Yes, I have an unquiet mind.

I fight anxiety, and so I have tried at various times to meditate. I often think of Leonard Cohen, how he spent five years in a Buddhist monastery, was both a Buddhist and an observant Jew. But did it give him peace? Perhaps, but his songs, even his last ones like ‘If it be your will,’ show him still struggling for it.

One time during the 1990s, when I had lost two beloved friends, I went for three days in January to a retreat in Darien, Connecticut, after visiting my mother in Rowayton, whose Alzheimers was progressing. The retreat was at The Convent of St. Birgitta. They gave me one of the little rooms on the second floor. Over the head of my iron twin bed hung the cross. It was peaceful, simple, serene. When I woke up in the morning, I could hear the nuns praying, singing beautiful Gregorian chants. At noon and at dinner time, a nun struck a large gong announcing it was time for food for the women who were staying as guests.

I had intentionally not brought any work with me, but also no books to read for pleasure. What had I been thinking? Now I found myself with nothing to do! Nothing! So, I went out to the living area, sat on the sofa looking out towards the wooded grounds, which were now covered with snow that had fallen during the night. The sun was shining, beautiful, but I was bored after ten minutes. I found a small room with a TV set to a channel with the Mass, and a handful of books, including a history of the nuns of St Birgitta.

There was nothing to do but sit. I couldn’t stop thinking of my sad mother, silent, her mind disappearing, sitting motionless for hours in her padded recliner just ten miles away.

Maybe I should take a walk, but there was nowhere to go. It was several miles to Darien, with snow and ice everywhere. And now I would be here for three days.

Ever since I can remember, even as a child, I’ve hated being bored, even found the Sabbath quiet uncomfortable, but at least I was allowed to read. It is not that I cannot be in the moment and present. I am totally present when I am with friends, when I am teaching or meeting my students. I also am when writing (yes, that is work, but I am totally absorbed), when I am cooking (selecting the ingredients, choosing flavors, chopping, stirring, arranging). There is something that energizes me in all those activities. But they are not meditation.

A year ago, my wonderful son gave me a subscription to “Waking Up,” an app he thought might help with my anxiety. The program starts with brief ten minute meditations, helpful advice and instructions, and then you progress. But quickly I ran into problems. “Everything is passing, nothing lasts, whatever is here will be gone.”

This message was (paradoxically) a constant. Yes, I know that, and yes I’ve read Montaigne, and Donne, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress:”

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near

and Herrick’s “Corinna’s Going A Maying:”

Our life is short; and our days run

As fast away as does the Sun.

And as a vapour, or a drop of rain

Once lost, can ne’r be found again.

I did not need to be reminded of the brevity and evanescence of life. To hear I have no self, and that everything passes was not helping. I knew I wanted to make the most of everything, of every moment.

Still, I have not given up on being in the moment in a calmer way that doesn’t require physical or mental activity, that is more relaxing. I have, at least for now (who knows how long) a place that works, my happy place. My corner apartment in Riverdale---on a high floor—looks west out towards to Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. To the north is Westchester, full of trees. The light is always changing. Sometimes a hawk swoops by my window. Tankers and boats sometimes sit out bad weather in the river. I can see a whole world looking out from my perch.

In the warmer months, I sit on my terrace, looking at the ever-changing horizon, the sun slowly setting, sending streams of color—orange, red, fuchsia—across the darkening sky creating slivers of gold on the undersides of clouds. I look at the Hudson River, always in motion (like me?), especially when the tide is changing (the Hudson is a rare river that has tides).

For the moment, I experience awe, the miracle of life, and I feel at peace.

I have an overactive mind, always thinking.

If I’m working on a paper, it is there in my head at night, particularly in the early morning. Sometimes sentences come even while I’m sleeping!

I’ve had this gift (though it comes with an exhausting price), ever since I was a child, growing up in what I now call a “house of doom,” with a father who believed he was the last prophet, the prophet of the end-times. How could I possibly be calm? At least from the time I was eight, I found myself observing and analyzing (and, yes, sometimes writing).

One of my brothers could escape into fantasy and art, or make his mind go blank. But I was hypervigilant, always watching out, because I was never sure what would happen next. An unquiet mind, like the title of Kay Jamison’s wonderful book, only I am not bi-polar.

No wonder one of my favorite literary writers is the seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poet John Donne, always thinking in new ways, figuring things out with metaphors that startle the brain, whether he’s talking about erotic love or about God. Later in his life he wrote “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” when he was deathly ill and almost died. Twenty-three meditations chart the course of his illness as well as his physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences (Aren’t they all intertwined?) He wanted to find meaning in his experience.

Published in 1624, after he recovered, his Devotions have continued to touch readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The phrase “for whom the bell tolls,” from Meditation 17, (referring to the funeral bell rung at a church when a member died) served as the title for Hemmingway’s novel of the same name. Donne’s Devotions found an eager audience during the AIDs crisis, for he spoke to the specific experiences and anguish of people affected by the disease—the wasting sickness, the marks, the isolation and fear of contagion. Then in 2020 came Covid-19, yet another plague. Andrew Como, as governor of New York, in his briefings, quoted “No man is an island” when stating the general public, nurses and hospitals, all needed to work together. As we were coming out of isolation, I included some of Donne’s meditations in my “Seventeenth-century Prose and Poetry” course, which I had subtitled: The Plague Years. My students fell in love with Donne. What he wrote almost exactly 400 years earlier resonated with them, powerfully during a time when Bessel Van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” had been on the New York Times Bestseller List for hundreds of weeks.

Because, of course, we are anxious people, living in dark times, fighting fear in a world that seems broken in so many ways. Sometimes we are told not to “overthink” things. Just do it.

But there is a passage in Donne’s Devotions that particularly resonates for me, and that I read with my students. It comes in Meditation 12, where the physicians “apply pigeons, to draw the vapours from the head.” This bizarre medical treatment prompts Donne to think about why and how he has “vapours” in his head. Knowing these vapors can kill a person leads him to conclude there is something self-destructive in each of us, that our mind, the very act of thinking, physiologically can destroy us. (He is so far ahead of his time, but he also comes close to blaming God for making us this way.) So here is the wonderful passage in which Donne thinks about thinking. I hope you will like it as much as I do — paradoxically, its brilliance and wit make me happy.

“wee are not onely passive, but active too, to our owne destruction; But what have I done, either to breed or to breath these vapors ? They tell me it is my Melancholy; Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe ? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke ? It is my study; doth not my Calling call for that?”