The Practice of Stopping Practice
Content Warning: Some graphic language
They had warned him. When Sam died folks told him it was important to stay active, to stay engaged in activities outside the house, to make sure he didn’t “isolate.” He appreciated this advice, but it felt to him as observations made from outside his life. And from the inside he observed that no one invited him to any activity with them. They were Sam’s friends, and so the connections with them died with Sam. The last time he would see most of these friends was at the memorial service. A service of Buddhist prayers for arrival in the Pure Land for Sam, a lapsed and crusty Methodist.
In those months right after the memorial service he did stay at home too much. He felt the isolation, he felt himself shrinking into something smaller than he had been. Sam’s organization and efficient systems didn’t last long. His shoes piled up haphazardly at the front door. The peanut butter in the refrigerator was never on the same shelf, and sometimes mysteriously there were two jars opened. Towels hung damp in the bathroom; he showered and used the damp towels. His skin smelled of mildew as he stood up from the sofa to make another cup of tea. He changed his clothes and dropped the dirty clothes on the floor by the hamper by the back door. Weeks went by–he started to pick up dirty clothes from the pile there to wear a second time, a third. He could see himself making these mistakes. He didn’t like the mistakes, but he didn’t stop making them.
He couldn’t find things. He was always looking for the dogs’ leashes; they never seemed to be in the place he left them. And the dogs were desperate for exercise, for getting out of the nest of loss and old age. Then for two weeks he couldn’t find his debit card. He was out of food and needed to buy more food, but had no cash and no card. He went to the bank and ordered a replacement card. The next day he picked a shirt up from the mound of dirty clothes by the back door. The old card was in the breast pocket.
Some weeks he forgot to clean the cat’s box. Some weeks he forgot to take the trash and recycling out to the bins–he ran out of plastic trash bags and started to collect the trash–food scraps, junk, unopened bills, recycling–in Tupperware containers. One week he just took all the containers and dumped them all in their bins (he still thought of Sam as the co-owner of everything he had), and when theirs were full, in the neighbor’s bins sitting at the curb for trash pick up day.
One afternoon, five or six months after the memorial services, he sat in the overgrown back yard. Weeds there, triggered by the spring rains, were climbing the rickety fences of splintered wood and chicken wire; everything in the garden was green, messy and moist. He smelled the organic stink of decomposing plants and junk and minty smell of the wild nettles along the edge of the garage. Sitting there he felt that something suddenly felt very wrong and it was his fault. He thought about Sam–seeing the snow skis leaning against the back of the garage. He should sell them–he vaguely remembered how proud Sam was that he had spent so much money on them. The little old plastic patio chair wobbled; he knew what a pathetic scene he had allowed to grow around him. He accepted somewhere in his distracted attention that it was time to do something different. He felt lost and unexpectedly he didn’t want to be lost. He needed to pay attention. That he said this to himself in his freighted mind, that he wanted to name, was something new for him. Something about the skis, he was bored by the skis, he felt they were cluttering his life, he was angry at the skis. Sam’s objects were taking space from him. He felt diminished, diminishing. And as he sat on the chair in the wet and dirty yard, he said out loud, “it is my fault.”
He couldn’t figure out if his guilt was a simple habit; the surface of cause and effect. But it seemed to him that he needed to simply get on with it, change something, something vague but looming. To choose differently, starting as soon as possible. In that garden he suddenly had too many thoughts not to make conclusions.This unease cluttered and grew his thoughts as the rain had changed the garden. Something was in his way, and his numbed grief had hidden the obstruction. Maybe the barrier was larger, epic, cosmic and all he had was a language too small to frame it. He lifted one arm and shook it in the air. The moment of inchoate revelation just ran up and down his spine as he sat in the crooked plastic chair. The anxiety was pleasurable, powerful. Suddenly every blade of grass in the mush around him was him. He said out loud, “maybe I don’t contain multitudes, but a paragraph surely isn’t enough to hold me and what I am seeing now.” This didn’t make sense to him. He had studied Buddhism for years, before COVID. As Sam aged and needed more of his attention, as he ate horrid food and gained so much weight, he’d stopped practicing. But in this moment, in that horrid back yard, he sensed that his whole being was being exposed in the spring air and sunlight, out in the air and raw. Impermanent, he was temporary. He had forgotten this. He had forgotten that his emptiness could also generate something brand new. He said out loud again, “anything new only emerges from emptiness.” He was sure about that though; it seemed like it might be something he wanted to retrieve from past practice but he might be lying to himself. Oh then, how he doubled over at his lying. “I am so fucking exhausted with my lazy lies.” Or perhaps this was also true, perhaps it was some beautiful memory from previous days of mindful revelations. He was, however, aware that something suddenly was being revealed to him. He was aware that this surprise was constructed with words and images he’d forgotten, but that were still in him, waiting. That secret force decided that his story needed to be a bit different. So many words rushing in him, and contradicting each other. What was it that Sam used to say though? “All contraries are true.” Sam was such a better person that he was.
So he determined in this moment (was it Carlyle who had such a consequential moment? Or St. Paul? Scrooge?), he needed to be honest about his little life of brief duration. He made a decision to water the better seeds in himself. He looked over at the dead annuals in the shabby flower bed. They hadn’t survived winter. But he had.
Life could be different and he could choose that difference. He would choose that difference. That very week he started to leave the house regularly. He went shopping. He bought groceries. He walked the dogs for longer distances. He took the car to get the oil changed. There was a pretty middle-age woman service adviser… she remembered him. She bantered and flirted with him shamelessly–but he knew the play. She saw him as a cute little old troll. She teased him and it made her feel sexier, more powerful. She was powerful. He blushed and laughed at her taunting. And he warmed from her kindness. As he was walking to his car, she admonished him with a chuckle that sounded like a river, “And you better get those brakes fixed soon, we don’t want to lose you honey.”
So his life still had juice, a fluid and animating flow. There were surprises waiting outside of this dark house at the end of lane, there at the edge of the farms as they turned into forest. The night he came home from the car mechanic, his car freshly washed by the workers there, the fridge full of good food he had bought yesterday, he put music on for the first time in many months. He wanted something that Sam would not have liked. He played Mahler’s Fourth and thought of the spicy service adviser. He laughed at the advantages of being an old man who was so precious to strong women in control. He masturbated that night, thinking of the days he first met Sam. They were both so young, so ready. He paused after and thought, “I’ll never again smell his hair, nor feel his hand on my back pulling me to him.” He cried a bit, uncharacteristically out loud. His slight sob also sounded like a chuckle. And there was more than sadness in his thinking. He remembered Sam always used to say, “the way to gratitude is through grief.” Sam the poet. Sam the signpost. Sam was always pithy. Pithy Sam. Sam who thought Mahler lugubrious. And now his memories of Sam and his wisdom blended with living attentively, hilariously, without Sam. None of it made sense to him and he had no inclination at all to figure it out.
Then the next week the older dog also died. In his sleep, and she was almost fifteen, but it still hit him as something deeply unfair. Too much loss too soon. He made a little story in his head that the dog had died of grief, missing Sam so much. But Sam never liked the old dog as much as the younger dog. The younger dog was a male cattle dog and needed a lot of exercise. After the old dog died, he couldn’t take the young dog for walks and runs as much. The dog was bored and started to act out. It broke into the back room, where the cat box was, and the dog tried to eat the cat droppings waiting in the box. He put hot sauce on the shit, as Google told him to do, and the dog ate the spicy shit and licked the pillows on the sofa.
As the young dog trotted impatiently from room to room, CNN was left on all day, doom casting. Then COVID hit. Doom media produced real doom in his chest in those next weeks. He watched the COVID updates without understanding. Some days he’d realized that Wolf Blitzer had been talking for a long time and he had no idea what he was saying, he was just moving slightly with the rhythm of his speech. The dog scratched at the door to go outside. Again and again. He turned the TV off, put the cell phone in the back room, and sat in a damp silence, cars passing outside, going somewhere, the only sounds. His reborn surge of energy had lost steam. He tried, he knew he needed to try. He began a project and then stopped in its midst. He’d clean the bathroom and leave wet paper towels in the living room. He found his wallet in the refrigerator one day.
He worried that, perhaps, he was having small strokes. He had a thought, and it seemed to sink below some surface in him, lost even as he was thinking it. Then he’d jerk, sit up straight, try to do the yoga breathing he’d done for decades, and retrieve the thought. He couldn’t. He knew he had thought something of substance, but its space, not its meaning, was all he could know. He was losing perspective and felt ashamed. Years of practice, he had assumed, had prepared him for this end of reduced capacity. He’d found lucid dreaming had helped him so much in those years of Sam’s illness, giving him clarity on what his motivations were, what he could choose to cause. But now it was as though he’d been dreaming while awake, not awake while he was asleep and the details and plot of any dream seemed to have no cause. And he felt lost with no past to prepare him for new thoughts, which came over and over, “clouds rolling across the sky,” he thought. And then wanted to detach, to clear the obstacles, cut them at their roots before they built the storms inside him.
But, no, that was just a memory from his past practice, so many hours sitting, with teachers and sangha, so much intention. The old language before Sam’s leaving. His thoughts weren’t weather in an empty sky. His thoughts were doors that just kept closing, hiding what was behind them. His thoughts crawled on him unbidden, like ants. And a part of them detached from him. That was the practice left for him; no memory, no rigidity, just waiting for something new, something different. And as new did inevitably come, it seemed both so familiar he didn’t see it come and so foreign he had no language to name it. He was resigned that his current practice was to experience no practice.
The practice of no practice left him sitting crookedly there in one of the recliners that had been bought for “two old men in their happy decline,” as Sam said. And this present emptiness stopped anything but his inchoate and heavy thoughts. This foreign and confusing emptiness left him with empty hands. He no longer could summon attention to exhaust its presence in him. He had no name for it. Sam, oh Sam would have talked it back into something known and named. Sam’s powerful collection of concepts. Sam was gone. The merit of Sam’s company and love was surely still helpful now, but as memory, not medicine. Current concepts sharpened in him.
He looked out the window at the car in the driveway, also waiting. He thought, well, I think I’d better get those brakes fixed. In the early June evening, no lights turned on, the sundowning light poured in the windows. He got up to look for his cell phone in the shadows of the living room. He would call to make an appointment, possibly even to talk with that lively service adviser. He heard the ring, a recorded voice told him, “your call is important to us” and then more words. Of course, the garage is closed now, he thought. The sounds from the phone in his hand mixed with the evening sounds. Cars passing on the street. Neighbor kids yelling. The glow from the phone lit the room. A book on the coffee table presented teachings on the Wheel of Fire. The phone’s light seemed to get brighter as the outside darkened.
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About the Author
HR Harper is a writer living in the redwoods above Santa Cruz, California. A student of the emptying traditions for many years, he writes to understand the nature of contemporary human consciousness and our relationship to a natural world humans seem to be destroying. An educator in immigrant communities for decades, he began to publish in 2021. Several of his recently published poems and stories may be found online at: https://brusheswiththedarklaw.blogspot.com. His chapbook, Inept Love, is being published by Finishing Line Press in 2026.