each other

In 2008 I collected what in retrospect was a fairly modest sales commission but at the time was the most money I’d ever had in my bank account and left an awful phone sales job for the mountains of Thailand to follow the cliche of getting certified to teach English as a Second Language. I was a year out of undergrad with a degree I felt ambivalent about, completely oblivious to the impact the looming Great Recession would ultimately have on my overall career trajectory, and, as was my tendency, was searching for the next thing. The plan was to take the one month intensive, get certified, travel around for a time and then come home or continue on with something in my pocket that could keep me running.

I stayed in Chiang Mai for almost a year, shoestringed around on that bonus and my near-negligible Thai teaching salary until I could no longer keep running, and had to phone home for a one-way ticket back to reality.

Many of my stories are iterations of the same theme: That is, not being able to sit, stay. When you can’t sit with yourself, travel is an exquisite charade—I was seeing the world! Meeting extraordinary people along the way! Getting the type of life education I could never get from sitting in a cubicle or in a traditional classroom! All of these things were absolutely true, and so were their shadow sides: The constant onslaught of novel experiences while living in a foreign land was just the right cocktail to cover up my aimlessness and staggering lack of self-esteem, while fueling the type of Magical Thinking that had me believe that opportunities would always be available to me, not by dint of any of my own merit, but simply because I wanted them.

A couple of months into my stay, I discovered a magic space where I started practicing yoga everyday and met some friends and teachers who altered the trajectory of my life (I would go on to teach yoga for the next decade), and, all this rambling is leading up to a story I’m going to tell you about another traveler I met on the mat.

Her name was Nadia. She was a petite, dark-haired-dark-eyed Italian woman a few years older than me who I thought was so interesting because, unlike me, who kind of glommed around in a band of fellow wannabe permanent residents, she rode alone: She had rented and was living in a place by herself, in a quieter part of the old city. She was self-possessed and sharp and of course spoke perfect English (we Americans so rarely have to try hard at anything) and though we never became particularly close, I enjoyed practicing next to her, hanging out in the sauna with her on Friday nights, and when she announced that she was moving on from Chiang Mai to head back to Pune, India to finish her yoga training, I was sad, though not surprised—when you live the way we were living, people come and go constantly, and you learn to navigate relationships with built in expiration dates.

Not quite a year after I’d returned back to San Francisco mid-recession to answer phones at an engineering firm and live off burritos and kitchari, there was a terrorist attack in Pune, India, at a German bakery. I found out via Facebook from mutual friends still back in Thailand that Nadia had died in the bombing. I remember gasping, hand to mouth. Frantically scrolling through news outlets for any details. I hadn’t really thought about her since the last time I saw her. And yet, her death staggered me, and it wasn’t just because I peripherally knew someone who had died in a horrible way. It was more than that. But what?

I was deep into my own yoga training, muddling my way through my own spiritual inquiry, utterly obsessed with doing whatever it would take to rid myself of the gaping black hole at the center of my guts, this strange engine that had me running and numbing my way through life. Nadia’s death snapped me out of my own self-absorption.

Spiritual practice teaches us that we are all connected. This is a challenging concept for westerners. Like, it sounds nice, right? I can understand it intellectually. And, it takes a lot of awareness to de-program ourselves from a culture that prefers we stay engrossed in our own bootstrap pulling. That commands that we stay in competition with each other, rather than in community. That encourages Us vs. Them thinking, that hones in on our differences rather than all that unites us.

As I connected with friends who had known her, most of us still scattered all over the world, I got present to a visceral sense of what up to that point had only been figurative, metaphorical, theoretical. Nadia was me. I was her. There was actually no difference between us. People dying in a terrorist attack in a faraway land was no longer an easily swept under the rug abstraction. Under slightly different circumstances, it could have been me in that bakery—another young woman searching, grasping, yearning for a meaningful life. I thought about her family, my family. I thought about all of us, who were lucky enough to know her. I thought about all we would never know, all the things the world is robbed of when we lose people before their time.

Nadia was already one of my teachers. She exuded all the qualities I desperately wanted to find within myself. And she’s been on my mind again, all these years later, as I think about all she taught me in death, as I struggle to make sense of this pandemic. Of the deep losses we are swimming in, of the grief that we will carry for the rest of our lives. Of the evil of a government who believes the loss of human life of this magnitude is the cost of doing business. Of the chasm between what is currently true about the society we live in, and what is possible, and my lack of faith that we as a collective are ready to make a leap toward a world where we don’t question our interdependence. Where we take care of each other as beloved.

Eleven years ago, I was ever on the run, because I was terrified that if I stopped, I would be swallowed whole. I had to outrun the dervish that threatened to spin me off the edge. It would take me many more years to face these dark parts of myself, to no longer be on the lam from my life. I kept going, yes, and, I learned to stay. Getting to stay is a miracle. Every last one of us is a miracle. I want us to care for each other through this dark time, even as we must keep apart. I want us to stay. I don’t want anyone to go anywhere.