Recently, I had a very sick person in my household. It is a situation from which we have yet to emerge completely, though things are better than they were. This episode featured doctors who disagreed, medication that would not stay down and symptoms that fluctuated literally by the hour. This week, I learned that our fever reducer of choice has been recalled. Had I known that at this time last week, I’d have felt even worse, as if that were possible.

I rarely left the house except for trips to the doctor. I slept fitfully and in the back of my mind suspected that the strain would surely visit some of the same symptoms on me. This week, I’m left with a persistent and violent cough. While I did everything I could, I didn’t seem to be helping. There were times of utter frustration and overwhelming anxiety. I could not control the situation. I could scarcely influence it. There were times when any influence at all would have been a blessing. A loved one’s wellness isn’t something I ever want to bargain with and it never leaves room for compromise. Despite a checklist of far more severe trials that we had endured, I felt as if we were in serious trouble.

When under duress, I often retreat into relaxation and breathing exercises that are mildly akin to meditation. I’ve been using these techniques for about ten years, whenever I’m backed into a psycho-emotional corner. They came in handy last month as fevers rose and days passed without improvement. In most all of the adversity that I encounter, meditative techniques are quite satisfactory, as they enable me to look within, to find strength, peace, and sometimes, resolution. This is the first time since I can remember that I felt as if the techniques were not enough. It was then that I resorted to prayer.

I’ve long claimed that meditation and prayer were no different. Whether you called it the Universe, the higher power or God mattered very little. I maintained that we were all talking about the same thing. Interesting that when I was at my weakest, I suddenly called what I was doing “prayer” and from a cognitive standpoint was placing power outside of myself. Normally though meditation, I felt that I could draw whatever I desired to myself, but in this situation, I just could not seem to visualize a universal oneness. I was too weakened, too flustered. As I looked to God for an answer, change began to occur. Ice cracked. Fevers broke. Immune systems finally took hold.

I have a much deeper understanding of the connection between meditation and prayer now. Perhaps what I viewed as a weakness, an inability to overcome feelings of helpless isolation, was just the unconscious subverting of the ego that I required. In a way, there was an acceptance of a situation that was far outside of my abilities to control. Placing power in God’s hands was a sort of meditative shortcut to the sense of oneness that eluded me. Acceptance and peace can be goals of meditation. Instead of meditating simply to draw something to myself, by means of my own energy, I let go my problem to the universe with the profound message that I could only solve it with help. I surrendered to the flow. Help arrived because I declared that my energy alone was not enough. So, despite my internal semantic sleight of hand, I was projecting the same energy I always do, talking about the same thing, as it were. I had simply been lacking a key ingredient: cognizance of the truth that energy doesn’t just come from me. It is within and without, everyone’s to share in as needed, and there is an inexhaustible supply. In prayer, I called it God.

I thought of the idea of a higher power used by recovering addicts. I talked to an addictions specialist I know, who explained the reasoning to me. The recovering addict admits that left to his own devices, he will make a bad decision. To head off that event, he places the situation in the hands of his higher power. At first, I believed placing power outside of the self to be a weakness, but if you believe in the universal connection between all things, there truly is no way to place power outside of yourself. Placing something “in God’s hands” is only a semantic variation. This practice is acceptance while simultaneously availing yourself of the limitless energy that belongs to all of us. You’re not saying, “I can’t do this.” You’re saying, “I can do this, with help. I choose to open myself to the help I need, to the energy in all things, to God.”

If you send your message, what you desire comes to you. I’ve learned that in sending your message, you must also submit to the universe, energy, or God, within and without. In connection to what is freely given but never controllable, meditation will bear fruit. It must. It’s the law.

If your message is that you can’t do something, or that there is no hope, or that you are alone, these untruths may be “heard” as your desire. Regardless of whether we pray or meditate or whatever it is we do, we must choose to experience life as if we can do anything, that hope is real and that we are connected to all things and never alone.

That’s the way I want to live.

I see some crazy things in New York. If you spend enough time in the city, you’re bound to. It’s simply unavoidable. There are too many people with too many different intentions for a day in the city to be uneventful. On the rarest occasions, I witness people in serious conflict with each other. That happened today. It’s still shocking when you see a fight and though I can’t say I agree with that form of conflict resolution, I think in this case that I might understand what’s at the root of it.

The last fight I saw was at least ten years ago on 30th St. Two bums were going at it just after 9pm. I got out of a rehearsal studio and I heard them bellowing back and forth at each other. The sound echoed in the canyon of the empty street and I couldn’t immediately ascertain its origins from the dark sidewalk. I finally located them about halfway down the block. When I did, the angrier of the two had just broken a wine bottle and was brandishing the weapon in the other guy’s direction. How absolutely classic, I thought at the time. Fighting in the street with broken bottles is some old-school brawlin’! I quickly came to my senses and was sure to cross the street and get out of there before things got too gruesome, or worse, closer to me.

The fight I saw today was different. It was at an ungodly hour in the World Trade Center PATH station downtown. The place was crawling with people from New Jersey who’d just gotten off the train to go to work. That mass of humanity under the most ideal of circumstances takes some skill to negotiate, since the whole damn station is one big construction site. You have to ascend no fewer than three stair levels before you get to the street. This incident occurred just one level up from the platform.

It wasn’t two filthy street guys. The fight was between two of the most demure-looking men in the late 40s or early fifties. They were both fairly tall and lean. Where they weren’t balding, they were graying at the temples. They both wore similar jackets, in shades of blue and made of that shushy polyester material people wear when they go skiing. The guy with the upper hand wore glasses. They looked like they could have been brothers, both of whom work jobs that don’t require hand washing upon completion of their duties.

When I came upon them, the bespectacled one had the other one over the railing, pulling at his jacket where in another time there would have been lapels. He was screaming something angrily at the other guy, possibly a warning. (I couldn’t hear over the Flo & Eddie album on my MP3 player.) As people fanned out around them, I did what I normally do when I see a fight. I checked them both from a distance for weapons. Not this time, but of course, I still wanted no part of the scene. Just before I moved behind a ramp and up the second staircase, I saw the guy with the glasses “hauling off.” Many people kept turning around, trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the scuffle. I just bounded around them, my own conflicts to confront.

What the whole thing was about, I’ll never know. Maybe one guy just crowded the other too much. The boiling point was finally reached. It was just the wrong day for both of them. As I traipsed through the streets, the fight far behind me, I studied the faces of the people I passed. There were hundreds of them. The more I looked, the more it seemed to be the wrong day for them too. Could the misery on so many faces be my imagination? Suddenly they were all corporate workers, nearing their limits.

I’m sure a commuter’s plight, whatever it is, could be considered by some to be a luxury problem since he still has a job, but even those not yet in dire straits can potentially bear a debilitating psychological burden. If it was just being crammed into disgusting trains, it might be different. But for most people in corporate America, a subtle demoralization continues when one gets to work.

Working in offices staring at computers is a tragic existence. A corporate job can be a dehumanizing charade in which there is no beginning and end, with a requirement to pretend one cares about something which was at best a trade off for the promise of life to be lived on the off hours. Instead of merely scratching and clawing for a crust of bread, days are spent surrounded by lies, politics, endless unknowns, fear and the ultimate surrender of the self. In many cases, it’s all to maintain some preconceived idea of success, a house in New Jersey, a car or two. However, over time these affectations can become little more than tangible proof that one’s been duped into cycle that is sure to swallow him whole. One in which every dollar is already spent and nothing is ever truly accomplished. The actual “work” means very little. It’s only there to occupy him, to deter him from the constant consideration of who’s above him and who’s below.

A corporate career can require so many compromises along the way that no one, two or even three changes can deliver you from the crisis of spirit it can foster. The result is inaction, even more compromise. In short, it can be a trap who’s bait is an empty promise. One that is eager to waste your life and then blame you for the choice as soon as you’re used up.

When primitive man, in some ways whose psyche we still possess, had hunted enough to eat for the day, he could rest. His fears amounted to attacks by things he could see or hear. He is completely unsuited to a corporate job, in which no amount of food can ever be enough and attackers are anything he can imagine. Rest is allowed only by the permission of his conscience. After years, coping with desperation and hopelessness becomes his true work.

This is unlike the conclusion of Langston Hughes in “A Dream Deferred” in which the poet asks if a dream deferred explodes, conjuring images of riots in Harlem. Hughes would probably have claimed that those corporate stiffs this morning, slugging it out in their psychological desolation, do in fact have a luxury problem. But it’s unfair to claim that a guy with a house in Jersey has no right to be despondent and searching for meaning. It’s also not inconceivable that a human being under extreme stress, whose attackers can’t be identified and who’s worst fears are manufactured, might choose someone in which his oppression can be personified and attack that guy for the silliest of reasons. I think that’s what I witnessed today. People are still human, no matter where you think they fall in the social strata.

With union regulations and laws concerning safety, health and child labor, reform at the beginning of the last century served to make the workplace safer for your body. Perhaps in the post-industrial age, labor reform is required to make work safe for your mind. Just because people can make a living at a desk doesn’t mean that they are not being endangered psychologically and emotionally. There is less concern for their rights per se, since there’s no clock to punch, no hourly wage, and no visible scars. But the dangled carrot, a promise that may not be realized, can be devastating to health and well-being. Those working to make someone else rich are told that they’re working to rise. It’s a mind game in which the rules constantly change. Only some figure out how to survive. It’s pretty sinister when you think about it.

I didn’t realize it until now, but my reaction to the fight this morning was not as much minding my own business like a proper heartless New Yorker, but more “There, but for the grace of God, go I…”

I wonder what happened…

That’s not exactly what she told me, but after talking to her, I could see how someone might think that from an emotional standpoint I was behind the eight ball from the very beginning. She was a violinist in a pit orchestra in which I was playing electric bass. She was a real gypsy type and as I recall it, bucked the pit musician’s full black dress code with a very colorful scarf. She was easily fifteen years older than I and rather heavyset, almost Buddha-like.

I don’t recall why I started to talk with this woman. Perhaps it was that I too had bucked the dress code by wearing red sneakers. We were just chatting during the intermission. All of the other musicians had cleared out, but we stayed right where we had been all through the first act. Before I knew it, she was giving me the foundations of a very complex analysis of my personality and motivations. In my 20s, I had accepted that mine was a life of suffering. This sage one must have realized that and got me talking somehow.

She asked about the details of my birth. The interaction is fascinating to recollect because anyone else might not have gotten much in the way of personal information from me in those days. Just the principle of such questions would have made me feel too violated. But she apparently was engaging enough that I told her what I knew. The details of my birth had been told to me by mother and I never attached much significance to them. The gypsy violinist seemed to think that they were at the very root of my supposed misery.

The archetypal truths about my birth had yet to be established on the fateful day on which I entered this world. For example, years later, I would become the middle child. I also would someday read a silly little poem that would playfully haunt me. Having been born on a Wednesday, this bit of verse would characterize me as “full of woe.” Before these details entered my consciousness, I believed myself to be a clean slate, at least in my first moments. Not so, according to this gypsy lady.

It really seemed to knock her out that I was born of an induced labor in a teaching hospital to a room full of student nurses. When I told her that, she seemed mortified, but at the same time completely convinced that my being a tortured young musician began before I even emerged into the harsh light of the delivery room. She expressed her deepest sympathy for my lot and became immediately more maternal toward me.

Her assessment was this: Since my mother’s labor was induced, my first decision, to be born, had been made for me. No one, in her opinion, could ever begrudge my obstinate nature after such a cruel usurpation. From that point on, control and independence were to be the hot buttons of my psyche. (There was the issue of my mother’s well-being, as she and I grew what seemed to be exponentially by the hour, but that didn’t seem to concern the gypsy lady much.) She claimed also that the experience of having the eyes of so many strangers on me at such a vulnerable moment (all of those student nurses up against the wall) deprived me of some level of security I should have enjoyed with my mother in relative privacy. It made perfect sense to her that I had chosen the life of a performer, doing my best to compensate for that initial molestation by attempting to control situations in which strangers could scrutinize me.

I had a grand old time lambasting my mother with my newly discovered insights. Though I have to admit that even now as I consider the gypsy lady’s interpretation, I’m inclined to believe that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. However, I also know that my life belongs to me. I have choices. I’m not merely the sad result of the circumstances surrounding the day of my birth or any other day. In an effort to duck philosophical discussions of destiny, pre-determination, nature vs. nurture and the like, I’m considering instead when exactly it occurred to me that my life was truly mine to do with as I wished. Perhaps I wish it could have happened earlier, but nonetheless, I gratefully accept the responsibilities that this knowledge presents.

My conversation with that gypsy lady probably lasted about twenty minutes, but I’ve carried it with me for many years. Despite the various truths about life of which I’ve since become convinced, there is still the question of when one discovers that authentic life is of your own design. Some never do. As a parent, I believe it’s of tantamount importance to reinforce this truth with my daughter. Hopefully it will sink in sooner for her than it did for me.

Just to be safe, and I’m sure that this was in part because of the gypsy lady, I did everything I could in the moments after my daughter’s birth to make her feel as safe and protected as possible. I never left her side. I followed her to the hospital nursery. They placed her little body under a heat lamp but I leaned over the table with my arm around her anyway. While we were on the way to the nursery and under the lamp together, I never stopped talking to her. I protected her from loud noises and the trauma of flashbulbs. Would she remember? Would this affect her emotional development in the delicate years before emotional consciousness? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Me, 4 days old.