge graduates enjoyed--and indeed, continue to enjoy to this day. Deserved or not, my Cambridge degree has served as an impressive calling card for me, both personally and professionally, throughout my life. I felt that privilege keenly last night, in the company of so many abundantly gifted people, men and women, gathered on the lawn at the British Consul's residence. I was impressed by the quality of everyone I spoke to, young and old--by the intelligence, the wit, and the social poise of these people who had shared with me the good fortune to be one of the privileged few.

I doubt, these days, that I'd even qualify. The competition for places at the great universities, Cambridge included, is intense. I'm not that smart. But it does feel good to have spent three years of my life at an institution that has been a major force in the academic world for the past 800 years, and I am profoundly grateful to have been granted that opportunity.

So Happy Birthday, Cambridge! I wish you many more--and that billion-pound sterling shot in the arm should give you something to be working on.

Co-ed

Yesterday evening I showed up at the meeting of the group of men with whom I sit down twice a month for an opportunity to take a look at what is happening in our lives. We have found a new location, in a space that is used primarily as a yoga studio, and a part of the deal--aside from contributing a fee for our use of the space--is to put our collective knowledge and expertise at the service of the women who organize and teach in this still fledgling operation.

Our meeting last night provided us with the first opportunity to sit down with our gracious hosts, and it proved a wonderful occasion. The women were sitting in a circle, engaged in a business meeting when we arrived, and I sat and watched the arousal of my familiar irritation and impatience as we were kept waiting on the sidelines while their meeting spilled over, past the time we had arranged to meet with them. My stuff, as they say. I have this obsession with time, a pattern that has repeated itself innumerable times over the years: I can't bear to be late for anything, and I very easily get pissed off when others are late for me or keep me waiting. It feels like a personal insult to my tender ego. I like to start on time, every time, no exceptions.

All of which was good, since it put me on edge and made me particularly aware of what was going on inside. Still waiting for their meeting to end, we men stepped briefly outside to do our customary check-in with each other, and I was happy to have a moment to take a look at how that old pattern had been triggered again. The result was that when we did join the circle of women on the floor of the yoga studio, I'd got past my petty irritation and was able to be completely present for the occasion.

And as things turned out, it was a terrific meeting. We were the smaller group--only four of our number made it for the evening, joining ten women in their circle. I think all of us were tuned in to this great blend of conscious masculine and conscious feminine energy. We spent some time telling them about our organization and our activities, and suggesting ways in which we might be able to offer them support in the work they do. Their response was gratifying. It's not vain bragging, I believe, to say that our training and the intensity of our group meetings keeps us in touch with an inner strength and sense of mission which shows up in the way we choose to live our lives. Not to sound too pompous, I hope, we demand integrity of ourselves, and of other men in our circle, and hold each other accountable for our actions in the world. We many not always succeed, but we do make the effort and we make it in full consciousness of our failings as well as our success.

We clearly managed to convey something of this spirit in our shared circle last night. It simply felt like we were all in the same space, on the same wavelength, in an immediate and pleasing common bond. A rare and delightful sense of mutual acknowledgement between men and women, on terms of comfortable and unquestioned equality. We look forward to more.

This coming weekend, I'll be heading up into the mountains to serve as a staff member on our next training. It's my hope and belief that we'll enable another small group of men to come down from the mountain more fully in touch with themselves, each other, and with those they love. It's our immodest intention to change the world, "one man at a time."

The Novice: A Book Review

The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit, & What I Learned, by Stephen Schettini, Greenleaf Book Group Press

I wrote about this publication last week, if you remember, before even reading it, simply to praise it as a beautifully-made book. I promised to write more about it after actually reading it.

If “The Novice” were fiction, it would be called a Bildungsroman—a novel of education. It’s not fiction. It’s the personal story of a young man who was brought up in Gloucester, England, where he felt himself a bit of an oddball with his Italian surname and an immigrant father who operated a fancy restaurant—exotic for its location, surely, on the main street of an English county town. In compensation, he chose to rebel—against his parents and their Catholic faith, against his school, against the rules, values and conventions of his middle-class social environment. The book is the long story of his battle with the rebel within, and of his coming to terms with himself as a finally liberated man.

His path is not a comfortable one, nor does Schettini attempt to make it so as he recounts it. We follow him from his early, angry years as a child and his defiant, shop-lifting youth to a disillusioned and disenchanted young manhood. At loose ends and casting about for some kind of meaning to his life, he breaks away from family and home, and takes us along on his cross-continental hitchhiking journey to India. Once there, he describes his discovery and embrace of Buddhism; he introduces us to his teachers and his fellow students at a Swiss Tibetan center where he goes to study, and to the often conflicted path toward his initiation as a monk.

We accompany him, back in India, to the Tibetan Sera Monastic University, and watch him grow disillusioned once again by discrepancies he perceives between the ideals of the orthodox Buddhist teachings and the devastating reality of a quasi-medieval environment rampant with hunger, disease, ignorance, and ubiquitous filth. We return with him to Europe and observe his downward spiral as he persists in obstinately questioning the certitudes in which his teachers would seem to have him believe—along with the upward spiral that brings him to a mature, less dependent sense of self and a release, not only from his monastic vows, but from the intellectual torment of doubt. He finds, finally, his heart, and the balance between heart, mind and spirit that can lead to the kind of inner peace for which he has been searching.

It’s a lively read. Schettini excels at evoking the particularity of environment, whether natural landscape or bustling city. Here he is, describing his arrival at the foot of the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas (since that time, of course, barbarously destroyed by the Taliban):

Beyond the open space an enormous shadow dominated a sheer rock face at the western end. It was surrounded by several hundred smaller shadows—caves, most of them impossibly high. The lorry brought us into a direct line of sight, and the large shadow resolved itself into a niche in the vertical cliff. It contained something of immense bulk. In a flash of sunlight, the sandstone features were set in sharp relief and the ancient standing Buddha was revealed.

And here’s a back street in Kabul, at night, in 1974:

The main streets were lit only dimly [...] I turned into dark laneways and the moon shone in eerie silence, full and accusing. Thick tobacco smoke and male conversation wafted from an open window. In a corner outside, a girl’s voice crouched in a shapeless burka, whispering protectively over a bundle in her arms. The embroidery around her face rustled. A bubbling sound from within made me look up, and I watched a refilled narghile being set down amid a circle of men. One of them glanced in my direction and turned away. The girl’s hand brushed my ankle and her voice pleaded. I dropped some coins in her hand.

This remarkable facility with language as an evocative tool brings us into the action and places us vividly in the situations Schettini describes. It moves us along, as readers, as much as does the narrative itself. We are present, engaged. That the author is able to bring the same clarity to describe his inner states and his relationships with those around him makes his story as profound as it is compelling to read. As one who myself abandoned the Christian beliefs with which I was brought up and who also found in Buddhism, later in life, the source of a potential inner serenity, I found myself resonating with much of Schettini’s experience. His doubts and his intellectual conflicts, as well as the intensity of his pursuit of an elusive truth about the life we’re given to live here on earth were intimately familiar to me.

I did find myself wishing that the end of the book—the mature commitment to a life of family and service—had seemed a little less rushed in the context of the whole. In terms of the personal journey, Schettini’s re-dedication of himself as a teacher and counselor along the path to happiness could usefully have been given more attention than it receives in the final “Epilogue.” Still, this remains a quibble that reflects, perhaps, my personal priority rather than the author’s. All in all, a truly satisfying read.

Trust

Here's a question that bears thought. Outside the relatively small circle of those close to you, how many people do you trust?

The question came up this past week at the gym with my friend, Scott--a sports fan and a fellow Tour de France enthusiast. He and I have often talked, over the years, about the prevalence of drugs in sports, and he told me the other day that the tennis player Andre Agassi had admitted, in a recent memoir, to the routine use of methamphetamines to get the aggressive juices flowing. In the past, my conversations with Scott have generally centered on the use of performance enhancers. The continuing scandals in the world of professional cycling were among the first to draw attention to the problem. Since then there has been a seemingly endless stream of accusations, denials, admissions, confessions, penalties and expulsions, and even some criminal trials affecting virtually every realm of sport.

Things have reached a point now, in sports, where it's hard to believe that any win is earned without cheating. It would be convenient to believe that there were just a few "bad apples", as our former president might say. But we are now in a place where we know that the barrel is spoiled. The kind of trust we need to believe in an equal contest between two athletes or two teams of athletes has evaporated, and once that is gone, the whole foundation collapses. If it's no longer about skill, talent, stamina and sportsmanship, it reverts, inexorably, to that familiar, remorseless competition for money and power.

Unhappily, the playing field persists as a metaphor for life. The erosion of trust extends to every aspect of our lives, from the food we buy and consume to the activities of the corporate and financial world to the realm of national and international affairs. The bank was once the solid symbol of trustworthiness. Who trusts the banking system these days, after the scandals of the past twelve months? The mattress seems like an increasingly sane alternative. Wall Street? The good faith of companies whose stocks are bought and sold? The very thought is risible. We once thought we could rely on our government to insure that the markets did not run amok. An article in today's New York Times tracks the lamentable failures of the SEC to detect the largest Ponzi scheme in history (Bernard Madoff's) when the evidence stared them in the face.

Do we trust our lawyers? Our doctors? Our police? Our politicians? Our neighbors? No more than our athletes. Where's the integrity? When so many show themselves to be untrustworthy, ruthless in the pursuit of their own interests and heedless of those of others, the whole system is undermined. The glue that holds us together as a society is gone. Our loss of trust in government--and, too often rightfully, in the politicians who represent us--has made our country virtually ungovernable. Without a pact of mutual trust between the governed and the governing, the hands of policy-makers are tied. We look to Washington and see paralysis, in good part because no one is prepared to trust anyone else. In California, where I live, we are now victim to our own mistrust. We are confronted with the spectacle of the results: highways crumble, hospitals close, what was once the greatest educational system in the country--perhaps in the world--is in a shambles. Were the effects not so dire in the lives of so many of our citizens, it would be simply laughable. I imagine myself arriving from another planet and trying to make sense of the absurdity.

We impugn the good along with the bad, refusing to recognize a distinction between healthy skepticism and the rush to mistrust. We elected what I persist in believing to be a man with a good heart and a good head to be president, handing him a mess more monumental than the Augean stables to clean up. How many years did it take to create this mess? But before six months are up--well, nine, now--he is under daily attack not only from those who oppose him but from those who worked for his election. How quick many of us have been to label him "just another politician."

Oh, and lest it be thought that I'm speaking exclusively about America... No, I'm speaking of a global pandemic. Look to the Middle East, to Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan for the effects of mutual mistrust. Look to Iran and Israel. Look to our relations with China, with Russia... I don't usually have much to say for Ronald Reagan, but his principle in this regard seemed a like good one: Trust, but verify. In today's New York Times, again, two articles--one about the theft or damage inflicted on 80 percent (eighty!) of those sturdy bicycles included in a wonderful program to make the two-wheelers readily available and returnable to convenient locations throughout urban areas, in an effort to reduce congestion and pollution; and another about the charges of corruption now being leveled against former President Jacques Chirac.

It seems that these days cheating is the norm. We can no longer expect integrity from our leaders; we no longer expect it of our neighbors; and we no longer expect it of ourselves. And yet... without it, what do we have left to count on in our relationship with others and the world? And where do we start to mend this broken web we so much need for our mutual security and welfare? There's only one place I know of: each of us in ourselves. If it ever happens, it will be a very long, slow process. If it doesn't, woe betide us all.