Tawfiq

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GETTING TO A MINDFUL UTOPIA
Tawfiq Ali

Advisor: Prof. Charles Nesson

Author’s Note

The words that follow on these pages are a work of fiction, though I am unable to truthfully state that all similarities between the characters and events depicted and real life people and occurrences are purely coincidental.

Many of the ideas expressed in this work, through its characters, are inspired by studies and conversations with my college professor, mentor, and dear friend Ellen Langer. I worry that this work will not do justice to the unending support and wisdom that she has offered me in the understanding of people, and in the way of living a mindful life.

I.

I am starting all over again, as we all must from time to time. To begin again is the hardest thing. To begin something new is to confront fear. I am afraid. The fear of uncertainty, the fear of failure, the fear of rejection—it is all too much. My entire life, I have begun things and I have failed to begin things. Sometimes I have started timidly, or I have stopped before I could finish. At times, I have overcome fear, but only for a little while. Always, the fear reawakens like a sleeping dragon that is never killed, but is at best only hidden away in its unexplored cave, and forgotten.

A little thing I did in the past has come back to haunt me. It was such a forgettable thing. Just a few words that I published. Anyone else could have written those words, and some people have written something like them. For someone in my role, however, those words were a type of secular blasphemy that the public would not soon accept.

Once you say something in writing, however, it is hard to take it back, even if writing in this age rarely involves etchings in stone. But even if I could take it all back, I would not want to. I think I would lose a part of myself if I did.

I am reclaiming a vision, a passion that I would have probably long forgotten because my fear would drive me away from it. But this time, I had no choice in the matter—or did I? The vision is comprised of a set of imperfect thoughts, multiple uncertainties, just a little bit of science, and a lot of hope and imagination. It is a vision I do not believe in completely, but want so badly to trust. After living a life of practicality, I yearn for that rash, naïve, idealistic bent that characterized my more childlike years. So here I am, ready to say some things that I have long been afraid to say; confronting the fact that I have been a coward for so long; regretful, knowing that I have found success, but mainly in accomplishing ambitions unsuitable for me.

I feel the churned mix of sickness and excitement in my stomach as I wonder where this new turn will lead me. As I enter back into the stream of life, I wonder whether recognizing life’s lack of essential meaning will lead to sure misery, or instead, real freedom.

II.

I sat at my desk in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, when I heard an angry voice on the intercom.

“Come into my office!”

“Senator, is something wrong?” I asked.

“Just get in here,” she replied, in a way that compelled compliance.

I felt the stare of their eyes as the other members of the senator’s staff watched me pull my body out of my chair in slow motion. I took a black pen and a yellow legal pad out of my desk drawer, and crept toward the senator’s office door. I knocked.

“Don’t knock, I already told you to come in!” she said, in a way to make sure that everyone else in the office could hear her. She was right, though; I was only delaying the inevitable. I timidly stepped in.

“Sorry Senator…” I began.

“Sit down,” she ordered. “It’s interesting to me how every day in this office you put on an act. You’re the quiet guy in the corner who dutifully does as he is told, is overly polite, and hardly ever has an original opinion on anything. It’s fine, at least you get it done well enough, and you don’t usually cause any trouble.” I was wondering why she used the word “usually,” and not “never.”

“Senator, I’m just trying to do the best I can…”

“Just sit down! Tell me, was there any other person with your name at Harvard Law School, class of 2007?”

I finally sat down, and answered, “No ma’am, I’m quite sure about that.”

“So this was you!” she snarled, with that same tone of voice that brought me into her office. She was pointing accusingly at her computer screen.

“I don’t understand. Are you looking at an old picture of me or something?” I asked.

“Why are you sitting there? Get up and step around my desk and look at this.”

I did as commanded, and looked at the computer screen. It showed an Internet webpage titled “Living a Mindful Life.”

“Oh, that…” I started saying, as I waited for her to interrupt again.

“Yes, that. It turns out John has a lot of free time on his hands. He did a Google search for your name, and found this. He just emailed me this link.”

John was one of the interns in the office who was spending the summer between his sophomore and junior college years taking what was essentially a ten-week field trip to Washington, looking for a few new things to put on his resume. Well, I did not know what his real reason for being there was. I just assumed. We tend to assume that others are as we are.

At the moment, I was wishing that I knew John’s last name, so that I could Google him.

“It’s just a blog that I published my first semester of law school,” I explained, “I hardly wrote any entries.”

“Yes, but you wrote this one. Look at it: ‘Mindful Utopia.’” She announced the title of the post while raising her index and middle fingers to simulate quotation marks as she read the word “utopia.”

“Yes, I was a little naïve and starry-eyed back then,” I said.

“Yeah, but some of the things you said in this post don’t seem particularly innocent. What does this mean?” she asked, as she proceeded to read a passage from my rantings. “‘The law claims to bind the hands of evil men, but society’s laws are precisely the source of much that is thought evil. I suspect that if every law were stricken, we would all be better off for it. But few are even willing to consider it,’” she read, deliberately mumbling to make it sound like gibberish. “When I hired you, you did not tell me you were an advocate of anarchy.”

“I don’t know that I would say that I am…”

“But these are your words, and anyone can find them. And now that you work here, these words will be associated with me. I cannot allow this. I want you to delete the posts right now, and I seriously hope that no one has cached it somewhere on some server, because then I really don’t know how you’re going to fix this. After you delete the post, we’ll talk about whether you will continue to have your job here.”

“Senator, I’m sorry, but I can’t delete them.”

“Why is that?”

“Because when I wrote those words, I meant them. And even today, deep down, I think I believe they might be true.”

For the first time that day, her angry tone subsided. It was replaced by a deep sigh. “I see,” she said. “I guess that conversation about whether you will continue to work here will no longer be necessary. Please start packing up your things….”

“Wait!” I squealed, trying my own hand at interruption. “Senator, I know that I wouldn’t now say those things that I said then. I know that saying something like that is politically dangerous. But please. My whole life has been a series of events leading me here, to have a place in your office. In my most neurotic dreams, I saw myself coming here to begin to change the world—at least to play a part in changing it. Please don’t send me away now. If I have lost my job, at least let me sit with you again to talk about this, and perhaps then, I will not see my coming here as a complete failure. I know there is some wisdom in what I said then. It isn’t even my wisdom—it is borrowed wisdom. But it has been so long. Perhaps if you could give me my lunch break to collect my thoughts, I can come back to see you this afternoon. If what I have to tell you then doesn’t win my job back, I will thank you for your indulgence, and be on my way.”

“Okay, fine,” she relented. “Make it a long lunch break. I’m meeting with the majority leader, and he has a tendency to go on and on. Come back around three o’clock. If I feel like talking to you then, we’ll talk.” I could tell she felt obligated to give me a chance to explain myself, but did not want to admit such an obligation.

“Oh, can I go to lunch with you?” I asked, forgetting that I really did need the time to figure out how to save my job.

“No! I’ve never heard a peep from you before, and now all of a sudden you’ve grown some serious...”

“Sorry, you’re right,” I said, interrupting again because I did not want her to finish that sentence. “I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“We’ll see about that…”

III.

I left her office around noon, and spent the three hours I had reading every word I wrote in that series of blog posts. I became nostalgic. I remembered that writing those entries was my release from the cold calculated rationalism that I relied on each day of law school. I had always felt that there was no room for emotion in law school discussions, only analysis, and from time to time, reference to some statute or legal opinion. And I did reasonably well playing the game, according to its rules, as I understood them. But on the inside, I was entirely vulnerable. On the inside, I was all heart. The heart was losing.

I spoke from the heart only in one place—on that webpage. It was the one place I expressed my hidden thoughts—some of them, that is. Even then, I was embarrassed. I never seriously wanted anyone to find it. I don’t think anyone ever did, until now. Perhaps I thought that if I simply put thoughts out into cyberspace, I would fulfill my responsibility to be an authentic person. It took blind faith to hope that some anonymous audience would discover unadvertised bits of data and be moved by my message—faith that was not much different from the belief that an unseen divine entity listened to my prayers. But since neither God nor humanity ever wrote back, I stopped writing too.

Many of my writings revolved around Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s theories on mindfulness. The spring semester of my senior college year, I made the fortunate decision to take Professor Langer’s course on social psychology. The very first day of class, she announced that she was going to teach us things that had the potential to change our lives. She said that if we were not interested in radically changing our lives, we probably would not enjoy her course, and should consider taking one with a different professor. I accepted the challenge, and she did not fail to live up to her promise.

I loved Professor Langer’s course so much that I was sad when it had to end, and regretted that I had not come across her work earlier in my life. I then decided to defer my admission to law school for a year so that I could spend it helping her conduct social psychology experiments. Really, more than anything, I was looking forward to the conversations I would have with her several times a week about anything and everything. I was entirely prepared to become her disciple. Fortunately for me, she had no objection to my plans.

To me, Professor Langer’s work on mindfulness was and continues to be revolutionary. It is simple, but profound. Essentially, mindfulness involves certain states of mind where a person is open to actively noticing and creating new perceptions and possibilities. Its antithesis, mindlessness, involves states of mind where a person is closed off to novelty—trapped by old habits, perceptions, and ways of thinking. The studies on mindfulness persuasively show that study participants who are primed to be more mindful receive significant physical and psychological benefits. For example, in one of her most famous studies, Professor Langer showed that when residents at a nursing home were given the opportunity to make more decisions and to organize their days independent of the routines commonly imposed by their caretakers, they not only experienced a greater sense of control and happiness, but they were also significantly more likely to live longer. Sadly, the opposite, mindlessness inducing scheme, was and continues to be much more pervasive, both in nursing homes and in the vast majority of our institutions. With that pervasiveness of mindlessness come the costs of mindlessness.

Professor Langer and I soon came to discuss the potential personal and societal costs imposed by our systems of law. It is on that topic that I wrote the final blog entry, “Mindful Utopia,” the very post that many years later, put my job in jeopardy.

All too quickly, I left behind the life-altering teachings on mindfulness, leaving documented on that webpage my forgotten struggles and temporary successes in attempting to live a mindful life. I went on to graduate law school and spent a summer cramming for the bar exam. Then I spent two years doing what I never thought I would do when I started law school. I worked at a large law firm representing even larger corporations. I needed the money. I needed the prestige. And then, I needed to leave. I wish I could say that I left due to some great principled reason. I didn’t.

After being praised for my good work at every turn at the firm, I finally met a critic. She was the partner in charge of a patent infringement lawsuit on behalf of one pharmaceutical company against another. She also happened to be seven months pregnant, which was obviously showing. I noticed.

The case was six months away from trial. Some of our witnesses gave favorable statements to an investigator, but did not want to testify in court. It was my task to research the law of evidence to discover some loophole in the rule precluding hearsay testimony, which otherwise would prohibit the jury from hearing the out-of-court statements made by our absent witnesses. Three days after receiving the assignment, I submitted a memorandum detailing at least eight far-fetched ways the testimony might be admitted. The partner took the memo, and snidely remarked that she expected to see it a day sooner. That small critique was enough to drive me to find new employment.

I am still ashamed about that. Somewhere in the shadows of my mind, I hated being an accomplished man who had to answer to a superior, pregnant woman. No one would ever know why I left the firm. Unfortunately I, however, do know.

I then remembered that there was a time when I wanted to be a leader, to “change the world,” as they say. My way to lead would be to enter politics. That would be a good thing for my ego, I thought. I was too meek to challenge authority, so it made sense that I should become the very type of authority figure that I so feared. But to get there, I decided that I needed to get schooled in politics. So, I decided that I wanted to be a politician’s lackey—to yoke myself again, deferring freedom for the sake of attaining freedom. It seemed so logical. The mind is so easily yanked by strange logic.

The guilt from leaving the law firm for the reason I did was still stinging. The only way to forget the guilt, I thought, was to work for another powerful woman, and to begin to confront some of my demons.

And the senator was indeed powerful. She was no nonsense, colorful, immensely intelligent, and, oddly, always charismatic. She never used that sugarcoated speech that other politicians had mastered, and she was never afraid to accept boos from the crowd or to say the unpopular thing. But she, herself, was wildly popular because she was so trustable, so real. I wanted to be real.

I found an opening on the senator’s website as a legislative aide, and applied. The senator liked my resume, but there were other resumes, I’m sure, just as good or better. I do not know what she liked about me, but it took her only a phone call and a split-second decision to give me a job. So I came to Capitol Hill, and soon forgot why I had come. Instead, I spent a month getting used to my now familiar, three-walled cubicle.