Open one of your mind’s eyes cautiously. Is he gone? He is? Thank god for that. Now we can get back on track and work on relaxing without such a powerful distraction.
Finally you feel the elevator come to rest. After a moment, the doors are going to slide open and you will look outside. But before they do that, wait a moment. Don’t let the doors open yet. Listen to me first. Only if you want to of course, nothing is mandatory. But this is important and if you’ve bothered to come this far, you might as well hear what I have to say, don’t you think? Because I want to warn you about something.
Beyond the open elevator doors is the place that you have been longing to go but didn’t even know it. What is it like? I can’t tell you that. It is whatever place makes you feel like you belong there. That will be different for each of you. Once I tried this exercise with a man who, when the doors opened, saw his own office with its desk and chair and telephone. He was a lawyer and it turned out that what he really liked most in the world was to be at work, with the clock of his billable hours ticking by nicely while he prepared divorce papers or personal injury suits or last wills and testaments. At home, with his beautiful wife and three small children, he was always slightly on edge; he felt like he was an actor playing a father and flubbing almost half his lines and most of his entrances and exits. He would come into his office on Monday and experience a great surge of relief, but it was not until he opened those elevator doors and saw his favorite place — as he had always in his heart of hearts known it to be — that he could admit this to himself. He was happier after that; it changed his life but only because he was honest.
What I’m telling you is this, and I hope you’ll listen to me because I am after all the one guiding this meditation: be honest. It might be that your favorite place is a lovely, bosky forest glen with the smell of pine trees and a crystal-clear blue lake beyond with a waterfall emptying into it in the distance, blah, blah, blah. There might be deer grazing amid the shafts of sunlight and a breeze ruffling the leaves. But really, the number of times I’ve gone around the “sharing circle” after a class and someone has talked about a place just like that, or about being on a beach with golden sand, or about a garden full of blooming flowers like one they saw when they were a child, well, please: if I got paid for each time that occurred, I would not have bothered to make this recording because I’d be too busy shopping. And for at least half of those people, I knew that they were not telling the truth, that they were telling me about a place they thought they were supposed to like, what they’d seen in advertisements on television. Not the place that really, deep down in their hearts, they truly longed for.
You can make up something like that if you want. There’s nothing I can do to stop you because it’s your mind and your desire and only you can know if you have really told yourself the truth. You may not even know you are lying to yourself when you look out of those elevator doors and see a Disney-style castle with white spires and banners waving and liveried footmen and a red carpet leading you inside. Or a boat the shape of a swan filled with silken cushions and all the chocolate you can eat. You might really believe that is the place you long to be. And perhaps you will be right. But I don’t think so.
It is much more likely that the place you really want to be above all others is not like that at all. It is likely to be a place that no one else could possibly guess, that other people may not find beautiful or even remotely appealing. To give you an example: my place is a supermarket parking lot. There, I’ve told you. When I was a child, my mother always bought me an ice-cream cone after she was finished with the groceries, and when I think about my happiest memories, they are of walking across the asphalt to the car after my mother and her rattling cart, taking the first cold bite. It meant that all was right with the world and that week my father wouldn’t open the cupboard door in the kitchen and say, “Why the hell isn’t there any food in this house?” and my mother wouldn’t throw something or storm upstairs to cry. When I think about that parking lot I feel one thing: safe. And for that reason it is beautiful to me, the way the parking spaces make their golden grid on the black asphalt, the way the cars slide in and out of their spaces fitting in like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, like they were meant to be there.
So now you know. That’s all I have to say. You can go ahead, when you are ready, and let the doors slide open. Look at what is outside. Step through the doors. Walk forward and explore this place that you have come so far to find. Look around and listen and touch things and, above all, do not be afraid.
Oh, one more thing. There may be some of you who, when you tried to make the weird man inside the elevator disappear, did not succeed. When you looked again, he was still there, waiting in the corner, not speaking, looking at his shoes, which you had just noticed were unnaturally large even for so tall a person. The shoes were thick-soled and looked like they might have steel toes. Also, there was a bit of spittle at the corner of his mouth, whitish and congealed. This unnerved you even more and you felt your heart beating and you could not wait for the elevator doors to open so you could get out of there and run away from this weird, rumbling, ugly creature.
As I said before, I don’t know what you should do about the man. Now that the elevator doors are open, you could, as you planned, run away from him, into the place you’ve dreamed up and perhaps you’ll lose him among the giant ferns or bookshelves or whatever might be out there. But you might not. He could come after you and find you. He might be able to run fast in spite of all appearances to the contrary.
So I suggest that you don’t run away. I don’t think you have too many other options at this point. If you can’t make him vanish from a fantasy that you yourself created, then there is really only one thing left for you to do. Obviously, you don’t have to follow my advice; you are in charge, you are the one that this is all about, the important one, the person that we are doing all of this to try to help. This is only a suggestion, nothing more.
Turn to face the weird man in the corner. Try looking at his face if you can stand it. Then try holding out your hand to him. Open, palm up. Go on. He might take it in his own hand, which turns out to be enormous, oddly shaped, maybe with the wrong number of fingers, but warm and dry and strangely comforting. Then, without letting go, try stepping forward, leading him gently out of that back corner of the elevator into the light and space. What does he do? Will he follow?
Good. See, he’s not so terrifying after all, just ugly and a little sad. But even though he’s not the companion you might aspire to have, he’s the one you created for yourself, so don’t let go of his hand. Keep leading him forward. Now you are not alone anymore. Now you have a friend. Now you can go out and look around together.
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None of the parents had any idea what was coming. All of them said the same thing. Sondra Patel from Boston told me: He was not an unhappy boy as far as I could tell. He played soccer on the school team. He had friends. And he was a DJ, too, you know. People came to hear him play.
Lorraine and Kenneth Mueller from Burke, Virginia, insisted that their daughter Kelly had not been depressed. We had her tested many times, Mrs. Mueller told me. We kept an eye on her. Any sign of something wrong or different, we’d make sure that she went to a psychiatrist right away. Mr. Mueller added: That’s right. We had her thoroughly checked out. Not one of them ever told us there was anything wrong with her. In fact, a couple of them told us we should stop bringing her in at all.