Of his 16 daily waking hours, Deepak Chopra spends four or five meditating. He never gets bored, he said, and he never experiences stress. His only vice is an addiction to yoga. “I’m happy all the time,” said Chopra, 78…
“The people who say they don’t have time, they’re not busy, they’re just scattered. If you’re present, there’s no fatigue. As soon as you think of what’s next, there’s fatigue. As soon as you think “I shouldn’t have done that,” there’s fatigue…”
“I don’t get stressed…”
“Pleasure is overrated…”
“I’m enjoying myself all the time. I don’t have to do anything special…”
Other than that, there was no noise. Not a breath of wind, no birds flying. Around us pure white snow continued to silently fall. What a beautiful scene, I thought. It moved me, in a way. I was sure every detail would remain in my memory, until the moment came when I took my last breath.
2:30 am. Wally is restless, and his tossing and turning had wakened me (again).
I don’t know what pulled me to get up and look out the window. Murakami: “You wordlessly shook your head. But something had happened. I could pick up on it, the delicate sound of wings beating at a decibel beyond a human’s audible range.” And what a surprise it was to see snow.
Murakami’s words didn’t exactly capture my experience this morning with our first snowfall of the season, but it was nonetheless beautiful. The impact of global warming continues to haunt me. I do wonder if our grandchildren will get to experience the beauty of snowfall in winter.
As I rounded the turn on the home stretch of my walk back to the car, the wintry mix turned to heavy rain and the snow was melting as quickly as it had arrived. Murakami: “The days passed, the seasons changed. Yet days and seasons are but temporary things…Human beings are as insubstantial as an exhaled breath, and what they do in their lives is but a moving shadow.”
More photos from this morning’s walk can be found here.
Photo above was taken at 3:12 am. Snow mixed with heavy rain. 32° F, feels like 22° F, wind gusts up to 37 mph. November 22, 2024. Cove Island Park. Stamford, CT.
[…] By any reasonable standard, I have won life’s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I’ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me—writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I’ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We’re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn’t swap with anyone.
Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long, naked look in the mirror. […]
I weigh 460 pounds.Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will. […]
What the hell is wrong with me? […]
“Eat less and exercise.”That’s what some of you are saying right now. That’s what some of you have said the whole time you’ve been reading. That’s what some of you say—maybe not out loud, but you say it—every time you see a fat person downing fried eggs in a diner, or overstuffing a bathing suit on the beach, or staring out from one of those good-lord-what-happened-to-her? stories in the gossip magazines.“Eat less and exercise.” […]
Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.
On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.
My compulsion to eat comes from all those places. I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense. But I’m always craving an emotional high, the kind that comes from making love, or being in the crowd for great live music, or watching the sun come up over the ocean. And I’m always wanting something to counter the low, when I’m anxious about work or arguing with family or depressed for reasons I can’t understand. […]
There’s a flight I want the man inside me to take. It doesn’t matter where it goes, as long as I’m in the middle seat. I want to sit there without flooding the banks of the armrests. I want the seat belt to click around my waist with an inch or two to spare. After that, I can bitch about the middle seat like everybody else. But I’d like to sit there and feel good about it. Just once.
Her gesture then was as gracious as everything about her. Choose her well, she’d said. What words. I wanted someone exactly like her, just twenty years younger, which was how old she was when she stayed at my great-grandmother’s in Egypt after escaping Germany, when all the men in the house, having watched her play the piano in the living room, swore they’d lost their minds over her…She loved me and I loved her. Choose her well. No one would have said it in just that way, or found words so spare and quick to help dodge the heartrending elegy in her voice. She was the only person with whom I could discuss ideas—not academically, which is how so many professors pour notions into our heads, but ideas with a completely human dimension, which is what ideas are in the end, not lifeless slugs devoid of human features, but sentient figures of what we live with when we can’t even tell a feeling from a thought and can only sketch what is bound to miss the mark. Look for the human, she would say when she wasn’t asking me to think American—even if there’s no proof you’re right, look for the human. What a pleasure to spell out my thoughts with her, when she’d ask what did I think such-and-such an author was really, really thinking when he wrote that piece? Then, turning to music, she’d say, This was what Beethoven struggled with when composing this sonata. “Do I know this for sure?” she’d ask. “No. Do I have any proof? No. But am I right? Absolutely.” […]
As it turned out, Look for the human was what I never forgot. I passed it on to those who listened. It was, however, almost impossible for others to practice, having never met Flora.
NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
“Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”
I am instantly taken back to those late-fall mornings when we had to stand glued to others in jam-packed buses, never daring to grab a seat if one ever was free—fall mornings… I’d give anything to experience again the unmistakable snug feeling of bodies swaying to the rhythm of the bus, seeking warmth like penguins huddled together— … people going to work, to school, or looking for work, they were on the bus too, broken and sad, always sad, angry, and scared—of the cold, of life, of your glance when they caught you staring and looked away, their ragged coats smelling of weather-beaten wool that had just been in the rain and whose damp scent I’ve always loved.
NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
“Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”
