How to Change Your Mind

the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than
being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and
something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives
thanks for “being alive,” but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones
gerund that comes before “alive”? I had just come from a place where
being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and
mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing.
I had entered a familiar and more congenial mental space, one in
which I was still tripping but could put together thoughts and direct them
here or there. (I make no claims as to their quality.) Before I drew the
smoke into my lungs, Rocío had asked me, as she asks everyone who
meets the toad, to search the experience for a “peace offering”—some idea
or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I
decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its
opposite term, “doing.” I meditated on this duality, which came to seem
momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter
term in my life and not enough with the former.
True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn’t
there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In
contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being
with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and
being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very
moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley
struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: “If one
always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”) Even
now, borne along on this pleasant contemplative stream, I had to resist
the urge to drag myself onto shore and tell Rocío about my big
breakthrough. No! I had to remind myself: just be with it.
Judith and I had had a fight the previous night that, I realized, turned
on this distinction, and on my impatience with being. She was
complaining about something she doesn’t like about her life, and rather
than simply commiserate, being with her and her dilemma, I immediately
went to the checklist of practical things she might do to fix it. But this was
not at all what she wanted or needed, and she got angry. Now I could see
with perfect clarity why my attempt to be helpful had been so hurtful.
So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less. But as soon as I
put it that way, I realized there was a problem—a big problem, in fact. For