Chapter 57 — The Meditation Retreat
The Curve of Time, Chapter 57 —— The Meditation Retreat, in which Zeno experiments with a new power.
Followed by some thoughts on the importance of different ways of measuring experience.
Listen to full episode :
— 57 —
The Meditation Retreat
He realized that it was a cliché of the executive class, but Zeno had had this retreat on his calendar for months and he was sticking to it. The trees whizzed by his window as he zipped his Z4 rental up the steep mountain road. He probably should have bought himself one of these sporty toy cars a decade ago.
It struck him as odd that he was driving uphill to find a streambed, but there you had it. He’d listened to the burbling brook that wound through the log cabins surrounding the meditation lawn. The aural mise-en-scène of the Youtube clip that adorned the front page of retreat’s website had been surprisingly immersive. It had flooded his dreams.
Rounding the last bend in the road, he felt vindicated. This was what he needed. His soul would quietly collapse in exhausted gratitude.
Even corporate villains needed to feed their vital essence.
Pulling to an abrupt stop by the welcome center, his tires skidded an extra inch as the gravel that cradled them lulled his vehicle to rest. Without removing his hands from the steering wheel, Zeno took a moment to breath it all in. Re-centered, he jumped out. The concierge was already crossing to meet him.
Five minutes later, after awkwardly handing the porter a crisp ten dollar note, he picked up the suitcase that the man had deposited in the middle of the floor and tossed it on his bed. Spinning the dials he opened both latches. Time to strip off the corporate suit he hadn’t had a chance to remove and slip into something more befitting of the environs that surrounded him.
The oil spill had been a debacle. It had been a hellish few weeks and it was time to escape to another dimension.
∞
The buddhist monk that Saskia recalled from her Berkeley visit many years ago was now running a retreat in the mountains above Santa Cruz. He looked out at his congregation——his disciples for the next three days——and reiterated a line he’d long loved: “We are all where we are meant to be.”
Zeno glanced about at his cohort. They were a mixed group. At least, as mixed as you might hope for, given the two thousand dollar price-tag for the weekend. The only person he knew before arriving today was another oil exec. The heavyset man had been decent enough to commiserate with Zeno’s recent predicament on the way to their induction ceremony.
Zeno had shrugged a grateful acknowledgement. It was good to be among peers. To be understood. “You do your best to help power the world, and the press crucifies you when anything goes wrong.”
To the right of the heavyset man a rake of a woman introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Molly Witherspoon. I’m from Seattle. I’ve been practicing for sixteen years.” She had well kept straight black hair that flowed over her shoulders. Zeno wondered if she’d eaten a morsel of meat in the last decade.
Next to Molly was an attractive woman with dark brown wavy hair. She was the spitting image of the woman who’d shown up at Zeno’s doorstep in Dallas, but she introduced herself as Sienna. She gazed intently at Amara, the cross-legged monk leading the gathering from his ornate mat.
In front of the two women sat a muscular man with tightly cropped hair; and beside him, a man with a striking birthmark that covered his nose. Birthmark man spoke: “I’m Gary Holcomb. Also Seattle area. Marketing exec.” Lastly, filling out the front row was another woman, Lora.
“You are seven,” Amara addressed them, “a number we associate with enlightenment in the Buddhist teachings.”
It was an intimate group really, and Zeno wondered how long the bonds they forged this weekend would last.
∞
Half an hour into their first mindful breathing exercises Zeno felt a tingling he’d first felt less than a week ago. He leaned into the sensation and peeked his eyes open. Enjoying the moment, he slowed time down to a crawl. Even the deliberate slow inhalations of his fellow disciples took on an ethereal quality when he further decelerated them. Zeno was captivated, and he rose carefully to his feet, and tiptoed about the reflection room.
It was like walking through a surreal wax-works rendition of Amara’s retreat. As if the wax figures resided inside a low temperature oven.
Unlike Saskia’s first experience with the subtle shift in his perception of the world around him, it had taken Zeno longer to reach out and take the reins——take charge of whatever mysterious force he’d conjured. Initially, he’d been like a passenger in an old horse-drawn buggy, the steed in front of him charting their path of its own accord.
Even now, it didn’t occur to Zeno that his relative motion, for the rest of the meditators, would appear fast. That he was like an elephant zipping by with the speed of a hummingbird. And so, he slowed time around him to the point that it barely slipped by at all, marveling at the room.
Fortunately for Zeno, as was typical during the first hour of conscious breathing at a meditation workshop, two of the participants had actually drifted into sleep, and the rest were aggressively focused on shutting the outside world out.
It wasn’t until he returned to his place on the mat, that Molly opened her eyes.
Zeno glanced at her, and meeting her eyes gave her a dismissive smile. His own mind was preoccupied with thoughts about Saskia, and Sienna, her perplexing likeness. Sienna had given him no indication that she knew who he was. Either she was an excellent actress, dissolving into character and giving no indication of the facade, or she really was someone else.
Well, Friends, that was chapter 57.
I for one, really like how some disparate strands of the story are coalescing, how side tracks are crossing, off in the wilderness.
It all feels kind of apropos to me right now, as I’m embarking on a bit of a side track myself. Well, I haven’t left yet, but out of a sense of responsibility to you, my future plans are forcing me to prepare for my journey now. Specifically, I’m heading to Australia in a couple of months for a long overdue trip home——funny how appelations stick given I’ve now spent more than half my life in the US——and that means that I need to get ahead on these recordings. It should be a bit of a journey into the future, which will pause when I get there and wait for you and the world to catch up.
One disconcerting element is that it’ll mean recording more or less up to the point that I’ve written, but I’m optimistic that while you listen to the episodes I’ll have time to polish the ensuing chapters. I’m actually really excited about where we’re headed. We might be halfway through the story, but to me the best is definitely yet to come.
That last thought kind of hides a secret about mathematics; that oftentimes picking the correct metric is what matters. That is, along which dimension you ought to compare objects. Put in more real world terms: suppose someone asks you how far apart two cities are. Your natural response might be to give the distance as the crow flies. Of course if you were driving, and there was a mountain range between the two cities, the “crow flies distance” is not exactly meaningful. But maybe you’re actually looking for a different comparison, say how much sunlight each city receives, in which case the latitude on which each city sits is much more meaningful. Or, if you’re considering livability, the population size might be more meaningful.
My point is, choosing the right metric is important when deciding whether something is “better” than something else. It’s a subtlety that is all too often glossed over.
On a related note: for those of you, like me, who are about to watch your kids sail off into the world: You might have been assailed, as my friend Crawford was, by the stat that says: by the time your kids leave home you will have enjoyed 90% of the face to face time you are ever likely to spend with them. To me, that feels like a mistake in choosing your metric. As I noted to Crawford, that might be true for hours spent with them, but it doesn’t mean you’ve already enjoyed the best most meaningful 90%. For me, the quality of time with my kids keeps improving and enriching!
Finally, your experience of mathematics might be similarly viewed. That is, if like my wonderful friend, Kat, your previous mathematical encounters were … well, suboptimal, then having a play with the Mobius Cuts Exploration (that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) could be exactly what you need to improve your overall average. Kat certainly enjoyed it when I walked her through it a year or so back.
Anyway, just give a second thought to how you should measure something.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
