Tracy Cochran

Think of Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.   To save other vulnerable young women, she married a murderous Persian King–a man so scarred by the infidelity of his first wife that he had numerous brides executed after a single wedding night so none would live long enough to betray him.  As gifted as she was beautiful, Scheherazade captivated him each night with a tale that she intentionally left hanging. The king was compelled to let her live until the next day to hear how it came out–and fell under the spell of another tale. After 1000 tales and 1001 nights, she tells the king that she is finally out of stories. She prepares to die, only to learn the king has grown to love her.

Our minds are perpetually spinning stories. We experience cliff-hangers and surprising twists. Our stories change as our lives change. Sitting in meditation shows us that there is an aspect to this process that is clearly mechanical–ideas keep arising in the brain the way the heart keeps pumping blood.  Meditation also shows us how we cling to our thoughts and out stories. It is as if our very existence depended on them.  Without them..we would just be…no one….or, well, someone just sitting here…breathing and perceiving…or walking…or washing the dishes…or whatever. We would just be life experiencing itself.

But sometimes we run out of stories. Maybe we receive a shock, or experience the sublime. We just drop the story making.  Just like that.  Over time, by practicing meditation, we can experience the attention dropping from the thinking head into the heart. We discover a different mind, a different voice.  We begin to be able to embrace the present moment in a new way. We begin to be able to love and be loved.

Years ago I interviewed Mitch Albom about his first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  Literary people didn’t like the book (and it really wasn’t in any sense an artfully written book).  But it stayed in my mind because it attempted to show that everybody matters,  even Eddie, a rough maintainance man at an amusement park.   Albom attempted to show people that living a life that has meaning doesn’t have anything to do with great achievements as we ususally think of them–even spiritual achievement.   It has to do with those moments when we’re all here, connected to life, when, in the case of Eddie who rushes in to save a little girl, we have a passion to serve life.  Interviewing this “popular” novelist, I began to wonder if certain deeper stories might  not be innate in human beings, a kind of  hidden legacy of wisdom we discover when we stop the noise that keeps us bound up in isolation.  When we are quiet, we discover a capacity to know our interconnection with life, our yearning to serve.