My hope in doing this – in spending a year in a stressful place and doing stressful work – was to quit a rut of self-absorption, and I feel like I succeeded. Of course I haven’t solved all the problems of my own selfishness, but at this point I’m sure I see the world more broadly and see the people in it with greater compassion. I’m sure I’ve found the perspective I sought.

When I left for India, I needed to find balance between indulgence in and gratitude for the abundance in my life; I needed to find reconciliation between my life and my place in the world, and I believe I found that too. Again, I don’t think I’ve “finished” any of these projects, but my vision has cleared and so has my sense of self and purpose.

This year was not an ultimate rejection of the world. It was a time without certain worldly pleasures and indulgences, and a reflection on their absence. It was a time during which I focused on service, spirituality, and art. During this year I made both deliberate and accidental changes in my life, but these changes were not permanent, and were never meant to be. I’m not sure I believe anything is truly permanent, but I am sure that my current perspective is different from what it was a year ago. Which is part of why it feels important to write this now.

(And although I do want to give a meaningful – if imperfect – summary of what I learned, I don’t intend to sentimentalize my experience or focus on specific people and their pain. Because suffering is too much to explain. And it’s impossible anyway – suffering can’t be explained, it can only be witnessed.)

My lessons in India were great and small. I learned how to eat with my fingers. I learned how to sleep in the heat. I learned how to wait for a train, and I learned how to shave another man’s face. I learned how to appreciate simplicity, and I learned how to live with the dying.

And I finally understood mosquito stings.

And car horns. Bureaucracy. Rain. Laziness. Body odor. Dirt. They were the small discomforts that bothered me each day, and while I was in India I learned that small discomforts are just that: small. I learned the difference between those discomforts and life’s real tragedies, but I also learned how hard it was to relax amid little pains and inconveniences, and truly, how hard it was to avoid obsessing over the imperfections in my life.

But after a while… it got easier.

Of course, learning how to accept that life is imperfect was something different than – but dangerously close to – resigning myself to complacency. I struggled with that. It was hard to accept “the way things are” without giving up hope for the way things could be.

(One example that came up over and over in conversation – especially with Westerners – was the problem of poverty. Because there is an idea or assumption in the West that a person who is living in abject poverty has fallen to that level – whether from a great or small height – and that they should be lifted up again; whereas in India it seemed that people more often are born into poverty and are expected to remain there, both by themselves and by the society around them.)

…I met a British nun not long before I left Kolkata. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember something she said about acceptance. As a young woman, she’d been working very long hours, which to everyone but herself seemed plainly unsustainable. She genuinely wanted to help the people she was serving, and could not allow herself to rest as long as she knew that their needs remained unmet. But she was told by one of her superiors that, “God knew how to take care of them before you got here, and he will know how to take care of them after you leave.”

Whether or not God’s providence is a universally meaningful consolation, I think the nun’s broader point was that it’s important to recognize the power we have – and use it – but also recognize our power’s limits. We have to accept that we are a part of something very big, and that whatever that “something” is – God’s creation or just humanity at large – it will always be more powerful than any individual.

I believe now that fantasies of power are most compelling to those individuals who believe themselves powerless. And I felt powerless many times in India. That was one of my great lessons: admitting my limited ability to affect immediate or lasting change on a large scale. I was humbled by an increasingly distinct sense that – despite my frustration or anger or delusions of grandeur – I really was just a tiny part of that divinely perfected or simply unstoppable human momentum.

And yet, I felt compelled to keep doing what I was doing. But it was hard.

*       *       *

Mother Teresa said, “A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves.”

The sacrifices I made during the year I spent in India were very small in comparison to those of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. But they did come at a cost to me, and at times they did hurt.

I believe now that sacrifice is a direct path to genuine spiritual growth, but I also believe that sustained self-denial is not the only path, and not the one to which I am called. I believe now that although it can be necessary and good for a time, abstinence creates a dangerous vacuum of pleasure; it creates a deathly seriousness; and a person’s spirit can be crushed under that too-great gravitas.

I believe now that abstinence may be among the greatest acts of self-love, or it may simply be a desire for self-punishment. But in either case, I believe it is unsustainable. It is too rigid. A conscious flow toward and away from attitudes of restraint seems more healthy to me; it seems more human and honest and much more likely to last a lifetime.

And although my year became partwise an experiment with self-denial, and although at times I found it almost easy to show restraint, I struggled to find balance between complete abstinence and complete abandon. And I think I always will.

But maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to struggle, to fail, and to try again. Maybe it’s okay to feel the pain of desire, and even to soothe it with self-indulgence, and maybe a real relationship to the things I want – and don’t want – is a greater teacher than the simplicity of a life without them.

So, a spiritual life – or quite simply, a good life – can be one in which we indulge our desires, but also one in which we resist them. Not because our desires are bad, but because little indulgences can become very large problems if they build upon one another and replace service or spirituality or art as our guiding principles. They can be blinding. And that was the great lesson of abstinence: clarity.

Clarity came with freedom from distraction. It came with the work I was doing and the life I was living, but mostly it came with the fact that I didn’t have to deal with the things I usually do. And when I was able to see clearly, when I was able to see my life in its simplest form and even see the world in its simplest form, things just became… clear.

That doesn’t mean I know how everything works and especially not that I know why things are the way they are. It just means that I learned what matters to me and what I want to incorporate in my life and what I want to avoid. (Of course, the integration of these understandings in “real life” – the life to which I now return – may be a challenge, but I still feel a sense of clarity during confusing times, and I still feel like even if I lose focus, I am able to find it again.)

So what did I learn?

I learned that I can experience and accept emotional, environmental, and even physical discomfort without judgment. I learned that mindful attentiveness leads to compassion. And I learned that compassion – i.e. genuine love for my fellow man and the ability to express it – is a central part of what makes me happy. (And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Happiness?)

I learned that compassion is crucial, and I also learned that happiness is linked to purpose. In my own experience, the pleasure of discovering a purpose in life – of answering a call – was empowering and centering and joyful. It was also exhausting and complex and terrifying, and it wasn’t always easy, but adventure and possibility urged me onward as I realized that I was called to serve and to write. And even though I felt the same ruts and frustrations of routine that I’d always felt, it was rare that I felt the deep sadness of spiritual inertia. Of self-loathing. Or of fear.

Compassion and purpose are the things that make me happy. They make me feel at peace. But happiness is something more than that. It is peace in motion; it is contentment through flux. It is accepting the way things are.

I think it’s clear that all people want to feel pleasure. But I learned that as long as I sought pleasure, I would never be at peace. And that speaks to a greater lesson about accepting life as it is: as long as I tried to alter the ways things were so that I would feel greater pleasure, I would never be happy. I would be happy only when I stopped seeking what gave me pleasure, and started trying to understand the way things are… and taking pleasure in that. It was only when I stopped seeking pleasure – and started finding it – that I was truly happy.

*       *       *

So what do I want to say to the people who read this? What do I want to say to you?

Simply, I want to encourage you to live a good life. And I don’t mean to say that you should change everything and suddenly start over, but instead acknowledge that you are already living a good life. Maybe not a perfect one, but one with good in it.

In my case, I needed to make a drastic change in my life in order to see it clearly. If that’s what you need to do, then of course I encourage you to do it. But if not, I’ll just suggest that you continue living a good life and start celebrating and making a habit of that goodness.

Because habit is truly the key. Happiness and peace aren’t reliant on single actions, and they are certainly not actions themselves. They are the result of good habits over time.

In that vein, it’s clear that every person’s past is littered with accidents and mistakes and failures; they are the common sources of our secret but shared sense of personal shame. Our lives may never be without these things, and we may always suffer because of the greater or lesser folly in ourselves and others. We can’t control this. But the past is the force that both condemns us and supports us; it is inescapable, but also useful. We can control the small goodness in our lives, the seemingly insignificant decisions we make each day to be kind or generous or patient. And these small choices will help us grow; they we be the ways in which we practice strength. And we have to practice.

The habits we cultivate – our daily works – determine the power of the past. If we can look back on our lives and see love and sincerity and patience and compassion, our past can be the sturdy buttress that supports us. It can help us move forward with courage and trust. So we must cultivate good habits – and we must each discover what our good habits are – for our own sake and for the sake of the people we love.

I believe you can make good things an integral part of your life. I believe it can be either incremental or revolutionary, but in every case you can’t passively wait for change. An anticipated expanse of free time may never come, and a flourish of inspiration may never occur; we have to use the present time to cultivate the self we wish to be; we have to practice goodness.

India was a fitting answer for me. It was the right time in my life to travel and the right time to devote myself to charity and writing. But it wasn’t an easy transition, and the financial, personal, and professional consequences remain to be seen. I made sacrifices to do what I did, and I was able to do it because I’ve lived a privileged life.

And service too is a privilege. Saying so may sound like a cliché, but I am certain that the last year was a gift I received much more than a gift I gave. And I did help people; I worked for free and gave my time and energy to strangers; but these strangers gave much more to me. They changed my life.

Of course I can’t say everything about how my life was changed or what lasting impact a year of service will have on my life as a whole. It isn’t finished yet. But at this point I’m not sure that really matters. I think what matters is that my life’s direction has changed. I’ve had to make some deliberate choices – many of which were difficult – but the reality is that I had to stop pretending I was someone I wasn’t. I had to become the person I am. And I did.

I believe you can too.

…Right now, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know why I feel all the things I do. I feel them. And I don’t know why I am called to this and not to that. I guess about why sometimes – with greater or lesser wisdom – but those guesses seem more and more irrelevant to me.

It may not be so terribly important to know why we feel compelled to do what we do. It may only be important that we accept what we feel, that we trust ourselves to be good, and that we move forward with patience and gratitude and grace.

Because I’ve finally started to believe – to really believe – that everything is a blessing and an opportunity. And I’ve started to believe that a life is not measured by any single achievement, but measured by sustained love over time, and by an active expression of that love.

If these things are true – and I believe they are – then every human interaction is an opportunity to cultivate, recognize, redirect, or celebrate love. In every moment we can choose to love. Or love more deeply. Or return to love.

Every moment is an opportunity to be good. So start now.

The cookies tasted pretty good. I gave a batch to my grandparents on Christmas Eve, after joining a number of my family members that afternoon at a “megachurch” in Dallas called Watermark.

(The place was so crowded that we were seated in the “West Community Room,” which was the overflow from the 300-seat Chapel, which was the overflow from the 2,100-seat Worship Center.

The multi-media service was strange to me. And I was put off by the huge crowd and resisted the unfamiliar Christian vernacular and aesthetic; I didn’t dislike the music the band played, but noticed – as I had in the few times I’d been to “megachurches” before – that ritual and ceremony weren’t emphasized.

Instead, the focus was “the message,” and the message was simple and appropriate and challenging: it was that a celebration of birth can be a reminder to seek a real and lasting relationship with God, rather than a “plastic” one. And after the message, and after a number of testimonial videos, the entire crowd, even those of us watching the service on a big television screen in the West Community Room, lit candles and sang Silent Night.)

In the evening my family ate dinner. My grandfather brought fresh and spicy guacamole from home and my grandmother brought pecan brittle from Alabama. We ate brown beans and fresh green tomatillo salsa and banana-leaf wrapped tamales and beef stew and after the meal my step-father Sidney said in earnest that he was pleased and grateful. Because we were all together.

On Christmas Day, driving with my brother to my mom’s house, I stopped at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. My brother had been the first of my family members to start attending Watermark, and he’d been instrumental in bringing a number of us there. In years past, we’d all attended Catholic Mass on Christmas Day (including Sidney and his sons, who are also Catholic), but the group consensus had changed. So it was especially meaningful to me when my brother joined me at Thomas Aquinas, even though it was only for a passing prayer.

(I’d intended to quickly enter and exit the church, but was captivated by the image of Christ on the cross, which seemed doubly powerful above a bed of red poinsettias and a brimming congregation. My brother and I stayed long enough to hear a reading from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, to which I’ve always felt a special kinship; I’d translated that chapter from the original Greek when I was in college, and I’d once attended a moving midnight Eastern Orthodox Pascha service at which the same verses were read in Greek and English and French.)

It was a pleasure to reconnect to a familiar ritual and aesthetic, and it underscored the value of what I felt I was compromising – willingly, but not always politely – in order to show my family that they were my priority: my time. And it underscored the complexity of a big family with divided value systems – economic, political, religious, and social – and challenged me to learn comfort with so many moving parts.

It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy to be consistently loving with my family or rise above the stress of our stirred emotions; it wasn’t easy to fail in my attempts to exercise restraint, control my moods, and forgive myself and others for little mistakes; it wasn’t easy to long for personal affirmation and nurturing during a busy time; it wasn’t easy to oppose consumerism and also shift to new social norms; it wasn’t easy to feel a deepening anxiety about money; and it wasn’t easy to ask for the emotional space and patience that I wasn’t always able to give.

In short, it wasn’t easy to live life with the people I love.

…But although I often felt off-center, there were a number of centering forces that helped me find balance during the holidays.

My friend Jeremy, who I’ve only recently started to understand is one of the most generous people I know, gave me a free month of membership at a big corporate gym called Equinox. The gym has a national presence and woodpaneled combination lockers and complimentary cotton swabs and clean floors and grapefruit soap in the showers. And although Equinox would not otherwise be my first choice for a gym – because of both cost and ethos – I was very happy to join for free and even more so once I saw that a favorite yoga teacher led classes there three times a week.

The classes are challenging, and the teacher – Aaron – is dynamic and funny and devoted. And in addition to his classes at Equinox, which seem somewhat hemmed-in by the gym’s desire for mass appeal, I also started attending classes at Aaron’s own small studio, which is called “Ascend”.

(The Ascend studio is a space Aaron shares with a dance teacher, so in addition to the practical ornamentation of yoga mats and blocks and blankets, the studio is decorated with bright posters, one of which features two tango dancers mirroring a painting of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob wrestling an angel.)

My little sister Jessica joined me for two classes, in which Aaron was truly at his best. The first class we attended was meditative and transformational; throughout the class, Aaron repeatedly encouraged us to witness our environment, body, and mind with unchanging compassionate detachment; he encouraged us to see the self as consciousness only, as the observer rather than the thing being observed. And despite the fact that Aaron’s regular admonishments and reminders sometimes gave little comfort, the day’s refrain worked; as a class we became very quiet and centered; immediately afterward Jessica said she couldn’t stop smiling, and the next day she said she was sore.

In addition to a spiritual and physical practice, I also felt centered by interactions with friends. In these I was free to relax, and remembered that although some intimate exchanges are challenging, others are easy and fun. With one friend I snoozed and watched television; with another I drank peach tea and ate sugary yellow cake, recounted memories of in-common friends, and shared reflections on where we both were professionally and personally; with my friend Colin I pet his parents’ long-legged poodle and regained perspective as Colin explained that he believes there is no perfect city in which to live, and that interactions with family are difficult because they necessarily involve unconscious layers of deep emotional associations. (My sister Carla had said something very similar regarding the emotional “triggers” that seem inextricable from familial exchange.)

And my dad’s visit to Dallas was centering too. I talked with him about the coming year and talked about my options for where to live in 2012 (San Francisco, Portland, Taos, and Austin topped the list), and options for what to do if I did indeed return to the States. I also met my dad and my sister and my step-mom Cecilia at a coffee shop with green awnings where we were eventually joined by my childhood nanny, a woman named Graciela who had lived with my family in Santiago and Mexico City and Dallas and who I hadn’t seen since my father’s wedding in 1997 and who still had freckles and who – my dad told me afterward – had years ago habitually spent hours twirling my sister’s then-blonde hair into coils.

And I ate dinner with my dad and Cecilia and my sisters and my brother at a newly fashionable restaurant in south Dallas called Bolsa; I had a beet and hazelnut salad, and lentils and salty potatoes and arugula, and my dad had a “bone-in” pork chop served with polenta that had been drizzled with honey from the restaurant’s rooftop beehive.

But perhaps the most centering force in recent weeks was the presence of my friend Victoria. Of course, in the days before she arrived in Dallas I was anxious and stressed, but when she appeared at night on the yellow flamelighted sidewalk in front of my step-dad’s house, everything became quiet and happy and calm.

(Victoria and I met sixteen years ago at a “talent identification program” summer camp at Duke University. I was twelve and Victoria was thirteen, and although I didn’t realize it then, during those three weeks I fell in love for the first time. We wrote innumerable letters in the years that followed, and talked every year on Christmas Day; I visited her in Richmond and Los Angeles, and she visited me in Dallas and Hong Kong.)

Victoria was in Dallas on the second leg of a multi-month trans-American road trip from California to Florida to California; she’d been traveling since October, and her dog Baxter – a twelve year-old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever – had been traveling with her. Victoria ate dinner with me and my family that night in the dining room where we’d had Christmas dinner.

My mom and Victoria got along at dinner and in the days that followed, just as they always have. They are similar and have unceasingly liked one another; Victoria’s presence not only made me happy, but also brought me perspective and created an easy reparation of the recently strained relationship between me and my mom. Victoria also met my dad and step-mom for the first time, and although their meeting was relaxed and informal, – we ate sandwiches and white cookies at a bookstore – it felt meaningful to us all.

In the morning on December 31^st, Victoria watched me shave my beard. I hadn’t substantially trimmed it in almost a year, and finally shaving felt symbolic and profound and silly and sad; Victoria laughed and took pictures of my beard in various stages of disappearance, from what I vainly called “Civil War General” to what Victoria discreetly called “Charlie Chaplin”.

That same day, with my face freshly revealed, we drove aimlessly through Dallas and stopped at a small lake in Highland Park. The air was sunny and cold, and as we walked I drank blueberry pomegranate juice and stepped on piles of spiky brown Sweetgum tree seedpods and held Victoria’s hand. That night, we joined my mom and Sidney downtown; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was performing at the glassy limestone squares-and-circles Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in the Arts District, which has become increasingly impressive in recent years, and which is where my mom works in community engagement. Our seats were on the floor, and the orchestra played Jacques Offenbach’s riotous “Orpheus in the Underworld” Overture and Johann Strauss’ brightly blooming “Blue Danube” Waltz. In the intermission we drank champagne.

After the symphony, which left us ecstatic and happy, Victoria and I met my friend Jeremy at a houseparty his friend was hosting. The party would not match the sensory or emotional momentum of the Meyerson, but among the smokers huddled outside around a standing firepit and the loud Irish folksongs playing on the iPod stereo within, and after sipping beer and toasting more champagne and sweetly kissing Victoria at the year’s end, – and the year’s beginning – I felt quietly pleased with nothing more than a relaxed atmosphere and Victoria’s presence.

The night wound down at Jeremy’s house, where I smoked and drank – because both felt right and because my year of conscientious restraint had ended – and where I gave Jeremy a bottle of whisky as a small token of gratitude for his generosity and friendship, and where Victoria fell asleep next to me curled under a blanket.

Victoria’s presence on New Year’s Eve was what I’d been wanting and looking forward to for weeks. And I was wary of my desire, but seeing her and spending such an easy and beautiful and funny and happy day with her reminded me that she truly was able to meet my expectations; she was curious and attentive; she was calm and confident; she was grounded and affirming, and her eyes were pretty and green and arresting too.

New Year’s Day – which could’ve felt like a monumental change or shift – felt normal. Maybe because of Victoria’s genuine companionship, or maybe because of something internal and already integrated, I felt relaxed and centered.

…In the days I spent with Victoria and in the days before, I both daydreamed and made real decisions about my future. I bought a ticket to Rwanda and thought of a committed romantic relationship with Victoria; I was vaccinated for Yellow Fever and Tetanus and Hepatitis A, and I imagined a future in which I didn’t have to keep saying goodbye to my friends; I fantasized about publishing and fatherhood and African travel, and told my dad I’d be home by Thanksgiving.

But mostly I thought of the ways in which I deal with stressful times and happy times, and thought with gratitude for the emotional and physical space I have to process the changes in my life. I didn’t make any formal resolutions, but simply continued to look for a middle path in which restraint is balanced with indulgence, solitude with community, exoticism with familiarity, conflict with resolution, and revelation with hope.

Because I planned to spend time with my family, and because more and more family members arrived every few hours as Thanksgiving approached, I was unable to attend an informal “young alumni” reunion that my high school was hosting that night at a fancy boutique hotel in downtown Dallas called The Stoneleigh. (I’d looked forward to reconnecting with friends from school, but The Stoneleigh was where my ex-girlfriend Anne and I had spent a week together in a room with long striped curtains along the walls and redbacked flower patterns on the carpet and long decorative pillows on the bed and a television set that spun a full circle to face either side of the room, so I felt a wounded relief – a coward’s relief – as I realized that I could justifiably avoid the reunion.)

In other words, instead of the emotional rise-and-fall of my revisited past, – of reinvented schoolmates and a girlfriend’s ghost – I chose the emotional rise-and-fall of family.

Following my Mom and Sidney’s wedding in June, Thanksgiving was our newly combined family’s first holiday together. And after snacking on hard cheeses and translucently thin crackers, we sat at two tables in the dining room, one of which was decorated with living leaves and red berries and candles and one of which was decorated with green gourds and living leaves and red berries and candles and white star-shaped flowers. We ate sweet or crumbly or moist or leafy or crunchy or spicy foods, and I sat with my sisters and my brother and with three of my four step-brothers and my mom and my step-dad and my grandparents and my uncle and my aunt and my cousin who is moving from Phoenix to Austin and who brought his daughter who he hadn’t seen for eighteen months before that week.

The mosaic of our faces and personalities was different, but the meal and the silver-helmet football game on television and the nap that followed were all familiar. I enjoyed myself and enjoyed the food, although I wished – as I almost always do when I’m with my family – that I was more able to be patient and magnanimous. (Then and afterward I thought of Pierre in War and Peace who honors his friend and wins his “undying devotion simply by drawing out the best aspects of his soul and admiring them,” and wished that I might become more like that: observant and kind and socially nurturing.)

…The day after Thanksgiving, I went to a party. It was in a neighborhood called Highland Park and at the house where my friends Colin and Nicole grew up. I saw classmates from high school there and saw some of their parents; I ate vegan pizza and chocolate-rolled pecans and stood next to a big untouched pile of chopped fruit with a beer in my hand; I saw a painting by Salvador Dalí inconspicuously hung in the living room; and before the night ended my friends’ teeth were wine-stained a funny impermanent purple-grey and we all sunk on soft couches and laughed.

In the days that followed, I watched pink and orange sunsets sprawl across the leafy suburban sky under a high and perfect crescent moon; I went to a movie at the Northpark Mall and before leaving I stood next to a valet parking attendant in a blue jacket with a long silver bar double-piercing the top of her ear and saw that on the stand where she organized keys there was a big curling paperback book titled Oil and Gas Law; I saw birdflocks rise in hundred-edged silhouettes from overhead wires and saw the slow fading glow of autumnal sunlight; I bought cereal and soymilk; I finished reading War and Peace and read Bright Lights, Big City and started reading Blood Meridian; I ate dinner at my grandparents’ house and had white and brown and orange carrot cake for dessert and my grandmother told me that after earning her master’s degree in psychology she had only one official client – a young autistic girl – but that she believes she uses her degree every day; I acknowledged that it feels good to be alone, but that prolonged solitude makes me feel less centered and more psychologically skittish; I drank spiced beers at a holiday beer tasting party; I thought about a girl I used to love; I drove and looked up at leafless trees skittering their black outlines in the air and watched clean white and yellow trains pass beyond the blinking lights and long painted moving beams that blocked the road; I cried three times into my hands; I woke up late in the day and watched the twinkle of light and shadow through drawn curtains as leaves fluttered in the outside breeze and then drew the curtains in the afternoon so the sun could pierce the window’s squares and blind me with golden-moted rays of light; I jogged; I ate Ethiopian food; I sat with a brilliant and inspiring woman named Ashley and drank hot mint tea while she ate oatmeal and I saw an old cowboy with dark brown skin wearing a tan flat-brimmed hat and a black vest and a purple shirt; and at night I looked up from my brother’s front yard in the darkness at the eggish gibbous moon and imagined that it – the moon and my relationship to it – was nothing at all, and had become only a remnant in memory of an otherwise forgotten and now alien fiction.

And I started thinking seriously and practically about the future.

…Planning the few months that will immediately follow the end of this year is at once stressful and soothing. And it sometimes feels like a denial of the present moment; although my conversations about continued charity work and international travel and about writing and publishing are meaningful and exciting and necessary, I also feel compelled to understand – or at least ponder – the things that have just happened, and that continue to happen now.

In a small and immediate context, I feel compelled to process the impact of leaving India and the ennui that has predictably followed. And in a larger and more general context, I feel compelled to consider my attitude toward the changes in my life and understand the way the past informs the present, and the way my memories seem to appear and disappear, and how forgotten or suppressed truths become accessible only as I become ready.

But that readiness is nothing I can consciously control. Instead I just try to relax; I try to meet change with receptivity, and revisit the past with care.

For instance: Last week I went to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. Since I’d been there once or twice as a teenager, I’d intended to return many times – but perhaps because I wasn’t ready – I’d never actually gone back.

And when I walked up the museum’s clopping wooden stairs and passed Murillo’s Immaculate Conception, I was dumbstruck and moved by the stars above Mary’s head and the putti at her feet and the corners of the crescent moon curving beneath her like a holy animal’s horns. And after I passed the nude metal statues of The Three Graces, I approached the painted images that had been so-long stored in my unconscious memory: a dwarf standing among pomegranates and lapdogs and birds, an enigmatic lonely woman on a Parisian balcony, a dead green Christ, a barely recognizable abstract black figure floating against a bright orange background, and all the saints. (One was kneeling and one was looking up and one was martyred with arrows and one was sprawled angular white and bearded and his naked body was covered with only a skirt of woven straw and he lay with rosary beads and a skull.)

And I saw Goya’s small black haunting Yard with Madmen which I’d unconsciously remembered many times in the last year when I stood in the stinking shadow of a high terrible wall in Prem Dan where men would piss and scream and writhe and smear their ugly food against their lips.

The paintings showed me some part of the mysterious visual vocabulary of my spiritual and creative subconscious, and showed me some part of what lingers in my memory and what fades away. And I started to understand that I am slowly allowing myself to remember and feel what has happened in both the distant and recent past; I am slowly reconnecting to the images and sensations from which I have felt so strangely disconnected.

…But as I explored my psyche and the many mirrors of my nightmares and dreams, I knew I had to temper my introspection with social action. I knew I couldn’t study my soul forever.

So I volunteered to distribute toys.

For five days I reported to a warehouse in West Dallas with high ceilings and giant orange shelves. The warehouse – the Salvation Army Christmas and Disaster Relief Center – is filled with donated toys every year, and every year thousands of impoverished Dallas families come to the center to receive gifts.

One day I sorted toys into carts and taped little tears in flimsy plastic gift-bags; the work felt mundane and overwhelming at times, but I easily returned in thought to familiar reflections on purpose and devotion, and rediscovered the joy of simple occupation, and remembered Mother Teresa’s mantra of “small things with great love”.

In the days that followed, I shifted to troubleshooting and to checking in “clients” and to actually handing over big bags of toys. And although I found value in all the things I did, it was meeting the people I was serving and giving them their gifts that moved me most. (When one woman saw a big stuffed yellow bee in her toy bag, she exclaimed that her infant son had asked for exactly that; then she smiled with deep sincerity and infectious delight and said her son – his name was Alvin – was going to be very happy.)

It wasn’t until I saw more than one person shed tears of overwhelmed gratitude that I remembered why I’d been drawn to service then and in the past; it wasn’t until I witnessed the humanity of others – and honored their experience of pain and hope and redemption – that I witnessed the convergence of my own memories and moods: I felt connected to others and free to feel new doubts and old pains; I felt sadness and joy when I thought of the past, and felt fear and brave hope when I thought of the future. And I acknowledged the mysterious but knowable truth of what I had given, and what I had received.

I’d flown to Hong Kong overnight, and when I arrived the sky was hazy and bright. I was exhausted. I heard surreal familiar clicks and beeps and electronic voices in the airport and on the train into town; as I passed the big rectangular stacks of yellow, red, orange, brown, and blue shipping containers, I mentally compared Kolkata’s raw color to Hong Kong’s industrial order and commercial polish. And in my fatigued delirium – suspended in the half-consciousness between sleep and waking – I imagined that the time I’d recently spent in India and the States had been a fantasy, and that I’d never left Hong Kong.

But I had, and then I went back.

I arrived on a Friday and met my friend Joe in Tai Tam, a small neighborhood on the green and far-less-populated south side of Hong Kong Island; Tai Tam is home to hundreds of ex-patriates and to Hong Kong International School, where I’d worked as an English and Humanities teacher.

Within minutes of arriving at Joe’s house, I was eating a freshly made artichoke pesto pizza. (Joe had recently started running a small and increasingly popular pizza business from home; at his front door I saw trays of tomato sauce cans stacked next to piles of his children’s shoes, and in his kitchen I saw balls of dough and bags of flour and bowls of chopped vegetables on the counter.)

After eating and talking with Joe, I walked to my friend Janet’s flat and started to settle in. (Janet would be in New York at a creative writing conference until my last day in Hong Kong and had generously offered her spare bedroom to me; Janet is an English teacher at HKIS, my friend Norbyah’s mom, and Joe’s mother-in-law.)

That afternoon I talked with former students and colleagues in the times between their classes, and that night I ate dinner in Stanley – the beachfront neighborhood where I’d once lived – with my friends Joe and Jeremy and Rob. (Rob had recently visited me in India.) We ate at “Spiaggia”, an Italian restaurant run by an eccentric old Belgian chef named Rolf, who greeted me happily perhaps because he recognized my friends, or perhaps because he remembered me from any one of the innumerable nights in the years before when I’d eaten at his other waterfront restaurant, which was two doors down from the Italian place and named “Main Street USA.”

After dinner Jeremy went home, and in familiarly mischievous form, Joe and Rob and I left the brightly-lit and semi-crowded Stanley restaurant strip, approached the undeveloped hills nearby, vaulted a short fence, and walked the dark jungle path to a little bouldery temple overlooking Stanley Bay. The place was deeply nostalgic to me, not because I’d visited that particular temple more than once or twice, but because – from my rooftop and from the waterfront and from the mountains above – I’d many times stood and watched that particular body of water hush and glitter and spray.

That night Joe and Rob and I smoked cigars and drank whiskey; we sat on the big half-submerged rocks beneath the temple; we talked. And although we said a lot of things – serious, hilarious, sincere, and obscene – something Joe said stuck in my mind and has stuck there since: “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “and I’m glad you’re happy.”

Starting with that night, my visit indeed proved to be a source of deep happiness and also of sustained emotional tilt. I was moved by the convergence of momentous changes: leaving Kolkata and its problematic but meaningful comforts, returning to Hong Kong and the community I’d once sincerely called “my family”, and starting a mysterious next phase of life.

…The following day, Rob picked me up in front of the HKIS high school gate (he is one of the few people I know in Hong Kong who both owns a car and regularly drives it), with his sons Caleb and Eli in the back seat. Caleb, now six years old, greeted me wearing a white Kung Fu uniform and holding a bent black Spiderman figurine in his hands, and was very much as I remembered him: his hair was bright blond, and he was brightly grinning and eager to talk and laugh and squirm; but Eli, now four, had changed tremendously. In the almost two years I’d been gone, he’d transformed from a moderately communicative infant to a sensitive and kind young boy; when we stopped to buy groceries before leaving for Rob’s house, Eli held my hand, chose for himself a fresh cut flower and a fresh baked pretzel, and – for no apparent reason – called to Rob and said “I love you Daddy.”

With groceries in tow, we drove the winding green and not-very-long distance to Big Wave Bay, the small beachside fishing and surfing community where Rob and his family have found the balance between Hong Kong’s infamous fast pace and their own more mellow approach to domestic life.

We walked between little houses and through invisible clouds of incense smoke to get to Rob’s two-story home; Rob’s wife Meg and Rob’s youngest son Bodhi greeted us within. It was the first time I’d seen Bodhi, and I was thrilled to meet him; his eyes were big and blue and shy; he crawled; he laughed; I liked him immediately.

In the late afternoon, I walked to the beach with Rob, Caleb, and Eli. Rob and I carried surfboards in our arms and Eli tottered under the yellow foam “boogie board” he balanced on his head. Caleb and Rob sped ahead while Eli and I meandered; Eli snacked on sui mai – pork dumplings on a bamboo skewer – given to him by one of the local restaurant owners (later that night Eli started his pre-bed prayers with an expression of gratitude for food), and he showed me secret trails to the beach. And although Rob, Caleb, and I were planning to swim, Eli chose to remain on the sandy shore in the company of family friends and a little crowd of doting giggling girls.

Rob and I ventured into the cold waves with Caleb close behind, and we paddled to the buoy-lines that marked the shark nets below the surface of the water; then Rob – more tolerant of the frigid tide – surfed on his big board while Caleb and I hustled back to land. And after drying off, warming up, and walking home, the boys opened a huge tub of Legos and a chest full of board games, and were joined by two other boys who lived nearby. But soon the little tribe abandoned the indoors and were kicking a ball in the house-front courtyard, and laughing and crashing and crying and yelling and laughing again.

Then and throughout the day, I was impressed by Meg’s unflagging attention to her sons; she was never overbearing but always vigilant; she set boundaries and enforced them, but also let the boys be free. And even though I’d been gone, and even though Meg was preparing experimental tofu lasagna, and even though we were in a house on the quiet corner of a southeast Asian island, the scene – the boys playing outside, the baby crawling in the living room, Rob and Meg standing in the kitchen, and the yellow-then-orange-then-blue light of the sunset – felt perfectly familiar. It felt like a family.

Once we’d eaten dinner and played chess and read books and said prayers, the boys went to bed. Rob and I moved upstairs and soon we were drinking Weissbier and singing; Rob played guitar and we sang songs we’d sung together before – like “Murder in the City” by the Avett Brothers and “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric and “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas – and songs we’d not yet sung – like “Beat It” by Michael Jackson and “Pretty Voice” by Cloud Cult.

I left Big Wave Bay the next morning and went to Mass at St. Anne’s Church in Stanley; I lingered at the baptismal font next to which Rob had four years before served as stand-in Godfather for my baptism before I could be confirmed as a Catholic, and I remembered how invariably churches seem larger to me in memory.

In the afternoon, I rode the yellow double-decker 260 bus downtown for a massage. The massage was disappointing but the steam and dry sauna that preceded it were much needed; I’d been enjoying myself in the past three days, but I’d been rushing from reunion to reunion, and I was getting tired. That evening I joined my friends Kathryn and Chris for a relaxed dinner – after meeting their seven-month old baby Iris – during which we ate vegan “meatloaf”, drank wine, and discussed classism, religion, and our generation’s compulsion to mask sincerity with sarcasm.

That night I slept hard.

On Monday morning, I visited classes; the first was a senior-level course called “Service, Society, and the Sacred”, and was taught by my mentor Marty. I spoke briefly and then answered a number of students’ questions, which – perhaps as an indication of generational shift – were truly thoughtful and sincere. And following that class, I visited two ninth-grade Humanities classes and continued to be struck by the students’ expression of their earnest moral and philosophical struggles.

As I spoke, I heard myself sounding surprisingly bleak and hopeless; I believed the things I was saying, but nonetheless felt guilty with the knowledge that I was addressing idealistic young people – i.e. people in the increasingly broad group between childhood and adulthood – and not softening my accounts of jarring revelation or sad disillusionment. Granted, I believed my message was ultimately a call to authentic personal interaction and dedicated human compassion, and indeed my intended message was a hopeful one, but it was framed – and maybe blackened – by my indication of the gross dichotomy between humanity and individual human beings: I claimed that humanity fails more than it succeeds, that humanity allows indifference and greed to overwhelm intuition and charity, and that because our most coordinated historical movements have been imperial, martial, and commercial, that humanity is a disaster; but I also claimed that individuals continue to succeed in meaningful ways – at the smallest but most important times – and that despite the paradox of an ugly sum being made of beautiful parts, human beings are genuinely good-natured and infinitely interesting.

I’d already met with most of the students I’d hoped to see, but on that day I stole opportunities to talk with a few more, and found myself especially drawn to and able to connect with those students who’d traveled with HKIS to Kolkata the year before, and with whom I’d talked on the rooftop of the Dee Empresa Hotel during one of their evening meetings. Those students had seen some part of what I’d seen; they understood the context for many of my conclusions; they seemed able to share my anguish and understand my joy, even as I struggled to articulate exactly what I’d learned about myself and what I was starting to believe about the world around me.

That night I reconnected with Joe, Norbyah, and Janet for one last dinner in Hong Kong. Adding to her already generous provision of a place to stay, Janet splurged on a meal at “Lucy’s”, a small and elegant bistro with orange walls and warm light and perfect food and a tree in the middle of the dining room. On the way to the restaurant, which is coyly tucked into a Stanley market alleyway, I finally realized that Hong Kong – and especially my former neighborhood – had remained deeply familiar to me despite my extended absence; it sounds strange and impossible as I admit it now, but I recognized even the edge-lines of flaking paint on buildings, the colors of closed and open gates, and the broken swells of the street; I realized that there may actually be no other place in the world with which I am so consciously well-acquainted.

And likewise at the restaurant I remembered the times I’d been there before, with friends and family and with a girl named Ingrid (she was Chinese) who I dated during my first summer in Hong Kong. But nostalgia wasn’t unique to me that night; between dinner and dessert, Norbyah said – in what I believe was a compliment – “You’re just as I remembered you.” Despite the outward changes in me that she’d rightly expected, she affirmed a belief I was just then starting to grasp: that home is the place – and a place can be in many different places – where certain known and tangible details linger like moods, and where the essential unchanging self continues to be recognized and celebrated, even as the outwardly changing self shifts.

I left Hong Kong early the next day. On the way to the airport, rounding the northeast corner of the island in a taxi, I saw the big crowded buildings on either side of Victoria Harbor obscured by white pollution and the morning’s rising mist, and I remembered a moment some years before: I was being driven the other direction, away from the city’s urban center and toward my home in Stanley; I was wearing a clean grey tailor-made suit, alternately looking down at my fingernails and out at the harbor, and thinking that one day I might remember the life I was then living and be envious or proud or ashamed or pleased or… simply… that one day I might be different.

Our first full day together started late. We’d slept comfortably the night before in our beds at the Peerless Inn, one of the fine hotels that edges and overlooks the sprawling grassy middle-Kolkata expanse of the Maidan park.

Although I knew that the best introduction to genuine Indian food would be a gradual one, my mom and I started our tour of Kolkata – and our trip at large – with brave culinary abandon: we ate hot kati rolls and drank fresh coconut water on the street. With bellies full, and after referring to two different guidebooks, we decided to explore the highly recommended Indian Museum and Victoria Memorial; I’d been in Kolkata for nearly a year, but I’d never visited either.

At the Indian Museum – seemingly unchanged since its 19^th century opening – we saw giant skeletons of elephants and whales, fossilized leaves, an Egyptian mummy, and thousands of gemstones. (My mother once owned a gem business in Brazil, so it was a special and unexpected pleasure to wander into one of the museum’s many high-ceilinged halls and browse the dusty but nonetheless stunning collection of gems and minerals in glass cases.) We saw old Indian statues and new Indian paintings; we stood mesmerized before a miniature painting of a blue man approaching a house – and presumably courting the woman shown within – but unaware of another man in the tree above him holding a drawn bow and arrow.

…After leaving the museum and walking a short and dirty distance along Jawaharlal Nehru Road, we entered the manicured grounds of the Victoria Memorial and strolled alongside gardens and fountains and lawns. We approached the elevated and patina-streaked green statue of an aged Queen Victoria slumped on her throne, and regarded at a distance an arch-top equestrian statue of the Rex Imperator Edward VII.

Once we entered the domed and palatial interior we saw yet another striking statue, a marble representation of a much younger Victoria holding the royal scepter and globus cruciger; the statue was beautiful, but both my mother and I could not help but feel a sense of pretense, absurdity, arrogance, and waste as we circled the monument’s centerpoint; and as we read excerpts of Queen Victoria’s 1858 “Proclamation Concerning India” – which were chiseled into the stone walls – we both admitted that the monarch’s appeals to God and the claim that “it is our earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer its government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein” could be read only with a bitter sort of post-colonial irony.

In the end, I was impressed by the monument’s artistry and moved by its magnificence, but in a word, I was shocked to see it all. It was a part of Kolkata that had not been typical of my experience; truly is was opposite to my experience, and in so many months of living in the city, I had never really believed or expected that any such place did – or could – exist there.

…The next day, after visiting Mother Teresa’s tomb, and after praying and singing with the other volunteers, and after meeting Sister Mercy Maria, my mom traveled with me to Prem Dan. As we rode the crowded bright blue 202 bus from Mother House to Prem Dan, and as we walked through the little slum nearby, I had the distinct sense – as I had a few times since my mom’s arrival – that I was seeing things with new eyes.

That morning my mom washed sheets and clothes, talked with patients, and served lunch. Like most new volunteers, she saw flaws in the Prem Dan protocols, and like most new volunteers, she discussed ways to fix them. And that afternoon (and in the afternoons to come), my mom articulated her thoughts about what she felt called to do, and about how she felt her gifts should be employed; in so many words, she said it felt like a waste for her to spend time scrubbing laundry. Her honest exploration of these thoughts touched upon a concern or insecurity or quandary of my own, and challenged the way I’d decided to spend my time in the last year, and challenged my assumption that – for now at least – it is more important for me to cultivate and use my heart’s gifts rather than my mind’s.

The following day we left for Delhi; the Indira Gandhi International Airport was as close as we could get to our next destination: Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.

Just before my mother arrived in India – but long after we’d booked our domestic flights – I’d learned an important fact about the Taj: it’s closed every Friday. And predictably, the day we’d planned to spend touring the iconic Mughal mausoleum – after staying one night at a fancy Agra hotel – was Friday. It was a disappointing realization, but when we arrived in Delhi on Thursday morning, we decided we could rush to Agra for a half-day visit at least; unfortunately we were told that the 204 kilometer drive – which I had assumed would take little more than two hours – would actually take closer to five hours, and that we would need to be at the world famous monument not before a specified time, but before sunset. So we hired a taxi – doubtful but not discouraged – and we rushed.

It was not the only time my lackadaisical planning became a source of stress during my mom’s visit, but it was surely the most intense. My mom was still adjusting to Indian social and transportational norms, so while I gazed sleepily out the window of our speeding car, my mother tensed at every honked horn, hollered curse, or near collision. And there were a lot of near collisions.

We did arrive at the Taj with time enough to scamper from our car, buy tickets, and shove through the entrance. As the sun turned a hazy orange and lingered at the horizon, we were predictably but genuinely awestruck by the white dome and perfected spires that have become the international symbol of India; and of course we intended to take pictures – but I had left my camera in the car. (We’d hired the car for that day and the next, so the camera was not gone forever, but we did have to buy a seventeen dollar disposable camera – which used film­ ­– in order to take silly snapshots at what may actually be the most photogenic place in Asia.)

After taking a few pictures of the Taj from a distance, we approached the building’s first terrace; a helpful and dubiously ethical guide whisked us to the front of the very long lower-level queue and up a flight of stairs, but this only placed us on the level of the Taj, in other words at the end of another equally long line of people that wound once around the enormous building. We’d only half-circled by the time the sun had definitively set, and could see that the interior of the building had turned completely dark. Following the example of hundreds of other tourists, we left our place in line to swarm the building’s middle; I peeked inside, but my mother’s face and my own sense of mob folly convinced me to leave the place without having had a proper look. When I said we now had a reason to come back again, my mother – without anger or sarcasm, both of which might’ve been justified – said, “I don’t think I’m coming back.”

That night I thought about my mother’s response and about my own shifting point of view. I realized in a clear way what had been obvious all along: she and I were approaching our week together from very different perspectives. She wasn’t used to the crowded chaos of the country, and I wasn’t used to luxuries, itineraries, or worry. So as she sought refuge in the amenities of our hotel, I resisted the artifice of fancy tourist life; as she found comfort in soft beds and hot showers, I felt awkward and out of place; and although we were both amused by the complimentary chocolates, fruits, and American aloe vera shampoos, I think I was alone in feeling a confused but compelling sense of hypocrisy, and alone in hearing other people’s voices in my head – both Indian and foreign; both persuasive and absurd – saying that I wasn’t experiencing “real” India.

The next day, after scrutinizing the lapis-and-carnelian-and-malachite-inlaid walls and contemplating the storybook balconies of the Agra Fort, and after another unglamorous five-hour roadtrip, we flew up through and away from Delhi’s murky air to the “Pink City” in the desert – Jaipur.

During our time in Jaipur, we saw the places our guidebooks recommended: Hawa Mahal, the five-story-high and one-room-deep ornamental façade that once allowed women observing the city’s then-strict purdah to watch the street’s goings-on without themselves being seen; and Jantar Mantar, the compound in which giant astronomical tools are displayed in a surreal combination of amusement park and modern art museum aesthetics, and outside of which painted elephants can be procured for rides and tourists can pose for pictures with basketed cobras and men with flutes. (My mom did this.)

After Jaipur we traveled to nearby Pushkar, where we accidentally arrived in time for the small city’s largest event: the annual camel fair. Although we’d seen camels on the roads of every city we’d traveled to so far, in Pushkar we were in close proximity with hundreds of camels and horses and long-eared cows; we watched the camels walk with bobbing heads and chew in funny lateral circles, and we watched them kneel or roll at the commands of their owners, all for the pleasure of the camera-squinting spectators.

My mom had booked our accommodations in Kolkata, Agra, and Jaipur, but Pushkar was up to me. So I reserved a tent. It was a luxury tent with a carpeted concrete floor and indoor plumbing, but it was a relief for me to be staying somewhere more third-world exotic and less first-world conventional; and although my mom seemed anxious about our drawstring-and-canvas-flap front door and unimpressed by the bucket-and-bar-soap shower, I believe she and I both appreciated the marigold bushes that lined the sandy path to our tent, and the complimentary camel ride to the fairgrounds, and the after-dark music of drums and whining horns that not-quite-lullabied us to sleep.

…Two days later, we were back in Kolkata. My mom was planning to leave less than twenty-four hours before I did, and because of the stress of travel and the stress of my impending and final departure, I started losing patience. And as my patience diminished, my selfishness grew.

In those last few shared hours in India, I felt pressured to do what my mom wanted, and I felt resentful and angry after realizing – in a hair salon – that I’d been spending my last full day in Kolkata shopping for skirts and scarves and silver earrings… But really my irritation wasn’t about my mom. And after she left, I had time – not much, but enough – to regain perspective and gather my thoughts.

I thought about my resistance to luxury. I considered for the first time that my desire to be around poor people could be the manifestation of a subconscious need to feel unquestionably superior, and that the proximity of wealth may be problematic for me because it spotlights my own lack of income. I admitted that my comfort with dirty puddles and dirty people had diminished after one luxurious week, and acknowledged that throughout the time I’d spent in India I might’ve changed my attitude and philosophy about “finer pleasures” as a way to cope with life in Kolkata; in other words, I might’ve rejected luxury not because of some innate evil, but simply because I could not keep seeing filth and chaos and wishing it were different, and I had to think of poverty and simplicity as normal, and wealth and luxury as aberrational.

I thought about my disdain of tourism. I considered that the grotesque and obvious presence of tourists reminded me that I too was a visitor in India, despite all my sincere or ridiculous attempts to commingle. I admitted that I would always be a stranger to native Indians, and that I felt like more of an alien in Kolkata after my mom’s arrival, which was difficult because I had truly started to believe that – in Kolkata at least – I was starting to blend in.

And I thought about saying goodbye. I thought about the fact that I was leaving behind a life that became familiar, but never became easy.

And I realized that as I’d traveled with my mom, I hadn’t allowed myself the space or time to feel the catharsis – the pleasure and pain – of saying goodbye to the places and people that mattered to me, and that I believed I would never see again.

But on my last day in India, I found that space and time.

I went to Prem Dan for the last time on a Thursday. I’d already been to the Modern Lodge to say goodbye to my good friend Sean, and I’d already been to Mother House to say goodbye to Sister Mercy Maria.

And because Missionaries of Charity volunteers don’t work on Thursdays, I was able to visit Prem Dan at my own pace and without distractions. I spent an hour or so sitting with various men; I explained with words and gestures and looks that I was leaving and that I wasn’t coming back; some of the men seemed to understand, some seemed pleased that I’d come to say goodbye, some seemed indifferent, some unaware, and some seemed genuinely sad.

It’s hard for me now to explain what I felt that day; it’s hard to know which things to include and which to omit; my memory has held onto some few details and let go of many others. My farewell at Prem Dan wasn’t perfect; I wasn’t able to say goodbye to any of the nuns, and I wasn’t able to say goodbye to all the men. But after saying goodbye far too many times in the last decade – to classmates and students and friends – I already knew that goodbyes are never perfect, and that they’re always hard.

Even as I write this, tears rise and I hesitate to try to explain everything – because I know I can’t.

I can just say that one of the last men I saw that day was one with whom I never really realized I’d bonded. I’d never asked him his name and never told him mine. Honestly I didn’t even know if he could talk, and I still don’t. But I know that half of his face is droopingly paralyzed and that his left eye is always reddish and wet and his right ear is always dripping pus; I know that he has grey hair and only one leg and that I’ve shaved his face many times, and many times hefted him into wheelchairs and onto toilets and into bed.

On the day I left, I approached him where he sat and knelt in front of him and – because we had never really spoken – I just looked into his eyes. I looked into his eyes and said nothing; I only felt a great sadness and joy and felt my eyes fill with tears, and saw his eyes fill with tears too. I reached to touch his foot with my hands and then touched my hands to my forehead – as far as I know, in India this is the greatest possible sign of respect – and he shifted in his wheelchair when he realized what I was doing and he leaned forward with awkward but practiced balance, and he reached down for my feet and touched his hands to his own forehead –

And that was all. That was all we could say, and all we needed to say.

On the last night of the week-long celebration, crowds of people with red paint smeared on their faces laughed and sang as cymbals, drums, and horns blasted from the big trucks into which they had all climbed and on which they processed through the city toward the Hooghly river, where the painted straw-and-clay Durga Puja idols were ceremonially dumped. Empty of their statues, my neighborhood’s pandals were then dismantled in slow stages, and the once-crowded streets became quiet and familiar again. And the magical, impossible, cool, and evocative scent of cardamom moved in the air – unseen and inexplicable – throughout the city.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, my friend (and stand-in godfather) Rob was preparing to celebrate the completion of his Master’s degree in Buddhist studies. With permission from his wife Meg, Rob had decided to travel to Bodhgaya, which is home to the Bodhi tree (ficus religiosa) under which Siddhartha Gautama reached enlightenment and became the Buddha. Rob had asked me to join him, and also decided to dovetail his trip to Bodhgaya with a visit to Kolkata.

Rob flew to Kolkata from Hong Kong via Singapore, and his flight touched down at the Netaji Subash Chandra Bose International Airport after ten o’clock at night. Rob had traveled to Kolkata once before (shortly after finishing high school), but it was his first time back after 14 years.

In order to thank me for meeting him at the airport, or simply because he is generous and hilarious and kind, the next morning Rob made banana pancakes using organic wholegrain pancake mix and maple syrup he’d brought from Hong Kong. They were delicious.

After breakfast, Rob and I relaxed and explored the city, starting with Kolkata’s famous Kali Temple. Within moments of our arrival, an opportunistic stranger spotted us and offered an unsolicited tour. Without actually agreeing, we were suddenly being sped from one corner of the small temple complex to another, but not before washing our hands with yellowy water from a crumpled plastic bottle; this was a necessity before we entered the temple itself, our guide explained, and added with authoritative assurance that he was a Brahmin priest.

After stopping to look at the bloody floor where goats and buffalos had been sacrificed, we moved fast to the front of the “not for praying” line; we clanged bells overhead and glimpsed a brightly burning fire next to Kali, the supposedly black-faced red-tongued three-eyed statue that neither Rob nor I actually saw through the elbowing crowd.

More or less satisfied, we left the temple and were led to the slimy edge of a green pool where we washed our feet next to an obliviously bare-breasted old woman, and were then blessed before a white statue of Shiva by our guide, who made a “Brahmin request” for a 1000-rupee donation; Rob handed the man a blue one hundred rupee note, and we left.

That afternoon we ate lunch at a nearby restaurant called Bhojohori Manna and talked about life in Hong Kong and about Rob’s three sons and about Rob’s sister who has tattoos of crows on both her arms. We didn’t rush. It was Saturday.

Very early the next morning, Rob and I taxied to Mother House for breakfast and for Rob’s day-pass to Prem Dan. Rob had volunteered at Prem Dan when he’d visited Kolkata before and was excited to return, but despite searching his vague memories for familiar images and experiences, his morning visit to the hospital was neither nostalgic nor deeply cathartic. I was disappointed to hear him say so, but not surprised; newcomers to Prem Dan often struggle to find a rhythm in their first days, and after fourteen years, Rob was essentially a newcomer (although perhaps a less naïve and more cynical one than before). Truly, Prem Dan had changed, and so had Rob.

That evening, before our late-night train left for Bodhgaya, I invited Rob to attend Mass at St. Teresa’s Church. Predictably, he agreed. I have always known Rob to be interested in spiritual traditions including and apart from his own. And it was an especially meaningful pleasure to share my now-spiritually-integral experience of what Rob called “corporate worship” so many years after he’d witnessed and helped facilitate the formal beginning of my life’s second religious awakening: my confirmation as a Catholic at St. Anne’s Church in Hong Kong. (I also felt a small latitudinarian glee when I realized that Rob was a Lutheran celebrating an extended season of Buddhist scholarship attending Catholic Mass in a Hindu city at the edge of a Muslim neighborhood.)

A few hours after church, our train left Kolkata’s Howrah station for Gaya. We slept comfortably overnight in the air-conditioned train car using the clean pillows and sheets and blankets we’d been provided, and as we slept our train left West Bengal, passed through Jharkhand, and entered Bihar, which is widely considered India’s poorest state.

As the sun rose, we arrived in Gaya, shared a bumpy car-ride with an Irish yogi named Sinead, and were dropped off at Bodhgaya’s semi-remote Root Institute, the monastery-and-hostel where we’d booked a “donation only” room. We were greeted there by three friendly dogs and Buddhist nun with short grey hair; we registered, meditated, ate breakfast, and slept.

Throughout the week, meals at the Root Institute were invariably excellent. We ate a wide variety of foods including potato tortillas, gingery carrot soup, steamed momos, and cashew-topped chocolate brownies; fresh baked bread was served at every meal, and fresh ground peanut butter was served at breakfast. All guests of the Root Institute were expected to eat in silence (which reminded me of a departmental team-building retreat that Rob and I had attended at a Catholic monastery in Hong Kong, where we likewise ate a silent lunch), and the meals were meaningfully peaceful and introspective, even despite the noisome presence of big black pantleg-penetrating mosquitoes which, in accordance with the Buddhist eightfold path of ethical conduct, wisdom, and mental discipline, we were asked not to kill.

When we weren’t eating, we spent most of our time at the Root Institute reading and meditating. I read small sections of an American Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, and even smaller sections of the opaque Diamond Sutra; we meditated alone and in groups on mindfulness and equanimity twice or three times a day in the gompa: a quiet meditation hall lit warmly and decorated with colorful Tibetan thangka paintings and photographs of Buddhist lamas.

Beyond the Root Institute, we explored the town. We snacked on streetside-vended roasted corn and toured an archaeological museum; we visited Japanese, Tibetan, Thai, and Chinese temples; we admired paintings of demons, statues of Bodhisattvas, and a giant grey statue of the meditating Buddha.

But the main attraction in Bodhgaya was of course the Mahabodhi Temple and the Bodhi tree.

The temple was visible from a distance. A tall stone stupa temporarily topped with scaffolding slowly revealed itself as we approached; walking alongside pilgrims holding strings of wooden beads and wearing maroon or orange or white robes – crowds of men and women with uniformly shorn heads of hair grown out in varying lengths of black buzz – we entered the temple complex and saw the temple, and then the tree, and then the Varjasana – the “Diamond Throne” – which marks where the Buddha is believed to have actually sat.

Rob and I visited some part of the temple complex every day we were in Bodhgaya, meditating on mats with monks and other tourists, reclining on the grass, listening to unending baritone chants, twirling pointed Bodhi leaves, or watching the flight of green birds with long green tailfeathers around the stupa and through the trees.

The day before we left, we decided to visit the nearby cave temples about which we’d heard dubious but intriguing rumors from rickshaw drivers. While negotiating a fare with a driver and his friend, a boy approached us and offered a stack of postcards for sale; we declined as we’d done any number of times with other peddlers already, but the boy lingered and asked if he could accompany us to the caves; he asked with such polite and disarming sincerity that we agreed.

Blasting Indian dance music, we were driven away from the Bodhgaya town-center; as we rattled and bumped through increasingly tiny dusty countryside villages, we learned that the boy’s name was Rahul, and that he was eleven years old. Rahul seemed to know where we were going, but our driver and his cohort apparently did not; Rob and I (and Rahul) exchanged knowing and doubtful glances as our directionless journey dragged on, collectively assuming we were lost, but mostly appreciating the unpredictable fate of our day’s adventure.

After our driver asked more than one smiling villager for directions, we rightly arrived at the base of a small mountain; the caves were halfway up, so we started hiking. At the outset, we were approached by beggars of all ages and in all states of physical breakdown, and when we reached the entry to the caves, we were willingly cajoled into buying offerings for the temple: we bought candles, incense, prayer flags, and ceremonial white scarves called khatas.

The caves were small and our tour was quick. Inside we saw sleepy attendants illuminated by dim candlelight and a statue of the emaciated Buddha, which represented the period of too-strict asceticism in the Buddha’s life during which he realized that moderation – the Middle Way – was best. We lit candles, burned incense, donated money, and left.

On our hike down to the road, Rob and I enjoyed a broadly expansive view of the Bihari countryside; we watched grey monkeys climb trees; we gave ten rupees to a man with amputated legs – he had dragged himself to the middle of our path – and took pictures of friendly giggling girls.

And during the ride back into town, Rahul asked us to buy him a dictionary. It seemed like a modest request, and even though we might’ve been put off in any other context by the boy’s predictable opportunism, Rob and I agreed to accompany Rahul to a bookstore once we returned to Bodhgaya. But before we arrived, Rahul tried to explain something to me; he said he wanted to practice his English with the dictionary, and that I shouldn’t talk to anyone else because the money would be divided; I didn’t understand, but because I was tired and because I was skeptical and because I thought I was doing Rahul a favor, I didn’t try to.

After paying our rickshaw driver, and after being led through town by Rahul, and after being joined by a chatty older boy named Surya (which I had recently learned was also the name of a famous American lama), we finally reached the bookstore where Rahul asked for a new 950-rupee hardbound Oxford Dictionary. Rob and I exchanged a quick look, but we paid for the book without further hesitation; sensing a scam, we encouraged Rahul to write his name in the dictionary and even wrote our own encouraging inscriptions. Rahul seemed genuinely happy to personalize the book, and seemed genuinely happy with the purchase; we walked with him back toward his house, and were followed by Surya and joined by a few of Rahul’s friends.

We parted ways at the intersection of the main road and the road to Rahul’s house; he asked us to follow him, but the day had been long and we were eager to enjoy one last delicious silent dinner. So we said goodbye and headed home, feeling good about what we’d done.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later – when we saw the boys cutting through a farmer’s field to intercept us – that we started to realize what had been happening.

Rahul was crying; his friends led him by the hand; Surya was close behind. Sensing that they’d been fighting, and that Surya – who was larger and older – had been the instigator, we sent him on his way. He reluctantly left, and we soon understood that Surya had tried to force Rahul to return the book to the bookstore and give him half the money. And I suddenly understood what Rahul had been saying in the rickshaw: he was being bullied.

I felt little twinges of sympathetic sadness as Rahul and his loyal friends walked with us to the Root Institute’s gate, but was comforted by the support the boys showed Rahul with their presence, their conversation, and with their exemplary flying jumpkicks.

We saw Rahul the next day selling postcards at the entrance of the Mahabodhi Temple, and because his friends were there with him, I believed – whether the conflict with Surya had definitively ended or not – that Rahul had the support he needed. We shook hands and said goodbye.

In Gaya that night, Rob and I drank beer and ate peanuts for hours at the Siddhartha Hotel restaurant before leaving Bihar for West Bengal. And after we boarded our train and found our beds, we laughingly exchanged playlists on our iPods and prepared for a restful night. But unlike our deluxe trip away, we returned to Kolkata in a regular sleeper car, which provided neither air-conditioning nor bedding; the weather was fine and cool, but we struggled to sleep on the sticky plastic mattresses using our backpacks as pillows. The few times I fell asleep I was woken by the train’s loud rattling or by the problematic passage of alcohol through my guts or by the man with white hair and white clothes on the bed across from mine who – in the train’s clacking flashing darkness – muttered midnight prayers and seemed to be fingering mala beads or freakishly chewing a string.

Not very long after our early-morning arrival in Kolkata, Rob left India in the evening. It was hard to say goodbye. I was still dazed from the train ride, still tired and mildly hungover, and still processing my subconscious emotional shifts. And of course I was going to miss Rob’s friendship, the value of which – as I realized how much more open and talkative I’d become that week – I’d started to remember and more deeply understand.

But in the week after his departure, and during concurrent celebrations of just-Kolkata’s Kali Puja and all-India’s Diwali, I started contemplating Rob’s visit in a broader context. And my perspective – along with my neighborhood – transformed once again.

For Kali Puja, new pandals featured frightful statues of Kali, the same destroyer-and-protector goddess who was represented in the Kali Temple. But in the pandals she was plainly visible; she had long black wavy hair, black skin, red hands, and a jutting red tongue; she wielded a curved sword overhead and stood upon the body of her husband Shiva; she wore glittering golden jewelry and a necklace of severed heads.

And for Diwali, the festival of lights, colored candles and little clay oil-pots filled vendor’s stalls, bright light strings and candles glowed in the streets, and fireworks whistled and boomed and crackled.

I’d objectively appreciated the foreign revelry, but it wasn’t until my friend Ip Pui – who is married to a Kolkata native – invited me to celebrate Diwali with her husband’s family that I started to realize the festivals’ connection to the week I’d spent in Bodhgaya.

After arriving at Ip Pui’s house, and before eating dinner, I sat with the extended family facing a small altar. The central figures were tiny statues of the gods Ganesh and Lakshmi, and one-by-one each family member – including the servants – dipped a leaf in water and sprinkled the sacred space; they flicked red powder at the gods, tossed them flowers and little sweets, and finally swirled a flaming leaf-shaped clay bowl of oil before the altar.

I watched the ritual in reverent and joyful silence, but only when I observed the family eating and talking after the ceremony did I finally feel an overwhelming sense of human interconnectedness. Overhearing discussions of Hindu theology, of city character, and even of the American President’s visit to India, I imagined my own family and our traditions, and saw very clearly how we are different – and how we are the same.

On the ride home after the party, sleepy and stuffed full of delicious Bengali food, I noticed white lights lining the streets and blue lights in the trees. And I noticed the lingering and mysterious scent of cardamom.

It was then and in the short time that followed that I started to feel deep gratitude for the intimate experience of traditions that are not my own; I started to feel the silent and unspeakable revelations that come during meditation and prayer; I started to feel as if the edges of all things were touching the edges of all other things, and as if the distinctions between foreign and familiar were suddenly blurred, irrelevant, or nil.

I started to feel the universal power of friendship, ceremony, family, and faith.

…And despite the sad reality that my family and closest friends are far away, I started to feel grateful for my past, and hopeful for my future. In particular I looked forward to my mother’s upcoming visit to India, and to my own upcoming visit to Hong Kong; I looked forward to reconnecting with beloved families and close friends, including Rob and Meg and their three sons; I have already met Caleb and Eli, but I have yet to meet Rob and Meg’s youngest son who, unlike his brothers, does not have a biblical name.

His name is Bodhi, and he’s my godson.

Immediately after the meeting, half-celebrant and half-relieved, I went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. I ordered a beer, drank it, and ordered another; I was served but soon afterward a nervous waiter approached me and explained in semi-comprehensible terms that I needed to finish my second drink quickly; he had made a mistake; it was a holiday – Gandhi’s birthday – and serving alcohol was therefore illegal.

I was surprised but happy to comply. I gulped down my second beer and as I finished my meal, I felt a little drunk.

After I left the restaurant and its chagrined waitstaff, I felt myself wander along the edge of satisfaction and desire; I wanted to keep drinking; because I was already buzzed or because I was still emotionally high from my meeting or simply because it was forbidden, I wanted to find another beer. I wanted more.

My desire grew as the real impossibility of finding alcohol became more apparent. And yet a part of me delighted in the doomed search; a part of me felt playful and wild; and as absurd as it sounds now, a part of me felt the once-familiar and intense Dionysian urge to feel nothing and everything at once: the desire for oblivion.

But then the search suddenly felt pathetic. I admitted to myself that my small craving would be unsatisfied, and even though I accepted that desire – even when it is foolish or pitiful – is an elemental part of being human, I still felt somewhat ashamed. I went home, and started asking myself questions in my usual melodramatic way:

Hadn’t I outgrown self-indulgence? Hadn’t I turned away from unchecked passion? Hadn’t I already decided that the deliberate pursuit of insobriety is childish and selfish and vain?

…More than a week later, I joined one of the monthly trips to the Gandhiji Prem Nivas Leprosy Center in the Kolkata suburb of Titagarh. We met at Mother House early in the morning, and were briefly oriented by Sister Margaret, the diminutive and kind-hearted Japanese nun who speaks barely audible and barely comprehensible English. Because she recognized me or because she mistook me for someone more knowledgeable, Sister Margaret chose me to lead the volunteers to Titagarh. I agreed to help because I felt obligated and because I hoped to impress an aloof, stunning, and newly arrived American volunteer I’d noticed the day before; but honestly I felt anxious until an Italian monk (and Prem Dan coworker) named Luco smiled broadly and offered to be my equally unqualified partner.

(Luco is formerly of the Franciscan order, and although he still wears the brown Franciscan habit, he is now an independent and itinerant missionary; he travels with other like-minded pilgrims who he refers to as his “family”. When I met Luco, his long brown hair had been twisted into dreadlocks and tucked into a brightly-colored Rastafarian cap; within a week, Luco became so sick with fever that he cut off all his hair and collapsed face-first onto the edge of his bed; his hair is now closely cropped and a diagonal pink scar crosses the middle of his forehead. He is among the happiest and most genuinely loving men I have ever met.)

Luco and I completed our modest task; our group successfully boarded the bus to Titagarh and found the Leprosy Center. After a quick talk by one of the center’s administrators in the reception building, we walked across train tracks to the main facilities; once there, we strolled through green and purple gardens and passed quiet black pools stocked with fish; we visited a classroom and listened to children sing songs in English and Italian; we toured the very long corridor of clacking looms where towels and bedsheets and the iconic Missionaries of Charity blue-and-white saris are made. We met the patients.

The tour was relaxed, and although I was excited to reconnect with two patients from Prem Dan who had been moved to Gandhiji Prem Nivas, the day was fairly uneventful. I hesitate to say the trip was boring, but I will admit that I felt none of the shock or fear or biblically dramatic catharsis I had first expected. And in no way do I mean to diminish the suffering of the patients I met, but it became clear to me that the famous Leprosy Center was simply a functioning hospital; it was a rehabilitation center; it was one of many places in the world where diligent and consistent help is needed – and is given.

On the bus back to south Kolkata from Titagarh, I felt a sense of relief. Because the ride was long and because we passed a changing landscape of semi-rural and suburban Indian neighborhoods, I felt a pleasant sense of travel and transformation that I’ve realized in a near necessity in my life. Because I was relaxed from the day’s events and because I was tired from the early morning wake-up and because the air outside was cool and rainy and drizzly, my head nodded forward a few times and I fell asleep.

When I returned home that afternoon, I busied myself with reading. I continued my slow but joyful progress through War and Peace and revisited favorite poems; I identified with Tolstoy’s character Pierre, who struggles to live life virtuously and accept death fearlessly, and I identified with Princess Marya, who desires earthly love despite her obvious spiritual calling; I read Tennyson’s Ulysses and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind and Thomas’ Do not go gentle. I relaxed.

That day and in the days before and after, I thought of the mysterious and fascinating details of my life; I thought of riding the train to Prem Dan and glimpsing big piles of empty brown snail shells alongside the train tracks during a normal but inexplicable between-stations stop, and how the shells seemed somehow indicative of a life I will never fully understand; I thought of this week’s Durga Puja festival and how my neighborhood streets have become crowded with corporate kiosks and with cotton candy and popcorn vendors and with fresh vegetable chaat vendors and with multi-storey bamboo scaffoldings under which arched tunnels admit cars and under which huge temporary castles called pandals have slowly grown and become bright gold and white and orange homes for statue-gods and animals, and how white light-strings dangle everywhere and bubbles float in the air and how green lights rise in the trees; I thought of the red-turbaned teams of railway construction workers; I thought of the very tall and old Italian woman with bright red up-swept hair who volunteers with me at Prem Dan and wears elegant black dresses and dark purple lipstick every day; I thought of St. Teresa’s Church and the tiny white worms bending and crossing in piles at the bottom of the holy water bowls and of the two altar-flanking statues of angels holding candelabras and how one angel’s gaze is lifted and the other’s gaze is lowered.

It’s become my habit to observe and list the exotic details of my life, and likewise it’s become my habit to compare those exotic details to the mundane. Amidst hypnotic and arresting mysteries, I live with simple struggles and obligations – both familiar and unfamiliar – just as I always have; I feel a sometimes fading sense of determination and purpose, and forget why certain things seemed important or even essential in my life; I feed my housemate Ip Pui’s cats (whose names are Lani, Hanuman, Passerby, and Siufafa) while Ip Pui travels to China; I feel disconnected from the people about whom I care most deeply, and long for cathartic conversation and emotional exchange; I boil pasta for dinner; and I recline on my bed, propped on my elbow, and think.

…Despite mundane struggles and thoughts, and even despite new experiences and sensations, I often find myself considering the positive changes in my life. I recognize that I am learning how to live simply – to be mild – and to breathe. I believe my romantic soul is maturing, and I no longer resist or turn from the antitheticals to passion: old age, patience, silence, and slow dignified death.

(Although “I cannot rest from travel” either, the endless search for adventure in Tennyson’s Ulysses seems arrogant, selfish, and foolish to me now; Ulysses’ ultimate departure seems like evidence that he is not “strong in will”, but only restless; I agree that we must all answer our life’s call, but now I wonder at what cost.

And likewise I find Shelley’s celebration of wild uncontrollable wind in his Ode to the West Wind and his praise of the “tameless, and swift, and proud” spirit immature and – in Shelley’s own language – “impetuous”; although I once did, I no longer identify with the scattered “ashes and sparks” of “an unextinguish’d hearth”; I now seek something much more sustainable and quiet and calm.)

I believe I am now cultivating a sense – just a sense – of genuine responsibility, accountability, and reliability, even though my responsibilities are small, and even though I am mostly accountable only to myself. I am now considering the ironic possibility that passion is a hindrance to the greatest artwork, and that control, discipline, devotion, and effort-over-time are better creative forces than tantrums, sudden revelations, or moments of ecstasy; I am now starting to believe that art – and also an artful life – is necessarily the result of habit and not any single event.

But of course these new modes of thought admit doubts. I have to acknowledge that perhaps only fearful solitude causes my romantic soul to draw inward and pretend it no longer believes in passion’s value. I have to acknowledge that I am embarrassed and even angry on behalf of my younger more passionate self as my values change. And I have to acknowledge that I still love the energy of Romanticism even as I disagree with its sentiments; that I sometimes wonder if the Romantics may have known better; and most importantly, that even if I am truly leaving behind my wild and selfish passions – I long for them still.

And yet, despite doubt there is also certainty.

I am certain that the world needs better helpers. And I don’t mean this in any grandiose sense, but in a human-to-human context; I am certain that we need to be more reliable and less selfish for the sake of those people we help, but much more – and paradoxically – we need to be less selfish for our own sake.

(I don’t know if I will be considered – or even if I will consider myself – among these ‘better helpers’. But as far as I can tell, there can be no more significant triumph or success, even if it means a person will be considered dispassionate or ordinary or boring as he or she becomes more like what I imagine God must be: compassionate, patient, and constant.)

I am certain that a person can find what he values most despite the occasional distractions of half-drunk desire, and despite the mental and emotional competition between the thrilling and the mild. And I am certain that there is greatest value in the quiet daily work of a hospital where people heal and tend gardens and where – thread by thread – clothes and towels and bedsheets are made.

Finally, I am certain that my soul may flourish, even as my body grows old and – like the transitory self – eventually dies. I am certain that I may “rage against the dying of the light” and “go gentle into that good night”. And moreover I am certain that light does not die in moments of silence and devotion and humble patience, or even in moments of motionless nightfall; I am certain that a more subtle light – and yet brighter and greater – shines in stillest, darkest places.

I still think about it sometimes. Not about the cheesecake – although I think about that too – but I think about being in the Pecos. The trip I took this summer was my seventh or eighth; my first was when I was thirteen years old (and during which I turned fourteen), and was required of me as part of a St. Mark’s tradition: all rising freshmen must camp in small groups for a week in the Sangre de Cristo mountains – in the Pecos – during the summer before they enter highschool. And because I enjoyed my trip as a student, I returned as a leader in the years that followed.

Even though I was accompanied by and responsible for a group of teenaged boys, the trip this summer – like all previous trips – was restorative and centering. My group and the seven or eight or nine other groups like it enjoyed relative isolation in the woods; we had only occasional interactions with other campers, and we only rarely smelled packhorses in the distance.

In the Pecos there is a subtle infinity of wildlife: butterflies float and dip over ponds, purple and yellow and white and orange wildflowers grow on the rocky sunny mountainsides, aspen leaves rustle and glitter in the wind, dry moss crumbles under trees, hummingbirds and black flies and yellow bees hover in the air, branches snap, creeks trickle, and small white mushrooms and big flat-topped orange mushrooms line the wet edges of trails; on this year’s trip my group was also visited by jackrabbits close to our campsite at Cave Creek, and by a herd of cows in Horsethief Meadow.

It’s easy to be happy in the Pecos. It’s easy to disregard what’s unimportant, and it’s easy to appreciate things: the hot beans in my dinner bowl, the black ash and soil on my knees, the silence and starlight in the night, the towering clouds in the sky, the fine bloody scratches on my legs, the cold taste of rain in the air, and the dark brown hairs on my arms that redden and shine in the sunlight.

One afternoon this summer, near a small lake in the shadow of a mountain called Pecos Baldy, I met an old Mexican cowboy with two horses and dog. One horse was brown and male and saddled; one horse was blonde and female and free. The dog was black and angular and light and quick; it was fluffy-tailed and very friendly; it seemed more like a fox than a dog.

The cowboy’s name was Leroy, and after asking about my trip, and after talking about his three attendant animals as if they were his children, he asked if I’d seen any cattle close to our campsites; I told him about the herd at Horsethief Meadow, and confirmed they were the ones he sought by mentioning the orange tags on their ears. He was pleased to know where they were, but in no rush to chase after them. He was letting the cows graze and would be moving them out of the Pecos eventually. As he told me this his horses waited with practiced patience; and Leroy too seemed patient and confident, and seemed as if he’d been patient and confident about most things for a long time.

…In a way, my time in New Mexico prepared me for my return to India. I felt strong and healthy when I left the Pecos, and I felt ready to deal with the fast urban chaos of Kolkata after being immersed in the slow sylvan order of the woods.

Now that I’m here, and now that I feel occasionally and increasingly exhausted and depressed by the small stresses of my daily life, I sometimes forget what I learned over the summer. I fixate on minutia. I think of the indefatigable green-and-grey mold that grows on the brown leather belt in my closet and on the brown leather wallet under my bed; I think of the mosquitoes that keep me from eating breakfast on my porch and that sting my ankles while I brush my teeth; I think of the patient named George who every day demands that I pray for his leg – which I do – every day – and I think of my less-than-charitable irritation as I do it; I think of the books I’ve written and the book I’m writing and the invisible goals toward which I blindly continue to strive.

Of course, amid the frustrations of my routine there are many newly or familiarly arresting details and images: there are the open eyes painted on either side of truck-fronts or the spiders flinching on my bedroom walls or the subtle but ubiquitous Hindu swastikas or the dog chewing a rubbery newborn rat outside a rubbled internet café or the too-long but disarmingly earnest puppet show of Mother Teresa’s life I watched last Sunday with a group of fellow volunteers.

Life remains interesting, but sometimes it’s difficult. This is no surprise, but there is an added difficulty that I now suffer or create or observe: October.

Historically, October – and perhaps autumn at large – has always been a challenging time for me. I don’t know if the change of seasons and the diminished sunlight depresses me; I don’t know if other people actually become as preoccupied and self-involved as they seem; I don’t know if the lasting imprint of the academic calendar makes me imagine and sense my own dwindling ‘first day’ euphoria and the onset of an impending never-ending schoolyear’s grind.

But I do know that thinking of the Pecos now – thinking of leafy shady dusty muddy flowery uphill and downhill trails, thinking of the mountaintop where my group sat in meditative silence and of the path we lost in the underbrush, and thinking of a Mexican cowboy named Leroy – gives me perspective and gives me hope.

…In our brief conversation, Leroy impressed me with more than just his manifest self-possession. It was his ability to commit to his work with dignity and joy that moved me then and still moves me. Leroy seemed blissfully bound to a life without a definitive goal; I don’t know about the man’s other ambitions, but herding cattle through the Pecos each summer doesn’t seem to promise any glamour or change; it seems that each year must be very much like the one before. And Leroy told me that – starting at age six – he’d been herding cattle through the Pecos for sixty years.

I suppose that over so much time, a person may observe many permanent changes and many repeated cycles. A person may see seasons begin and end, both those spent as romantically as a summer riding horseback through the mountains or as mundanely as a monsoon typing in obscurity and wiping mold.

I try to remember Leroy’s humble example during overwhelming times; occasionally I do, and occasionally I am heartened by it. I realize that I’m doing what I want to be doing, but I also feel free to admit that it’s a grind. And then I aspire toward patience and confidence; I ask for the strength to persevere. It is challenging to ask, and it is challenging to want to ask. But every time I do – eventually, and because of God’s grace or the power of deliberate personal intention or because of some great cosmic coincidence – I find that strength. I go on.

And I think of Leroy’s blonde horse.

I brush my teeth each morning and try to dodge mosquitoes by stepping from one foot to the other and shaking my legs the same way Leroy’s gentle horse stamped her hooves and twitched her shining flanks and swished her tail; and even though I can’t remember the name of Leroy’s foxy black dog or the name of the horse he was riding, I still remember that blonde unsaddled horse’s name: it was India Linda.

Even though I went to bed late that night and slept late the next morning, I didn’t rush to work. It was raining – as it had been for days – and I was still sleepy, so I stretched for twenty minutes, meditated, and then sat on my bed and ate a bowl of crunchy Swiss muesli with honey and sliced bananas and soymilk.

After the rain stopped and after I finally groggily left my house, I rode to the train station in an autorickshaw decorated with looped and crossed marigold strands and big green banana leaves. When I arrived at Prem Dan I discovered that the back gate was locked, so I walked the long way around the slum to the front gate. A fat woman in a blue sari yelled at me; she called out “Hello! Hello!” so persistently that I turned to face her; she pointed to a man bent forward with both hands on a huge drainage pipe, said “patient”, and then pointed at Prem Dan. I approached the man where he stood wincing in pain, learned through his gestures that he had injured his hip, and told him and the big blue woman that I would ask inside if he could be admitted.

Joan, the dedicated skilled cynical elderly New Zealand nurse and Prem Dan veteran, who has russety-brown-over-grey dyed hair and wears stylish rectangular glasses and big white billowy Indian shirts, told me that “the Sisters” make all decisions regarding admissions, and that I ought to let the man come to them on his own. Because Joan is always in action and because she is so experienced, her perspective often seems cold or excessively callous; so even though Joan was probably right, I sought out Sister Romaric myself and asked if a new patient could be admitted; with a reluctant and non-committal smile she told me to bring him to the gate.

The man with the injured hip and his big blue spokesperson seemed surprised to see me return. I explained – incomprehensibly, I’m sure – that the man could come to the front gate with me but that it wasn’t my decision whether or not he would be brought inside. They seemed satisfied, and I asked the man if he could walk; he could not; he could barely stand. Seeing the difficulty, the woman looked at me, nodded to the man, and put out her arms with palms facing upward, as if she were hefting a big invisible weight. I had to carry him.

I lifted the man and held him in my arms and started walking with tentative heaving steps through the slum. Meeting the unfriendly but deferential faces of the people I passed, I felt a combination of pride and shame. I felt the shame of my own obvious strength in contrast to the man’s obvious weakness.

At last I arrived at the gate and set the man on his feet. He whimpered in pain when I told him to wait; I went inside and after I found Sister Romaric and brought her to the gate, she spoke with the man briefly. Then she told me his hip was broken and that he was a “hospital case”; she said he needed treatment that he couldn’t get at Prem Dan; but after regarding the man’s desperate face again she allowed him to come inside anyway. I ran to find a wheelchair for him and when he finally sat down, he looked terrified. I told him my name and asked him his; it was Saleem.

That day, Saleem was admitted to Prem Dan so he could comfortably await treatment for his broken hip. He was wheeled to the dirty rear courtyard which smelled like rotten bananas and garbage (and which always reminds me of Goya’s nightmarish Caprichos); he was given water and mouri; his body was washed and his head was shaved; he was assigned to bed F6.

(The man who had formerly occupied Saleem’s new bed had died at 9AM the day before. I never knew his name but I’d shaved his face before and each time he’d scowled in unhappy noiseless toothless pain; in the days before he died he’d started refusing food and appearing more and more horrifically thin, and his eyes sockets were dark and wet; two days before he died he asked me to shave his thick beard, and I did.)

Because I’d arrived late that morning and because I’d spent time helping Saleem, I didn’t hang laundry and shaved only a few men’s faces. During my break I drank chai with a group of pretty Spanish women and girls and then prepared to help with lunch.

I ladled food for only a few minutes; the sweet smell of steamed rice and the spiced smell of hot lentils and potatoes mingled unpleasantly with the stink of chopped-up-and-boiled fish, so I was relieved when Joan called for my help in the wound-dressing room. (I have been in the wound-dressing room only very rarely since I began working at Prem Dan, and never for longer than a minute; Joan and the few other volunteers with medical training do not invite many people to join them, and they always seem busy and preoccupied as they work.)

Joan had called for my help not because I was experienced in wound-dressing, but because the patient whose wound she intended to dress, and also – I soon realized – swab with betadine and inject with numbing solution and re-stitch with black thread, was Paul Mondle, the man who I’d visited daily for two weeks at Mercy Hospital.

By the time I got to the room, Paul was lying on a metal table and crying hysterically and babbling and pleading with Joan to stop what she was doing. Sympathetic to Paul but also respectful of Joan, I asked what she had done. She said she hadn’t started yet; Paul’s hysteria was not a result of pain, but of fear.

And I was also afraid. The old bandage had been removed from Paul’s thigh, and I saw bright red flesh with brown skin-edges on either side pulled rudely together by black stitches. Joan was of course unmoved by the minor gore of the wound; she simply smiled in the broad and genuine and mildly frightening way that older women who still wear heavy makeup sometimes smile; the original stitches were her own work, and although she admitted they were not “plastic surgery”, she seemed proud of the job she’d done and pleased with Paul’s progress. But perhaps because she noticed my fearful response to the exposed flesh and to Paul’s melodramatic lamentations, she assured me that Paul was overreacting; she said she was almost certain now that Paul was a drug addict, and that he – like all addicts – had a very low threshold for pain.

(Joan and I had talked before about the possible cause of Paul’s abscessed leg, and after hearing that he often asked for sweets at the hospital, and after seeing his response to painful treatments, and after talking to Paul’s doctor, Joan concluded that he’d been “mainlining” into his thigh. Because I’d both prayed with Paul and bought him a Bible at his request, I had assumed – naively or irrationally – that Paul was not using drugs; when I said so to Joan, she replied without hesitation that he would probably use the Bible’s pages to roll joints or try to sell it when he left Prem Dan. It was then that I remembered Paul innocently asking me the name of the bookstore where I’d bought the Bible and asking me how much I’d paid.)

I stood next to Paul where he lay and tried to speak soothing words to him. We’d never learned to communicate in a very substantial way, and that day was no different; I earnestly wanted to help him calm down, but I couldn’t. And then Paul saw Joan approach with a syringe.

He sat up fast and pushed Joan’s hands away and tried to swing his legs off the metal table and began shrieking and begging Joan to stop; Joan told me to hold him so I held him and he kicked and swatted at her hands until I pinned his arms behind his back and pushed him down; Joan pinned his legs and Paul stopped moving but kept crying “Auntie, please no!” in English and screaming in Bengali that he wanted to go home. And he said he was dying.

Joan injected Paul’s wound five or six times with the numbing solution, and each time a big bump full of fluid formed beneath the stretched skin. Paul whimpered and shook uncontrollably and started hyperventilating; I put my hand on his chest and tried to breathe slowly and steadily but soon I too felt myself becoming anxious; my vision tunneled and I felt impossibly exhausted and lightheaded; my breaths shortened; I looked outside and the clouds were twisting and moving and turning black; I looked back into the wound-dressing room and saw a man with an strangely elongated diamond-shaped face sitting in a chair and smiling; I stepped dizzily away from Paul and toward the man in the chair; both of the man’s wrists were raw and bloody and the bones in his right forearm were exposed and chipped and yellow and his right hand was enormously swollen and round. When he saw me approach he smiled more broadly and reached down to touch my feet and he did and then he touched his lips and reached for my feet again and then I stepped away and told Joan I needed to go outside and I did.

Paul’s dressing was finished in my absence without any problems, and after a quick but intense rainstorm, and after checking with Joan and sitting briefly with Paul on his bed in the men’s dormitory, I left Prem Dan through the front gate.

I was still dazed, but as I passed the slum I saw and recognized the fat woman in the blue sari and managed to communicate that Saleem was resting comfortably inside. She spoke rapidly and pointed to a child standing in the doorway of a shack nearby. I think she tried to tell me that Saleem was the child’s father or grandfather, but I couldn’t understand; the woman became disinterested and dismissively flipped her hand in the air and pushed me away; the conversation was over.

As I rode home from the train station soon afterward, I felt mentally and emotionally lost. I accidentally stayed in the autorickshaw beyond my stop and had to walk an extra mile back. I stopped at a restaurant called “Hatari” on the way and drank fresh lime soda and ate potato-stuffed parathas and brown curry. The food helped calm my mind and body, but I still didn’t know why I’d reacted the way I did; maybe I was too emotionally invested or maybe my blood sugar was low; maybe I was still thinking about Traffic.

Regardless of cause, I remained confused and unconsciously upset. And when I returned to Prem Dan the next day and saw Saleem, I asked him how he felt. He gestured that he was still in severe pain and asked for “tablets”; I saw him again later that day and he said in Bengali that he wanted to leave; he pantomimed smoking a cigarette and pointed to the gate.

My confusion started to fade, and I started to feel angry.

I was angry with Saleem and I was angry with Paul. I started to return in my imagination to the slum and to the wound-dressing room; I started to think of Saleem’s desperation and of Paul’s agony and fear, and I created scenarios in my mind that I’m ashamed and embarrassed to admit: I imagined myself telling Saleem that I wouldn’t carry him inside if he was going to choose cigarettes over treatment and that I wasn’t going to help him get painkillers, and I imagined myself grabbing Paul by the collar and saying “You brought this on yourself, now stop being such a pussy!” and slapping his ugly mouth.

I’d lost respect for both men and couldn’t quiet my emotions; I’d failed to sympathize; I’d stopped believing that “real strength” was admitting fear or seeking help or showing weakness; I’d started to hate Paul and Saleem because they were weak and pathetic and because they were addicts.

…Some of my family members and close friends call themselves addicts, and I too have indulged in most of the compulsive behaviors and addictive chemicals I know about. In varying degrees, I’ve felt addicted many times in my life. I’ve heard addiction called a disease, but in my experience it has not felt that way; honestly, it has felt like a weakness of the will. 

And for some reason it feels natural to hate that weakness in myself and others; it feels natural to judge it. But even though it feels natural, I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think I really understand addiction… But maybe I don’t need to.

In part, this year has become an experiment with self-denial, and I’ve learned deep lessons about my ability to resist temptation; I’ve considered and observed and possibly overcome some addictions in my own life, but that doesn’t make me qualified to speculate on what addiction really is. And regardless of what it is – if addiction is weakness or disease – I should remember something that seemed true to me once, and still does: that societies – and perhaps also the people in those societies – can be measured by how the strong treat the weak, by how the healthy treat the sick, and by how the powerful treat the powerless.

I was embarrassed when Sister Romaric eventually told me that Saleem had left Prem Dan only two days after I’d brought him in, and I still feel off-put by Paul’s hysteria and betrayed by his schemes; truly I may have been taken advantage of, but I would rather be fooled than risk ignoring, criticizing, or humiliating a weak or diseased person.

I think now that my gross emotional shifts may not have been simple reactions to Paul and Saleem’s weakness; my anxiety and anger may have also been reactions to lingering bitterness and shame I feel about my own actions and the actions of people I care about; I may have been reacting to a reflection of my own weakness and cowardice and fear.

Paul and Saleem’s circumstances are different – just as every person’s circumstances are unique – and I don’t know everything about their lives. There may be understandable reasons for their decisions and tendencies, but even if there aren’t I believe my attitude should be the same. (And I should remember that I always feel viscerally anguished – but never angry or judgmental – when I think of ‘Caroline’, the 16 year-old girl in Traffic who becomes addicted to heroin.)

…I’ve written something like this before, but I think it can be meaningfully repeated once or twice, or maybe every day: It isn’t up to me to judge these men or say if they are strong or weak because of their behavior; it isn’t up to me to judge the symptoms of disease. It is up to me to treat all people with respect and love. (And I mean love and not pity; to pity someone is condescending at best and dehumanizing at worst.)

But even that is not so simple. I honestly don’t know how to respect and love a person who hurts himself; neither indulgence nor repudiation feels right. But I am learning. And I do know that however I treat a person, my decisions should not be motivated by anger or pride or bitterness or shame.

I also know that I should let myself be humbled by my own ignorance – by my weakness – and remember that we are all fluid combinations of vigor and illness and power and frailty; sometimes we see more of one than the other, but whether in this moment or the next we seem strong or weak, we always deserve to be loved.