audio monastery

On TikTok I follow a Buddhist monk— a reminder to ‘be here now.’ It's a phrase he's fond of repeating. He wears a retainer, smiles frequently and has great skin. He seems peaceful, confident and calm.

‘Impeccable vibe,’ as my 22-year-old roommate would say.

She'd be right, too, though I'm convinced nobody knows for certain what a 'vibe' really is. It's a feeling, inexact and reliant upon individual interpretation. Maybe it’s the art of personhood. Maybe art, too, is just a feeling.

There aren’t many instances in modern life where we’re forced to turn to feelings in lieu of words. There used to be, back when we were toddlers, or even further back, before our prehistoric ancestors got a grip on language. I wonder what their vibe was like?

No way to know. The picture rendered in my mind is as incomplete as theirs would be of me. There’s stones, there’s grass, there’s pairs of limbs and hands. Hardly the makings of a ‘vibe’.

I remember the TikTok monk once mentioning that desire is the root of all suffering.

'Too true,' I thought then, reflecting on own desires. There are an awful lot. Maybe that's the problem. 'Be here now' is a sort of end-all. I want, I want, I want. I want to give, I want to earn, I want to win. I want to be beautiful, and funny, and smart. I want a better world, a more just society. I want to be loved, want to be loved better. I want to understand, want to be understood. I want better weather, cheaper rent, more money and new sneakers.

Maybe there's a honky-tonk town down in the deep green of Appalachia, or a dusty watering hole somewhere in West Texas, where the wanting, overtaken by a simpler way of life, finally stops. That must be what a monastery is like. No way for me to know, obstructed as I am by sheer lack of experience. All the monasteries I've seen have been on TV, and I've never been to Texas. My daydreams are a patchwork of generalized notions—nowhere close to the here and now.

Surely there are moments when we're better off not 'being here now'. Isn't that what hope is for? Is hope not a form of wanting, of desire? Could the same be said of acts of prayer?

If the mind were a line, and the 'now' set firmly in the middle—with hope and desire venturing off in one direction—on the opposing side I think we'd find our memories. Illusive, hard-earned, somehow both potent and powerless, a source that, of course, can't be endless, yet feels like it is so.

Who would we be without them?

They shoot up out of nowhere, our memories. Triggered by all sorts of thing: songs, smells, places, tastes. It's easy to become overrun by them, and with them, their many cohorts: life lessons, regrets, traumas, family recipes, nostalgia. Our individual history, the invisible tapestry of our lives. How easy it is to swaddle ourselves with it.

If the memories themselves aren't endless, then at least the way we interpret them is, and therein lies the problem:

The past and the future are simply too big.

There is nothing, I think, so simple, so honest as the present. The inimitable now.

Here we are at this moment, on a sphere suspended in nothingness, vibing around in the cutthroat cosmos. Terrifyingly vulnerable, and boldly thinking nothing of it. Memories and desires pouring down on us like ash, like confetti. Obscuring our vision. Teasing us out of the now.

I will learn to let them fall.

—

Right now, my here and now is New York City, where we make noise in abundance. This is inherent to any city, but here it is a particular source of pride. Here it is rowdy, crowded, overwhelming to the unaccustomed. Silence, when found, is short-lived, and reserved for the meekest hours of weekday mornings.

To seek out tranquility in such an environment is laughable, like trying to remove spray-paint with a pencil eraser. And since we cannot remove the noise, or the graffiti, what remains is to conceal. Paint to cover paint. Sound to muffle sound.

A playlist for the here and now.