Sometimes life hurtles toward a serenity ever beyond reach: If I can just get through airport security, then I can relax. If I can just get on the plane, then I can relax. If I can just get to the hotel. If I can just get into my room. If I can just get to the bar to meet my friend. If I can just get this talk over with.
Yet: Trains don’t come. Flights are delayed. Phones are left in cabs. Cab dispatchers are called by the hotel desk. Bags are dropped off in a rush. Friends are kept waiting at the bar while you wait outside for the driver to return your phone. You realize too late you probably should’ve tipped the guy.
It’s the kind of logic that gets one into trouble in both life and writing. Storylines run and run when they should be abandoned, because relaxation doesn’t come on its own. You decide to be relaxed. You decide on poise and ease and when these things are most essential is precisely the moment before the moment, right when you start thinking, If I can just …
The morning before my talk at XOXO I try to cut the storyline. I meditate, I journal, I sit and read the words of a Leonard Cohen song off a wall on the mezzanine of the Portland Ace Hotel. It’s the second time Cohen has come up in recent weeks, which pings my sonar of things I should be interested in. I let this sonar dictate a surprising amount of what I read and watch and listen to. A single bleep could be nothing, just a glitch. Two bleeps means watch this space. Three means do something about it. Four or more and we have Obsession. The analogy is imperfect, because the more unexpected the encounter, too, the stronger the signal.
I give the talk and I seem calm on stage, at least that’s what friends tell me afterwards. Some find relief after a talk is finished, a book published, an email newsletter sent. For me it’s the opposite: my nerves are most racked after the thing, and I wonder why. Maybe because there is suddenly this piece of me out there in the world and thus frozen in time and inboxes and collective memory and thus untakebackable, outside my control. After the talk I make a quick exit.
If I can just get out of this room …
If I can just get some tea …
I come back to the festival and talk to a new friend. Our conversation wanders to meditation. I’m reading a book about Tibetan Buddhism, I tell him. He recommends a documentary about The Tibetan Book of Dead. It’s narrated, he says, by Leonard Cohen.
And now I’m sitting in the mezzanine of the Ace Hotel with not enough sleep waiting for the Powell’s a few blocks away to open so I can walk in and pick up a book of Cohen’s poetry that I found while Googling on my phone at five-thirty in the morning.
If I can just get that book …