Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 2019, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, finished his report and concluded that the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a communist one since 1975, needed to implement reforms to help its citizenry climb out of poverty and to ensure that  all policies to promote economic growth would benefit the poorest, not the wealthiest, who already benefit greatly from tax loopholes, ill-advised infrastructure projects, and land concessions. Alston did note that the government had done a decent job of lifting more and more people above the international poverty, despite the legacy of imperialism that still affects the country’s socioeconomic profile—a point that cannot be glossed over. Laos was at war with foreign forces for three-quarters of the twentieth century and has the dubious honour of being the country that has had the most bombs dropped on it. Between 1893 and 1953, the French ruled Laos, except for a brief moment in World War II, when the Japanese occupied the country. The Geneva Accords of 1954 sparked the end of French rule in Southeast Asia, and in terms of Laos, the participating countries—France, Great Britain, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union—determined that sovereignty over Laos should return to the royal government, although northern areas remained under the de facto control of the Pathet Lao, a communist group. Yet the truce between the royalists and the communists was short lived, and when the Vietnam War threw the entire Southeast Asian region into chaos, the Pathet Lao allied themselves with the North Vietnamese and the Soviet Union. The CIA also noticed Pathet’s manoeuvering and the aid it was offering to North Vietnamese fighters and was unimpressed. So starting in 1964, and for nine years, the U.S. bombed Laos in attempt to curtail the growing power of the Pathet Lao as well as to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail—a network of muddy tracks and pathways winding their way from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia used to support the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong. Throughout the war, Americans planes dropped more than two million tons of cluster bombs, which is the equivalent of a planeload of bombs falling from the sky every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year—for nine years. By 1975, the Vietnam War was over, the Americans had lost, the communists had taken power in Vietnam and Laos ,and one-tenth of the Laotian population, 200,000 civilians and members of the military, had been killed, over fifty thousand of them directly from American bombs themselves. In the war’s aftermath, the citizens of Laos still suffered from the American bombing campaign, since an estimated twenty thousand people have been killed by the eighty million bombs left behind and that did not explode on impact. 

            It is needless to say, then, that the history of this relentless bombing campaign weighs heavily on contemporary Laos, a fact noted by Alston in his report. But even though his report contextualizes Laotian poverty and notes some progress in its elimination, Alston still paints a rather depressing picture of the country’s socioeconomic realities: 80 per cent of the country survives on less than $2.50 per day and 88 per cent of children experience deprivation of some kind. Rural communities lack basic amenities, such as roads, water, and electricity, and experience poverty at level four times greater than their urban counterparts. Discrimination against women is widespread, as is the marginalization of minority groups not belonging to the Lao-Tai majority. The country has no functioning social protection system and invests next to nothing in education and health. To address these problems and promote economic growth, the government has relied too heavily on projects that only enrich the elite and the private sector while doing little for the common Laotian. Moreover, the government’s enthusiasm for large infrastructure projects has burdened the country with great debt as well as disrupted traditional land tenure practices in the country. A dam collapse in 2018 only further highlighted the need for greater oversight and transparency concerning such projects. Alston concludes his report by encouraging the notoriously secretive and authoritarian Lao government to partner with Lao civil society, as such dialoguing will ensure that future projects aimed at improving the lot of the entire country will take into consideration the needs of the people such projects purport to support.

            Given the poor state of affairs of the country and the limited avenues towards social mobility among the populace, Buddhism has become an important way for families to fight for a viable future for their children, and no place in Laos offers as many monastic opportunities as Luang Prabang. As much as Buddhism prides itself on lighting a pathway towards a more purposeful and spiritual life than the one promised by modernity, monasteries themselves also provide unparalleled educational advantages for those lucky enough to attend. One such fortunate son is A, who works for Orange Robe Tours, a profit-for-purpose social enterprise that employs former novices and monks that have recently left the monastery to give culturally accurate tours to tourists, which supports these individuals in their transition from temple life. A is in luck, because today, he gets to guide me through a meditation in session in a nearby temple.

The office of Orange Robe Tours sits on Khem Khong Road, which caresses and overlooks the Mekong River. On the road’s south side are an array of different guesthouses and villas catering to an equally vast array of guests on different budgets; the best rooms face the river, and in the evening older and whiter men and women, sometimes speaking French but not always, sit on their balconies and watch the sun soften as it slowly falls and splashes into the Mekong. From their perch, the elder couple can also see the sunset boats cruising the river, which touts operating along Khem Khong spent the last hour or so trying to pack with tourists. The boats move towards the sun, as if hypnotized, and the tourists stand and snap their photos of the glorious scene in quiet desperation, in that futile attempt of theirs to try and capture this image for posterity, to be forever interned on their social media networks. On the riverbank, below Khen Khong, local families grill fish on a barbeque and sit around on the grass drinking beer and soda and every few moments they laugh. A boy and a man kick a soccer ball around, until the man grabs it and boots the ball high in the air, and the boy squeals in delight as he traces and tracks the ball through the air, watching it twirl in the fading sun, his little feet darting back and forth, trying to position his body underneath the undisciplined sphere, and when the ball comes crashing back to earth, it lands with a thud to the boy’s right, bounces high two or three more times, before landing squarely in the boy’s outstretched arms.

Above the family but below the French couple, I sit at one of the many bars-cum-restaurants along Khem Kong that have wonderful views of the river, especially in the evenings, when the waters seductively swallow the sun. Around me wafts the familiar smell of cigarette smoke and beer, and I hear people speaking in different languages and they bleed and blend into each other in a cacophony of different cultures. I am eating a plate of friend spring rolls as well as drinking from a glass of strawberry juice. My head is light and wavy from the pint of beer I had with my dinner not twenty minutes ago, only the second drop of alcohol I have had in the past two and a half years. Although escitalopram has made the allure of alcohol nonexistent for me—the idea of having a beer seems as exciting as watering plants—and the thought of experiencing a hangover, and its resulting depression, strikes me as horror best reserved for works of fiction, I ordered that pint to celebrate submitting my dissertation and completing my MA in refugee protection and forced migration studies. I participated in the convention that says milestones are best honoured through alcohol. And even though the beer tasted like glue and fell to the bottom of my stomach and sat there heavy and uncomfortable, as if I had swallowed a rock, I still do enjoy the effects that one beer has had—the warm glow now wafting through me. Everything flows beautifully and effortlessly. I am a river.

            I watch the sun inch closer to its disappearance. Minute by minute, the sun drops between the two tree branches extending over the balcony upon which I sit and then the star transforms into a perfect sphere of brilliance—a ball of incandescence so strong that it sends a dancing ribbon of light over the twinkling waters of the Mekong.  I already picture myself somewhere in the future writing this scene and trying my best to represent its detail and spirit faithfully. Jon Hopkins, a musician, once said that when he works on a new piece of music, he lets his instinct take over and his own intuitions guide him. I feel the same about writing, about putting lived experiences to paper or computer screen. Writing is instinct. You write and you write until that internal voice dictating those words and sentences and structures becomes second nature, until you need not worry about prompting the deluge for it springs from you as naturally as your breath, as naturally as the blood you spill, that fucking torrent of beauty and pain and truth, each and every time you write. All creativity depends on flow.  

            At the table to my left, an older and larger man sits with his laptop open. The server, a young-looking teenager, brings him a whisky contained in a glass with two ice cubes and places it, carefully, next to the computer. The man, who is smartly dressed in formal pants and shirt, and undoubtedly a Westerner, does not say a word as the boy scuffles back to the bar and the man himself reaches into his leather bag and pulls out a thick book. He opens it tenderly and finds the place where he left off, and in that moment just before the book divides into two parts, I catch a glimpse of its subject matter: Ho Chi Minh. He glances at the page and then to the screen and then back to the page. He rests his fingers on the keyboard, but they do not seem to wander between letters. He takes a sip of whiskey. What could this man have to say about Ho Chi Minh? I see him attempting to put a new spin on Minh, something the thousands of other books about the man have failed to show. I see him carving and dissecting Minh’s life with his fat, drunken fingers, bumbling about with no skill or imagination or passion. I see him ripping Minh from his cultural milieu until he is nothing but a caricature or strawman for some argument or another, in the same the Vietnamese themselves have mummified his body in Hanoi for all to see and revere. This man, too, I suspect wants to disembowel Minh until only his skin remains, until only his recognizable markers and expressions are visible, until all nuance and humanity are gone, like a bullet fired into the ocean.

            I take a bite from my spring roll, and the sun feels lovely on my face. A soft song passes through my earphones and freezes me in nostalgia. I remember the first time I heard these sounds ten years ago in Cali, Colombia. I am sitting at the computer in my hostel’s common area checking my email and surfing the net, killing time in fact, since those were the savage days when people did not have the internet connected to their body via their phone 24/7, when people actually made an effort to stop what they were doing, travel to their computer, and actually log into their email accounts, like, for example, when at my parents’ house in Bradford, we did not have wireless for the longest time, only dial up, horrifying I know, and I would actually have to stop what I was doing and walk to another computer to check my email or do whatever, but if I wasn’t careful that small break could easily turn into one or two hours lost, which was what I was actually hoping for in Cali, since I had little to do but wait for my bus to Manizales, so I am visiting my favourite sites, especially my most treasured music ones, and I come across a short story about a new project from one of my favourite musicians and the website has actually provided a song from the album, and when I dutifully press play I am suddenly transported to a verdant ambient forest, and I am so enchanted with the lush, peaceful sounds, the wonderful solitude that comes from loving a piece of art for the first time, the feeling that it exists for you and you alone, and I forgive myself that little foray into such inexcusable narcissism because  the music has pulled such emotions from me, dismantling the palisades I have constructed to keep those sentiments locked away deep inside, that I feel all is equally possible and forgivable and suddenly my fears need not dictate the course of my life, the direction of my actions, for the simple reason that they are just manifestations of an anxious mind, a mind too obsessed with its own distinctiveness and cleverness, and alone in that forest, I believe anything is possible and that life is a gift that must be savored and shared, and as the music builds and cuts me so deep I become only a man of feeling, so vulnerable to touch, and I feel the tears coming, they are coming, and I picture myself with her again, walking hand in hand, with her, laughing over a drink, with her, arguing over beautiful nonsense, but then I think about another time in 2003 in New Zealand and I felt so alive, too, with music, so mesmerized by its  effect, but my 18-year-old self soon uncovered the problem that has no solution, what do you do when the music stops, and I wrote it down there in New Zealand, I am invincible until the music stops, and I think about her and that in Cali and now, today, in Laos, and Jesus Christ, I am everywhere, and I ask myself how can I live when the music stops, and Christ I love this feeling, I am fucking everywhere, here and now, and then, and now again and again and again and what connects me across these times is the music and the desire to hold everything and be everywhere, for I contain multitudes, as the man says, but only with the music, and life is beautiful, but only with the music, and I am with her and her and her, but only with the music.

            A greets me in the office of Orange Robe tours with an enthusiasm generally reserved for close friend or family member—a brother. He cannot be older than twenty, yet he carries himself with the confidence of a man twice his age. He recently left the monastery after attaining the level of novice monk, after spending years sequestered in the monastery studying and mediating, mediating and studying. He is a good advertisement for the erudition such schools promise children, and their parents, they will attain if they forsake the material and dedicate themselves to a simple life of study and quiet reflection. He speaks about Buddhism with poise and assuredness, reserved for only those who have actually lived the practice, as compared to those who treat Buddhism as a Caribbean island only visited once or twice a year.  He speaks English in a languid, carefree manner, as if it were his maternal tongue. He is hungry for the outside world, I can tell, as he peppers me with questions about Canada as well as my trip—the countries I have already been to as well as the countries I will eventually go.  He dreams of studying abroad. But today, he promises me, is not about dreaming of future plans but about focusing on the present, and with that sentence, I receive my first lesson of my guided mediation session.

             Outside, on our walk to the temple, we pass Saffron café, arguably Luang Prabang’s one most famous coffee joint, and its premises are packed with tourists sipping lattes and typing away on their laptops.  We turn up a narrow side street and walk by parked motorbikes and scooters and underneath colourful streamers connecting homes on each side of the street.  A asks me whether I like the city and I tell him of course, especially the tranquility and the quiet, and he says Luang Prabang is usually busier but what with  the virus and all, the tourists have stayed away. Even though, A says, Laos hasn’t had a single confirmed case of COVID-19, he says laughing, and I ask whether he believes that statistic, one I have hard time swallowing myself, and he just shrugs his shoulders and says he does not know.

The morning is pleasant, washed in a mid-morning sun, but A warns me that the afternoon will bring heat, and I believe him. I am wearing pants, and I can already feel their restrictiveness raising my body temperature. The website informs its guests to wear pants for any temple visit, a gesture of respect, and I have dutifully followed its advice, even though pants are anathema to me, a symptom of an invented tradition that has defined the boundaries of decorum and modesty in clothing and has determined that exposed knees and shins represent an affront to more dignified and solemn practices. I have always avoided pants whenever I could help it. In high school and university, I was known as the guy who was always wearing shorts, even into November and December when the temperature dipped below zero and the first snowflakes fell from the sky.  My persistence in wearing shorts had little to do with a desire to appear unique, to stand out among the crowd, but a fervent wish for the exact opposite: to have fewer eyes analyzing the less flattering parts of my body. Pants always felt constricting; they revealed, more so than shorts, the contours and shape of my body, much to my shame and embarrassment, as I was bigger than most of the other boys, and pants made that abundantly clear to all onlookers. The suffocating fabrics, feeling seemingly glued to my legs, also increased my body temperature, and because of my propensity to sweat even under normal conditions, puddles of perspiration would reveal themselves across my forehead and under my armpits, which would, of course, only draw more stares from classmates who were gifted with the chance to see this sweating penguin waddle down the hallway.

Although I am not as big today—or “fat” to use one of the most popular words in the English language—I still feel self-conscious in my pants, particularly when the temperature rises and the sun cooks those foolish enough to step outside and tempt it. On the walk to the temple, I adjust my pants a half-dozen times, trying in vain to find the right position, the best angle, so that they do not feel so cumbersome, so much like a boulder I have been compelled to drag behind me. And with every step, I inch closer to breaking out in a complete sweat.

            A and I remove our shoes before entering the temple, which is smaller and less ostentatious than the city’s more famous temples, such as Wat Xieng Thong or  Wat Paphai, whose exteriors radiate in colour and gold flakes and whose roofs undulate the likes of a reptile. This temple is more modest and workmanlike, devoid of tourists, the kind of place an ordinary person would come to sit and reflect. Today, though, a group of monks, just to the left of the temple’s entrance, are busy renovating part of the complex and the hammering and banging sounds they make will surely test my ability to focus and concentrate. “You will get good practice today,” A says, as we step inside the temple.

            Inside, A asks me to take a seat on the ground while he goes, as if sensing my discomfort, and turns on an electrical fan. I sit cross-legged on the carpet and watch A return swiftly from the fan and drop to his knees next to me. His buttocks rest on his heels and he lays his hands on thighs, and I am immediately jealous of the flexibility and agility he has developed over his decade of training, for whenever I have tried to sit like that I could never completely close the gap between my glutes and heals and whenever I pushed my body lower so as to close that embarrassing gap—yet another market of my inelegant body—a shooting pain ran through my quadriceps. “Sit in whichever way you feel comfortable,” A says, and I whisper okay and continue sitting with my legs crossed.

            A regales me with incredible details about his life in the monastery, the waking up at 4:00 a.m. every day, the cleaning and studying, the two-hour mediation sessions—a life completely regimented by routine. The idea of routine has always equally seduced and repelled me. There is no denying the power of routine to cultivate habits, to do a thing over and over until it becomes instinctual, until it becomes almost perfected. Personally, I have experienced its power in my writing: I write every day—five hundred words. Not only does such discipline and repetition produce an abundance of writing over a relatively short period, it also inevitably creates something called a voice. Voice is personality expressed on a page. Voice is the author’s particular and unique internal monologue captured in words; it’s her stream of consciousness on paper, her wonderfully puissant images and rapid-fire reflections caught and expressed in the syntax and sentences—the net of language. And although grammar and the rules of communication cannot completely express the absorb complexity of thought, the more you write and the word you become familiar with that voice whispering within,  the more you will become skilled at stretching the rules of the game, playing with the limitations of language, to allow your voice to sing on the page.

            Thanks to routine, then, I have become more attuned to my internal voice and can better express it in my writing. When I sit down to write, I turn on my taps, as it were, and when the water comes gushing from the faucet or the hose or the showerhead, I know how to scoop and pail that liquid and present it, evocatively, in language. I can never capture it all, of course, but I know how to selectively scoop and succinctly pail such a deluge in order to present that human flow into manageable chunks of syntax, ideas begun and ended by points of punctuation.

            Yet as much as I have developed my voice in my writing and now have more freedom in how I express myself on the page, due to the power of routine and repetition, I have also become alarmed with how guilty I feel if I skip a day because I just do not possess the energy to turn on the taps. Because routine is so enmeshed with the idea of productivity and productivity is so integral to notions of neoliberalism and capitalism, I feel my desire to write every day is not always tied to creativity but a need to produce. Routine can take creativity and transform it into something mechanical, made of steel, hard and unfeeling. The power of routine has the potential to be so great and effective that the mere idea of missing a morning of writing becomes the stuff of nightmares. At times, I genuinely believe that if I forego writing for a day, I will become a weaker writer. Every hour I miss subtracts from the whole. If ability is measured by the number of hours a person has spent practicing a craft, if their skills and talent result from that cumulative effort, the days and days spent doing that one thing, then it stands to reason that every hour missed is a step in the opposite direction: if ability were represented by a body, then every session skipped would be like cutting away a chunk of flesh. Routine, then, can both liberate and paralyze. If routine becomes only a mechanism to achieve more, then it will inevitably lead to anxiety and disappointment for the writer or artist. Routine wrapped in the tentacles of neoliberalism takes creativity and turns it into something only to be measured and mapped.

            A tells me that every night the novice monks would meditate for two hours. As A attended his monastery for nine years and he meditated every day, the total number of hours he spent mediating for his entire schooling equals 6570. The number shocks me, since for me the idea of sitting quietly and calming the mind for five minutes is tantamount to sitting quietly and calming the mind for five minutes in a forest full of black flies. Yet I doubt A would bother counting the number of hours he has practiced because such an obsession with time, and its years, months, weeks, days, and hours, would defeat the whole purpose of sitting still. In the West, researchers and writers argue over how someone achieves mastery in their respective craft. Recently, the debate has given less credence to the hypothesis that talent is predetermined by genetics and has instead focused on the number of dedicated and determined hours a person commits to mastering their craft. Talent, they say, is not necessarily innate but rather is the fruit borne from hours, days, months, years of sustained and rigorous practice. On the surface, such a position is liberating. I can listen to all my favourite musicians or read all my favourite authors and conclude that only time and practice separate me from them. The number of hours required to transform a student into a master, then, has become the subject of great interest. What is the magic number?

            “Ten thousand hours,” our guest speaker, a well-respected writer from the New Yorker magazine, informs us, a group of MFA students attending a one-week residency in New York City. Citing work from Malcom Gladwell and others, he tells us that we need to dedicate ten thousand hours of practice to become the writers we wish to be. He further breaks down what this means in reality: if someone wrote four hours a day, it would take them almost seven years to reach the ten thousand hour threshold. He cites his personal story as evidence for the number’s validity, as his writing only began to attract the attention of publishers after seven years of toiling in obscurity and pounding out pages of questionable quality. He tells this not to discourage us but only to remind us that writing is a vocation that must be constantly watered and nurtured. And although we all have the capability to become great writers, excellence is an attribute that takes time to grow.

            I find his talk representative of the West’s, particularly America’s, obsession with the individual’s struggle towards greatness.  It is neoliberalism’s guide to becoming a great artist; neoliberalism’s portrait of an artist as a young man. Individuals need only put in the required work—those ten thousand hours—and they are assured mastery over their craft. Between you and your goal lies only one obstacle: your desire to work for it. Worry not about finding four hours a day to write because those who truly want to become writers will. Worry not about familial or financial obligations because true writers will find the grit and resilience and determination necessary to find the time to put the work in. Worry not about anything at all in fact because such concerns are mere excuses used to fulfil a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and disappointed, since, as it is well known, there is no just thing as structure just as there is no such thing as society: writers become writers because they work at writing. Nothing more.

            A says mindfulness involves no judgment. How can the mind calm itself when it practices self-condemnation, he asks, rhetorically, glancing in my general direction, and part of me wants to whisper, son, you still have 3,500 hours to go before you get to tell me anything about mediation. Boy, I think, you are in no position to lecture me, to teach me, if you have no put in the requisite time, if you have not become an expert in your field. In the West, we only pay for professionals. We only handover our hard-earned dollars to those skilled enough to actually deserve them, those with the best degrees, the most enthusiastic references, the most perfect scores on the one million websites dedicated to judging the performance of professionals. We only listen to those worthy of our attention. We pay for results.

            A repeats: mindfulness involves no judgment. No judgment? We thrive on judgment. We judge everything and everyone all of the time. How do you think the West won? How do you think the West climbed over climbed over the rest of the world? We judge and then we destroy. Embracing inferiority in the name of solidarity is the death knell of economic progress and advancement. A civilization does not thrive through indulging its weaker components; it amputates them before they can infect and pollute the entire body politic.  It judges what is necessary and what is expendable. Societies separate the leaders from the chattel through judgment. We judge your performance and allocate you a score and then put you in a particular box from which you cannot escape. We assign worth through judgment. We determine what matters through judgment. We decide who lives through judgment.

            A says that to begin our mediation session, we rest on our knees,  bring our hands together, and then prostrate ourselves three times in front of the golden Buddha sitting a few metres in front of us. Religion has its purposes, I think, as I drop my torso to the rug until my nose almost touches it. Belief can be refashioned and resold as an antidote to transformation. Belief properly articulated can present the untenable as something noble and natural. Belief in a god, or a higher spiritual plane, can facilitate the acceptance of horror among adherents through teaching them that the reward comes not in this life but the next. Belief can help hungry people understand that they cannot change their circumstances, their external reality, but they can learn how to approach hunger in a more constructive and controlled manner. And how splendid it is to watch people starve to death with a little Buddha smile draped across their faces.

            We have completed the three movements and now sit cross-legged in silence. Our arms our outstretched, elbows resting on knees. I peek to my left to see if A has started his meditation and I am struck by how still he looks. He is a statue of concentration, his body motionless except for the rising and falling of his chest. And in that pose of complete abandonment, his relinquishment of all earthly desires and materials, how powerful and confident he looks, despite his smaller frame and his fewer years of existence. He is a man in total control of his practice and such self-assurance exudes a force that is difficult to describe. He seems immune to the outside world and its cacophony of voices and expectations. He has silenced their shrill cries and closed their staring eyes. He personifies impenetrableness. He is a rock, a mountain, a jungle. He has rapped the world on its knuckles and rebuked it for its noisiness. I am envious of such power.

            In my darkness, I hear everything. I hear the monks working outside. I hear them banging their tools and debating the correct course of action. And then more voices invade and infiltrate my quiet zone. They come from outside the temple and I strain to hear them, their sentences, and they are French, I think, as I recognize some words, and, flash, I have left the silent comfort of the temple and I am following them outside, imagining walking next to them while they marvel at the architecture, its colourfulness and vividness, how the gold catches the light and everything swims and flows in incandescence, imagining listening to them while they, maybe, possibly, converse about the importance of adding a little Buddhism to their daily lives back in France, maybe a sprinkle of mediation, a dash of mindfulness, because things have not been so nice in France  recently, what with the paralyzing gilets jaune protests, the increasing poverty, the eroding of social programs, the austerity measures enacted by Macron, imagining stubbornly shaking my head when they say that meditation may provide them little moments of relief amid the turmoil and restlessness, may grant them refuge from the sounds of a world eating itself. I rebuke them. I say you are not allowed to. I forbid you. Vous ne pouvez pas. I say the French have taken enough from Laos. I say the West has taken enough from Southeast Asia. I say you can no longer take without consequence. I say you can no longer pillage without further self-reflection. I say you are forbidden from downloading a mindfulness app onto your smartphone. I say you are not to further legitimize a billion-dollar industry that has stolen the cultural practices of others and transformed them into ten-minute sessions that aim to make capitalism and its horrors more digestible.

            I pull myself back to the present. I focus on my breathing and try to ignore the mounting pain in my legs. I feel uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable. I reposition my legs as quietly and quickly as possible, without awaking A, without stealing his time away from the world, although I doubt he would move even if I started singing. He is locked in. He is control. A has mastered his practice, it seems, no matter the hours still left to reach the 10,000 mark, that finish line cherished by Western recorders and keepers of accomplishment, who mete out worth and value based on what their books and files say about expertise and professionalism. I doubt A would care if I flicked his ear at this very moment and informed him that despite how convincing you look and sound, you still have 3,500 hours to go before you may call yourself expert in mindfulness and mediation, before the relevant monitoring bodies can bestow upon you the relevant degrees and paperwork, and I am sure he would look at me perplexed, replaying my words over and over in his mind to ensure he has correctly understood them, because such a sentiment borders on the nonsensical, the egregious,  and if my words were indeed true and he had accurately assessed them, he must pity me for possessing such a spiritually vacuous and soul crushingly stupid manner in which to understand a life, a journey. There is no terminus and certainly no perfection, he might say, except in Nirvana.

            I stare at the back of my eyelids, enveloped in my blackness. My discomfort mounts. My body’s imperfections become more acute and apparent. I feel them while I inhale and exhale. I am uncomfortable. I am disequilibrium personified. I am waves and hills and tremors. And despite my best efforts, I travel back to that room in that hospital three years earlier and I am sitting at that table and they are all looking at me because I am talking about my recent trip to Peru to hike the Inca Trail and the desperate anxiety I felt the night before we were to set off. We are sitting in this hotel room, I say, waiting for our tour leaders to arrive to brief us about the trip. There are about ten of us, and the rest of them are all talking, all being friendly and stuff, getting to know one another, introducing themselves, asking where everyone is from, what everyone is doing in South America, what everyone does for an occupation. And instead of asking the woman to my left her name, where she’s from and what she is doing here and what she does, I instead sit rock solid, looking away in the opposite direction, pretending to be above it all, these clichéd meet and greets, but instead I am silently praying for the leaders to arrive so that we may jettison these icebreakers, complete the necessary work, and leave this hotel. Yet when the guides do arrive, I say, my anxiety only grows, as the leaders go through the trek in perfect detail, outlining every facet of the hike, and suddenly those voices arrive and want to know what exactly I have gotten myself into, and the guides go over the equipment check, wanting to who among us has hired porters to carry our luggage, who has rented trekking poles, who has borrowed sleeping bags, I swallow and swallow again and wonder whether I should have hired porters, should I have rented trekking poles, will the sleeping bag fit into my backpack, and question after question rattles my mind while everyone sits and smiles and laugh and I don’t know what it is about that room and those people, as I have been fortunate enough to travel extensively so this is not new to me, but they make me feel inadequate, an imposter, a charlatan, whose true identity will be unmasked and whose characteristics will be marked as weak and whose true face and body will be mocked and I want to run away, I want to leave the room, the hotel, the city, the country, and just disappear in a forest or on a mountain, some place where eyes do not shine so brightly, some place with a sky that does not have dilating pupils hanging from the blue.

“But you did not run away,” the councillor says. “You stayed in that room and you completed the trek. Do you remember what strategies you used to calm yourself down? What tactics did you use to keep yourself there?”

I force myself to believe that this, too, shall pass, that these feelings will eventually fade and disappear, just as I forced myself to keep believing in Santa Claus long after my peers had abandoned the idea and ridiculed me for my naivety, but I kept thinking it’s possible, yes, it’s possible, even though deep down inside I knew it was silly for a boy on the cusp of puberty to believe in such a folly, to subscribe to the notion that a big man from the north delivers presents to good boys and girls the world over, riding on his reindeer and squeezing through chimneys, but I held to the idea on the surface because it felt good and brightened the future and ordered my existence a little more neatly and maybe that’s all hope is, self-delusion with a purpose, so I endure in that hotel room because I figure that eventually it must end, that eventually I will be free to walk the streets again alone and unencumbered, but I do not tell the counsellor that it really is the stink of shame that keeps me locked in my seat because I know I could never survive another failure and that if I abandoned the trek I was condemning myself to a fate full of misery and regret and that if I returned home without having accomplished my task, my mirror’s reflection would always be of some scared little toddler always needing mama and papa for support and safety, so I asked myself in that hotel room whether I could live with myself being a scared little kitten, whether I could stomach the sight of myself wrapped in a coat of failure, could I, could I, could I, no I could not, so I stayed out of absolute and complete fear of the alternative.

            How long have A and I been sitting here? My legs are stiff and aching. I sneak a glance, and A is as still and relaxed as he was when we began in what feels like hours ago. My mind still wants to tiptoe away, but I lasso it and wrestle it to the ground. I concentrate on the darkness, my breathing. The workers are still hammering away outside but I do not pay them any mind. The tourists have gone. Everyone and everything have vanished. I am alone with my breathing and with my present. I feel divorced from my past and able to float over those events from a safe distance like Montreal, like Johannesburg, like… No. Do not go. Come back. Settle down. Child, settle down. You are so precocious, a little ball that just bounces left, right, right, left. What energy you have, little one. Now, come back here and sit down. You can play later. On your chair, good, good. Now sit, good. Stay, good. All is calm. Good. You want to play, I know. But now we work on being still. Can you be still? Like this. Watch me. See how my arms rest to my side. See how my muscles relax. See how body exhales. Follow me. Good … good … good. The mind is the greatest gift. This is true. But sometimes we need to quiet it so that it becomes stronger. Rest follows work. And strength follows rest. We concentrate on ourselves in these moments of silence to become stronger. Never forget this. We may close our eyes for five, ten, twenty minutes, but the world does not disappear, nor does our place within it. And when we open our eyes, we may feel better, calmer and more composed, but the struggle still remains outside us. We have two fights: the one inside and the one outside. Little one, I wish I could show you how beautifully it feels when those two battles come together in beautiful harmony—when the fight for internal peace joins forces with the fight for a better world. But I know in my heart, little one, that you will get there. As much as your mind plays tricks on you now and can really tire you out sometimes, it’s your best friend in many ways, your closest confidant. It connects you to the world. And this is important, little one, as you and I are forever part of this world. We are part of communities, societies, cultures, countries, continents. What we do has consequences. What we do matters. And never let anyone tell you that it doesn’t. Never let anyone tell you that things cannot be changed. Never let anyone convince you that your past doesn’t matter because my god, child, experience is the greatest teacher, the wisest mentor, and what a waste it would be to just let those moments, however horrible, disappear into the sea. You, child, are not defined by your past. It’s not written in stone. But in many ways, you are your past, good and bad. And do not forget that when you close your eyes and never forget that when you open them again. Good. The serious stuff is over. Go and play.

            “How did you find it?” A asks.

 

 

It’s June 2008, a Friday, around 10:00 p.m., and I am driving north on Jane St. towards Highway 7 in the city of Vaughan. I open the window, and a summer breeze hits me with a loving jab. I am high on accomplishment, having put in about ten hours of study at York University’s Scott Library, and at the moment nothing fills me with greater joy than watching the world glitter at night. At a traffic light, I light a cigarette, and the nicotine massages my mind in its seductive, subtle way, and I drift in and out of bursts of creativity. Every blink of my eye reveals an image in desperate need to be photographed, a scene in desperate need to be written. The city buzzes with imagination. The streets are alive with cars driven by people in search of good times. They long for the promise of a Friday night. I can hear music blaring from their open windows. I can see their cigarette smoke wafting into the night. I can feel their excitement build and build towards some great explosion worthy of a weekend. Driving over Highway 407, I see endless car lights flowing east and west. I take a right on Interchange Way, and in the distance, a large mansion sits and shoots streams of dancing light in the night sky, and below people wait in a line to enter its doors and revel in its interior. I pass a vacant field below drooping electrical wires, and even at night, I can picture its ugliness—the browning grass, the mud puddles, the overgrown weeds, the deep footprints of desire—yet under this spell, I am enticed by its artistic potential, what it represents, what it symbolizes—a dead field at the foot of  a banging club. I pass an Ikea and then an AMC theatre surrounded by more bars and restaurants and the parking lot is packed and people are everywhere and everything is a fuse ready to be lit.

            It’s July 2005, and it’s my birthday, and it’s a weekday afternoon, and I am standing underneath the AMC sign waiting for her to finish talking on the phone. She is in her work clothes, as she is on her lunch break. I am not. My head is swimming with alcohol and nicotine and the summer sun and she looks good in her black outfit and I am going away in the August to study abroad for a year in Copenhagen and we have talked about our plans and how she could to visit me in December and how it’s only 20 euros from Copenhagen to Berlin by bus and how everything is close in Europe and how it will be great and everything does feel great watching her talk on her phone and thinking about Copenhagen, drunk and young and high on fucking life.

            And then it’s July 2018 and I am driving past the AMC and those bright letters that once graced the theatre’s exterior have been removed and all that remains are the letter’s outlines, a tracing of AMC, a mere memory of the theatre’s former glory. The theatre has closed, and the parking lot is empty. Along Highway 7, construction crews have torn up the road for expansion, for a new bus lane, to accommodate the people who will move into the new condos being built where there was once only sky. And I take Highway 400 north, and join the rest of the car lights heading north, as if we have formed a large caravan of escape, to flee the city, to speed away from our past. Rows of streetlights illuminate the highway and I see taillights as far as I can see. Yet as I drive deeper into the north, the cars thin and soon disappear and I am alone in the dark and silence descends from the encroaching forests but my mind still screams.