On Being Happy I was mournful when Halloween rolled around in 2004. My editor and I had just locked down the text of my first book, a memoir. I felt as if I had just lost part of myself. Writing it was like having a close friend with whom I could converse and argue. For three years I’d worked on it till late every night, driving home rubbery-legged and red eyed. And now the manuscript had gone away to live a life of its own, beyond my control. I was mournful about my dating life, too. I was about to turn 40. When I was in love with someone, I thought, my restless yearning would go away and I would finally be content. I would feel like I had finally drawn into port after endless winters at sea. I’d heard people say that they could be happy without a partner, and I didn’t believe them. I suspected them of either giving up or being delusional. But I did feel contented in a certain way. I’d summed up my life and spirit in 232 pages. The book was as personal to me as the bones of my hands, the clothes in my closet. Anyone who read it would know me intimately, and in that sense, I had escaped death. I’d backed up my spirit into the hard drive of civilization. From here on out, I could die at any time knowing my life had not been wasted. A friend of mine came over to help me carve a pumpkin. We’d dated briefly, and while it hadn’t worked out, I’d taken it with good grace. I made a joke about having a postmortem date where both of us were wielding sharp knives, and we got down to business. We cut a hole in the top and began scooping out a stringy mess of orange pulp and seeds. Annabelle asked me what I wanted in my dating life. “I’d like to be with someone who really knows how to communicate,” I told her. “Most people don’t know how to communicate. Nobody teaches them. We teach math and writing in our schools, but we don’t teach people how to listen to each other.” Annabelle considered that while poking out the pumpkin’s triangular eyeholes. Then she asked me if I had heard of a workshop conducted up north of the Bay Area. She told me it was about love and intimacy, and that I might learn a lot from it. The idea scared me. But what I wanted now was experiences so profound that I had not even imagined their possibility. That was what I wanted: not just to keep on living, but to go so far beyond what I had already known that it would leave me stunned and gasping. I was ready to try anything. At 40, I was ready to die. And that made me ready to live. I arrived after a nerve wracking drive through winding, pitch-black roads. Scared. Uptight. Dragging a suitcase full of clothes, and a sleeping bag. I took off my shoes and went in the door. Suddenly I was surrounded by warm light and a large, carpeted room full of people chattering away. Beige walls, high rafters, ceiling fans, and faces; so many faces. I gave my name at the reception desk, stuttering a little, and was issued a parking permit for my car. Then a woman with deer-like eyes came up to me and said, “Would you like a hug?” “Yes, sure,” I said, feeling both startled and grateful. She enveloped me in her arms, calming me as if I were a restive horse. So that’s what it is, I thought to myself as I parked my car. It’s a place where you can get a hug. After dinner the facilitators asked us to sit in pairs on the floor, facing each other in a straddle position. We were invited to touch each other’s faces, one at a time, with the other’s permission. My partner, a slender, dark-eyed brunette with the eyes of a nervous horse, assented with the air of someone going along with the program. “Are you sure?” I whispered. She jerked her head impatiently. As I touched her forehead her eyes closed. As I moved my palm to cup her cheek, I felt a rush of tenderness. One cannot touch someone else’s face and not see them as they are, or wish they could be; every stray thought is mirrored on the face despite themselves; one can see their feelings in every saccade of the eyes, every quiver of the nostrils or the chin. As the philosopher Alain de Botton has said, a vulnerable face, whether in sleep or in the intimacy of the encounter, “invites a gentle regard that in itself is almost love.” A huge area of the brain is devoted to control of the face, and even more to the hands; touching someone’s face with one’s hands stirs up neural waterfalls of gentleness. Then she reached out to touch my face. I assented by closing my eyes and bowing my head. I felt her cool fingertips shakily stroke my cheekbones, then trace upward into my hair. I imagined that her touch would feel like the susurration of a warm breeze. But she moved her hand in short, stiff strokes, as if my skin was made of clay. She was touching me mechanically. It kept me on the surface of my body, rather than allowing me to descend to depths. She’s afraid. I was angry with her. I sympathized with her. I pitied her. I opened my eyes and we stared at one another. The air between us had softened, though she still seemed wary. I felt astonished. I had only touched a woman like this during sex. And then we were asked to separate and find another partner, this time of the same gender. I felt a surge of tension. To do this with a man? But I found a man about my age, dark-eyed and dark-haired, going slightly gray. We sat down awkwardly in the straddle position. When men touch, the skin radiates alarm. We looked into each other’s eyes. I touched his forehead, his temples, his cheeks, his upper lip, his chin, and discovered, for the first time, what stubble felt like. A rough, cross-grained, sandpaper texture. This is what women experience every day – this feeling of a man’s skin. Amazing that they put up with us. His eyes seemed remote, even frightened; this emboldened me. I looked directly into his eyes. I began to think of The Workshop as a magnetic confinement chamber where people collide and react, spinning off new experiences in every minute. You can’t pack 70 or 80 questing and highly motivated people into one room for three straight days and not get a giddy array of micro-dramas and explosions. It’s not real life; it’s a compressed, superheated version of it, and that’s the joy of it. The exercises are designed to push your buttons. You have to be someone who likes having your buttons pushed, because you know you’ll learn from it. On the first night I slept deeply, exhausted. On the second night I slept only a few hours because desire and longing were stalking my mind like uncaged dragons. On the third night I couldn’t sleep at all because I was afire with wonder. So many new ideas and insights! It was like discovering a new continent between California and Japan. How many more revelations might be in store? Eager to keep learning, I went to the next HAI workshop a few months later, and began dating a beautiful woman I met at one of my readings. We communicated honestly, had good times and great sex, and learned from each other. But for complicated reasons, it didn’t work out. After we broke up, I was prepared to feel remorseful, lonely, and horny. But to my great surprise, I didn’t feel that way at all. I took such pleasure in eating breakfast with one hand while turning newspaper pages with the other. For the first time in my life, I felt happy to be by myself. While dating her, I had gone to my third and fourth HAI workshops. At the workshops I get flooded with touch – hugs, backrubs, face-touching. To be sure, I get touched when dating someone, but it’s a different kind of touch, overlaid with the complex pleasures and tensions of a relationship. The workshops have allowed me to become comfortable with a simpler kind of touch, the kind that saturates me with oxytocin, endorphins, and the compassion of people that I have come to recognize as being as human as myself. Feeling happy by myself has gone on long enough now for me to be sure it isn’t a temporary thing. I keep poking about in my new spirit in wonder – it’s as if someone broke into my apartment while I was away and replaced my ratty old couch, painted the walls, and filled the fridge with lasagna and wine. It’s not just because of the workshops. They confer moments of clarity and insight, but the emotional high soon fades in the ruckus of daily life. It’s more that they helped me coalesce a long-accumulated series of impressions and lessons. The workshops didn’t heal me. I healed myself, with the help I got from them. On the J train in San Francisco a few weeks ago I realized, “I’m free.” Free to do what I want to do, instead of being endlessly driven by hormones and desire. I had spent so many years assuming I could only be happy only in a relationship. To feel happy anyway is one of the vastest and subtlest surprises of my life. —Michael Chorost is a HAI workshop participant and the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human — a memoir of going deaf and getting his hearing back with a cochlear implant. |
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