“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

The benefits of meditation can be yours for only $700, according to a women's beauty magazine.

Maybe I had an awareness of what meditation is before about 2006, but that year was the first time I tried it for myself. This was the middle of undergrad and I was procrastinating on my homework so zealously and successfully that I was always finding myself days (hours) away from a deadline and with a lot of stress. Part of my procrastination was dedicated to researching ways to reduce my anxiety (save the very obvious approach of doing work on time; that would have been too, well, obvious). 

Vegan eating was still a very fringe activity eight years ago so when I wanted a treat at the end of a week, I'd go to the Whole Foods salad bar. Sometimes I would add a magazine to my purchase to read it with dinner. It seems almost redundant to list the types of magazines Whole Foods carries, but, suffice it to say, there was more than one each about Buddhism and yoga. Knowing nothing about either, other than that both promised their practitioner a peaceful mind, I reached for the esoteric Buddhism ones. Yoga was peaking among my peer group, making its claims of peace seem more dubious. 

Inside the glossy pages I learned about the technique of meditation. Science was starting to more seriously study meditation's benefits and alongside serene looking monks the magazines had photos of brains in all sorts of colors, the brains of meditators less chaotically hewed. 

Here was as close a thing as you could get to a cure for America's anxiety and best of all it was free! Sure, the back of the magazines included advertisements for cushions and Tibetan ringing bowls and incense and all sorts of meditation accoutrements. But no one claimed they were necessary. Sit on your butt, preferably in a cross-legged position if you can't do lotus, and close your eyes for a bit of time. There weren't even fancy timer apps you could download for your iPhone because no one had an iPhone. 

Free was a price point that played well with my student budget. And so I tried to learn how to sit. I'd put my alarm clock next to me, look at the time, and close my eyes. In the beginning I'd open them ever so slightly -- somehow this felt less like cheating -- to peak again and I'd find barely two minutes had passed. Eventually I started sitting for longer, working up to 15 minutes at a time. Fifteen minutes of sitting doesn't sound too hard, hell, office workers sit for eight hours a day, but this sitting was mentally and physically tougher. As I got better, there were no extra bells or whistles to buy. As my practice became more serious, there were no upgrades I had to do to my equipment because the only thing one needs to meditate is a place to sit or stand or lay down or jump (you get the idea). 

I was reminded of this yesterday when I was flipping through a women's beauty magazine. I forget which one, but nearly any of them would do the same thing, I'm sure. On seeing a feature on meditation my first response was delight that this activity, which I had ceased talking about with people because it made me seem even more fringe than the above-mentioned veganism, had gone mainstream. Of course my delight turned sour on the next page, when I learned that to improve my practice I should buy a cushion ($100), a Tibetan ringing bowl ($105), a semi-precious stone to stare at ($350), incense ($25) and a bench ($200). 

Meditation is about sitting, or not, for a long time, or just a short one, not trying consciously to do anything. There's nothing wrong with buying a $100 cushion to sit on. It just seems antithetical to the point of the practice to suggest these items to purchase at the end of an article about an activity that's about minimizing. Staring at a $350 stone instead of whatever random junk happens to be around you when you sit doesn't make the practice less true. But it is maybe not true to the spirit of the practice to sell it to American women in this way. 

Don’t share your favorite books. Don’t share your favorite books with almost lovers, with best friends, with your mother. Hoard them. Keep their words locked up in hardcovers, paperbacks, trade paper, on a Kindle or iPad. If you have a vault in your home, keep the copies of your favorite books secured inside. Spin the dial, maybe forget the combination. On your bookshelf, turn the spine of your favorite books away from the peripatetic eyes of nosy visitors.

Would you like to know what losing a bit of your soul feels like? No? Well, then don’t share your favorite books with anyone.

Consider the implications. Today you give your favorite book to a human, a beautiful, messy, imperfect fellow human, and you trust them to treat it kindly. Maybe they even begin to love your favorite book like how you love your favorite book, like how you love them.

But what happens when the messy, imperfect human, who has now left a shadow of themselves across the pages of your favorite book, exercises his or her prerogative to be a jerk? A clean excision of a human from your life, while hard, can be accomplished. Don’t allow your favorite book to become collateral damage in the cleanup.

Maybe your favorite book is a classic of the genre, a hundred-year-old, thousand-page tome. Perhaps it’s a crime procedural. Don’t tell me about your favorite book. Don’t trust me with the secret of the words and ideas that have become your emotional education.

In the center of the world lives a man who still believes that he can change himself. He believes other people are to blame and that he, at his core, is good, only contaminated by the ills of those who surround him. For his birthday his mother bought him a suit, his dad took him to a tailor. On the weekends he reads books and goes for a ride. Fresh air is good for the soul, the cooler the better to cleanse him from the inside, he says, drawing on his gloves and double hat and opening the front door. Breathe, he tells himself, breathe and be renewed. He tinkers with his bike and, occasionally, his car, proud of the grease on his hands, holding them up higher to admire the grit that he believes means he's done real work. Self-doubt he reads as only the rest of the world trying to bring him down. Though often uncomfortable, he tries harder, goes bigger, thrusts his hands into the air to make a point and laughs -- oh, he laughs -- and smiles and looks you right in the eye, looking for a connection to the depth he sees in you and wishes to appropriate for himself. Others take pity on him, holding him by the shoulder and hoping through a gentle touch to ground him, literally to nudge him to feel the earth he stands on and by that to gain perspective. He resists. And he soars instead, discarding contemplation, favoring to be guided by intuition. But his life, same as it ever was, continues to be ill-fitting, to itch and he can't scratch it vigorously enough to get relief. No matter, he's right and everyone else is wrong and this will have to be enough for now. 

He first noticed cracks in the illusion when his wife left him. And the first sign of that was the dog. Or more accurately, the absence of the dog. His food bowl and toys were gone, but most peculiar was the missing stash of plastic bags they used to pick up after the dog. She was detail oriented, that's why he married her, and now, as she struck back at him as close as she could aim to his heart, he could do nothing but admire her thoroughness. He had no use for the collection, anyway, so better that she took them. It was a mid-spring day when she took off, a Friday afternoon. Sun was still boring through the kitchen he was standing in, the white walls and white cabinets and white furniture amplifying the brightness.

Ambling through the house — formerly their house but now his house — he began to note the things he would now need to buy to fill his life up again. He would miss the fragrance of her lotions and powders, the way they mixed and warmed up their bedroom with femininity. Eventually that, too, could be replaced.