9
THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

SUSAN AND I moved to Berkeley in 2001, when she was still weak from her latest round of chemotherapy and the walk up the steep stairs to our rented house in the Berkeley hills left her panting. We wanted to be close to the children if she had to undergo further treatment. A few years later, through the kindness of a friend, I found myself across the table from the playwright Tony Kushner at a dinner sponsored by the Berkeley Repertory Theater at a French bistro near the Berkeley campus. Kushner, who was in town for the opening of his play, Caroline or Change, was remarkably gracious in engaging the strangers assembled for this dinner.

I was introduced as the former president of the Nathan Cum-mings Foundation, perhaps with the hope that I could be helpful to him in financing his next project. But I had no help to offer— being a former president is radically different from being a president, with direct access to the foundation checkbook.

I told him about my decisions to leave the presidency of the Cummings Foundation, to pack up our Riverside Drive apartment, and to move to California. “My wife and I were ready to slow down and to live closer to our children and grandchildren. I was worried that I was starting to believe all of the subtle flattery that was aimed 240in my direction—it can be disabling. I thought that the community in Berkeley was likely to be more supportive of my peculiar mix of activism and meditation.” I had anticipated continuing to make waves and ride the currents, with a shift in the balance toward more ease. I looked forward to being relieved of the burden of responsibility that rests on the shoulders of a CEO.

“How has the move worked for you?” Kushner asked.

I started on the positive side, describing the joys of California life—magnolias and camellias blossoming in February, canoeing in mountain lakes, sleepovers with the grandchildren.

Then I got to the harder part. I told him that I missed the foundation and the work that had been at the center of my life. My phone rarely rang, and I was on my own to handle phone calls, email, and correspondence. I missed the dense flow of people and issues, and the opportunity to support important and promising projects with money, ideas, and introductions to other funders. I had vaguely thought that I would work as a consultant in Berkeley, and I did some informal consulting with nonprofit groups, but it was a pale shadow of my former engagement. I had been accustomed to making waves on a large scale; now I was making ripples.

I had anticipated a challenging transition, but it was more severe and prolonged than I had expected. I missed what I had come to take for granted—the special attention given to me and my ideas because I was the president of a large foundation. I reflected, with greater empathy, on the “ex-great-man” syndrome that I had identified when I was a young public interest lawyer dealing with former presidential cabinet members. I missed the “foundation bounce,” the added energy that flowed my way by virtue of my ability to give away large sums of money. This was the first time since I was twenty-nine that I did not have the status and identity of a prestigious position.

“So you’re having trouble with retirement,” he said.

“Not exactly retirement,” I said. “I’m not working at a regular job, but I continue to be involved, and I am open to seeing what new opportunities arise. And I am still engaged in some projects I started at the foundation, especially the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. I co-led a four-day meditation retreat for lawyers recently, and I lead a weekly meditation group for law students at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.”

He seemed puzzled by the idea of lawyers in meditative silence. Then the crème brulée came to the table and he turned to another conversation. As I broke through the crust of my dessert, I thought about the lawyers Kushner had created in Angels in America—Roy Cohn, ruthless, manipulative, and immoral, and the young Mormon in the prosecutor’s office, cerebral, repressed, cut off from his emotions. I didn’t suppose that he could imagine lawyers in meditation, sitting in contemplative silence, looking inward, opening to wisdom and compassion.

As I left the Berkeley Rep dinner, I thought that this stage in my life was full of opportunities for practicing wisdom. The shock of a phone that doesn’t ring is actually an opportunity for reflection and growth. I recalled the medicine wheel in the Adirondack wilderness. I was sitting at the west side—the sunset, the time of harvest, aging, and physical decline, the time for letting go. I was shifting through the northwest, toward the north, the place of night and winter, death and renewal. This was my “northwest passage,” and I had the opportunity to enter it mindfully and consciously, a profoundly important application of my practice of wisdom.

I found myself at the front edge of a large wave of aging baby boomers who would be entering the northwest passage, the new life stage that comes between departure from the regular full-time workforce and actual retirement. Because of longevity and prosperity, 242there will be a growing cohort in this interesting stage, full of vitality and trying to decide how to use their time and energy We don’t have a cultural model for it or a vocabulary to talk about it.

I had been uncomfortable introducing myself as the former this or that, who had done so many interesting things some decades ago. I have found that my meditation practice helps to cushion these problems, helping me relax into the new situation. Practicing wisdom has become the key to my dealing with these unsettling circumstances, and it is something that I can share with the growing communities of “northwesters.” Sharing the practice of wisdom— writing, teaching, and mentoring—could become the core of my new life, bringing forward the values of reflective stillness and compassion.

Wisdom has traditionally been associated with advancing age and accumulated experience. Much of the new scientific inquiry into wisdom has analyzed that connection.¹ It seems totally appropriate to offer the practice of wisdom as an organizing principle for people leaving their full-time careers, to give their activities in the next phase weight and a deeper meaning.

In the spring of 2003, seventy lawyers gathered in the modern, Japanese-inflected buildings at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, living in spare, monastic cells and spending eight hours each day in silent meditation, with some time for discussion of law-related topics, tempered and modulated by the stillness and beauty of the place. The spring rains had turned the hills a vivid green.

The principal teacher, Norman Fischer, had been the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and taught Jewish meditation as well.² A poet and translator with a son at Yale Law School, he had 243been meeting with a small group of lawyers in our living room monthly, exploring the ways that meditation practice affected the way we lived and worked as lawyers. I led the planning committee for the retreat, and had particular responsibility for teaching Qi Gong, a form of moving meditation that I had learned from an itinerant teacher at a meditation retreat a decade earlier at Vallecitos.

The lawyers assembled for Qi Gong in the early darkness on our first morning, walking under the luminous, star-filled sky to the meditation hall, a large square building with enormous windows and a roof that soared to a peak in the center, a modern adaptation of the temple architecture of Kyoto. I imagined that many of them were wondering what they were doing in the predawn chill, echoing the doubts and ironic judgments I entertained when I had first been invited to learn Qi Gong. “I never felt a ‘flow of energy’ in my body,” I had thought, “and I don’t believe that exercises can miraculously cure illnesses that antibiotics can’t. It sounds like a lot of New Age hooey.” Nonetheless, my first exposures to Qi Gong left me feeling remarkably good, in a way that I could not exactly put words around, and I have done these exercises most mornings since then, as well as teaching them to hundreds of people.

“Qi Gong,” I told the lawyers at Spirit Rock, “is meditation in motion—an ancient Chinese system for working with the body’s energy—integrating movement, breath, and the flow of energy.” I stood in the center of a large circle of lawyers—professors, public interest lawyers, partners in corporate firms, students—in the dim light of the hall. “It helps you become centered in your body, and it supports focused attention and mindful presence in the moment. And it complements meditation, keeping the joints limber and the body relaxed and grounded. They say that masters are able to cure diseases that are not curable with Western medicine.”

I was surprised that I took so much pleasure in sharing this ancient practice, so remote from the world in which I had grown 244up, unconnected to the skills that I had prided myself on and built my career around. I was actually quite comfortable teaching Qi Gong to this group. These lawyers had, after all, voluntarily signed up for a silent meditation retreat, so they were not likely to be as rigid and tight—physically and intellectually—as I had been when I was young. They probably would accept the teachings more easily because I was not a lithe and flexible sprite, but a somewhat stiff and lumpy older lawyer, like many of them.

With gentle instructions I encouraged them to focus their awareness on the body’s energy center, the dantien, to plant their feet solidly on the floor, to be attentive to their breath, and to feel the flow of energy as they slowly followed me through the movements. “Waving Hands by the Side of the Lake,” I said, and slowly raised my hands up the front of my body, fingers relaxed and pointed to the floor, while I drew in a long in-breath. Half an hour later, after the sun had risen, revealing the steep hillsides around the hall, I led the Marriage of Sun and Moon, and we bowed deeply to each other, sharing a surprising sense of connection to ourselves and to each other.

Late that afternoon, after hours of meditation, the silence framed a contemplative discussion of the tensions of the lawyer’s life. Successful partners in big corporate firms shared their frustrations about careers that left them no time for quiet and reflection. “I am tired of acting like a pit bull every time a client comes in with a scheme to attack a competitor or stave off a government investigation,” said one lawyer who had fifteen years of corporate practice. “Perhaps the meditative perspective can help me deal with these pressures.”

“I need something more fundamental,” said one law student, taking the conversation to a deeper place. “I have to figure out how I can practice law. I spent three years in South America before going to law school, and I was appalled by the way the big oil companies 245despoiled the jungle and abused the natives. Of course, I could never represent such clients or the banks that finance them. But I don’t feel good about participating in a system that makes their abusive behavior possible.” The conversation circled through the hall, people listening to each other respectfully, and allowing a few moments of resonant silence between each speaker’s comments. I was surprised by the level of intimacy and trust.

The substance of the conversation was familiar to me, although I had rarely encountered such candid and undefensive reflections or such a flow of empathy, tangible in the room, as people heard each other and allowed other people’s reflections to illuminate their own experiences and emotions. These people are practicing wise dialogue, I thought.

On the drive home from Spirit Rock at the end of the retreat I reflected on my career in law. I recalled my own unhappiness with the pressures and moral ambiguities of corporate practice, and the joy with which I entered public interest practice. I took great pride in the continuing success of CLASP and the other public interest groups that I had helped to launch. I was proud of the CUNY Law School, and the thousands of public interest lawyers who had studied there and gone into law practice to serve the poor and disad-vantaged.

But something had been missing from my public interest work and the institutions I helped to create. I had been dissatisfied with the institutionalized self-righteousness and aggression of the public interest law firms, and disappointed by the harsh and unreflective anger that often divided the CUNY community.

I had found my work as a foundation president a relief from the lawyer’s world of argument and competition. And yet, how much worse things were now in law practice—the huge firms where partners do not even know each other’s names, a business ethic that has undermined the sense of professional independence, immense 246salaries paid to young lawyers to practice corporate law, a scarcity of public interest law jobs, difficulty in getting a hearing for the poor and powerless before increasingly conservative judges.

I was intrigued by the idea that the practice of wisdom could make a different kind of law practice possible—a wisdom practice. It is not so long ago that wisdom was considered the highest virtue for lawyers and judges. The quotation from Justice Benjamin Car-dozo emblazoned above the entrance to Boalt Hall of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, admonishes students to “study the wisdom of the past” so that they can order human affairs “with wisdom.” Yet the word wisdom has virtually disappeared from the legal classroom. Our retreat at Spirit Rock filled me with the inspiring hope that the practice of wisdom might return as the core of the lawyer’s commitment, beginning in law school and running through a lifetime of practice.

At that moment, I didn’t suspect that I would soon be reenter-ing the world of legal advocacy and facing the challenge of integrating the meditative perspective into real-life legal encounters.

In November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 71, authorizing the sale of $3 billion in state bonds to fund stem cell research. Prop. 71 was generated by entrepreneurs who supported it with a $37 million advertising campaign. In large part, a vote for Prop. 71 was a vote against President Bush and the limitations he placed on embryonic stem cell research in deference to the views of his Christian fundamentalist constituency.

When I rolled up my sleeves and addressed the tangled legalese, I concluded that the short-term medical benefits of stem cell research had been dramatically oversold. Moreover, I discovered that Prop. 71 had launched an unprecedented political experiment, 247in addition to its scientific experiments—billions of dollars of state money would be spent with virtually no oversight by the public, the governor, or the legislature. In the small print of the text, the normal checks and balances of democratic government were suspended.

Perhaps, I thought, I might play a useful role in assuring that the vast sums of money would be well spent and that the difficult ethical issues involved in genetic manipulation—the commercialization of women’s eggs, cloning embryos, and designing babies— would be subjected to searching public scrutiny and debate. This area of scientific research called for great wisdom in its oversight and management. The passage of the proposition in a flood of extravagant medical claims was not an auspicious beginning.

My response grew directly from my work as a public interest lawyer. I had spent years trying to assure democratic oversight of medical and scientific enterprises—issues ranging from the abuse of patients in public mental hospitals in the name of therapy, as in the Rouse case, to participating in the adoption of federal regulations to regulate experimentation with human subjects. In the Wyatt case, we stopped an experiment that involved giving electric shocks with cattle prods to mentally retarded inmates. In another case at the intersection of science and public policy, we helped obtain an injunction in Michigan against experimental brain surgery to affect the behavior of nonconsenting mental patients. It was this work that helped secure my election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. While I was committed to the scientific enterprise, especially when there was promise of significant therapeutic benefit to sick people, I did not think that the fact that a project was undertaken by scientists meant that it rendered democratic oversight unnecessary.

The lack of concern with democratic process was reflected in the agenda for the first scheduled meeting of the oversight committee.

I saw that the planned meeting was in clear violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act—inadequate public notice and no opportunities for public comment on the issues being presented for decision. I sent a letter to the members of the committee, and to the attorney general’s office, requesting them to follow the open meeting law and adopt a more open, democratic process.

I dusted off my gray pin-striped suit, which had been hanging untouched in my closet since our move to Berkeley, and went to the auditorium at the UCSF Medical School. I found that the committee had acceded to my request that it comply with the state’s open meeting law, and nine-tenths of the agenda items had been omitted in order to comply with the law. But there was little interest in opening their processes to full democratic dialogue. The committee members, who included five medical school deans and various CEOs of biotech firms and research institutes, wanted money to flow to their institutions as quickly and as generously as possible. They didn’t want a seminar on bioethics. They wanted to build new buildings and fund high-tech science.

Bob Klein, the principal draftsman and promoter of Prop. 71, was elected chair. My intervention on the open-meeting issues attracted a good deal of attention in the press, and made it worthwhile for Klein to get to know me. He called me the next week with an invitation to have lunch in San Francisco.

Before the lunch, I took a walk at Point Reyes with my old friend Gary Friedman, a convenor of the Devil’s Thumb gathering, a member of our lawyers’ meditation group, and a leader in nonad-versarial dispute resolution. As we walked out the Bear Valley Trail toward the Pacific, through forests glistening from the rains earlier that day, I talked about the upcoming lunch. “I can feel all my old adversarial energy arising, waking up in the middle of the night thinking about arguments to show just how undemocratic their governance structure is. It’s rather exciting, but it feels incomplete.

I want to draw on the wisdom perspective to shape my conversation with Klein to increase the chances of our dealing with each other productively, with respect and goodwill.”

“That sounds great,” Gary said. “You’ve come a long way from your kick-ass days as a public interest lawyer. I don’t remember you talking much about mutual respect or avoiding polarization. But Klein isn’t going to feel too good about you, since you slowed his process down by insisting that they comply with the open meeting law.”

“Yes,” I said. “But perhaps I can be sufficiently anchored in my own meditation practice that I can retain some flexibility and modesty that will be contagious. Meditative skills aren’t worth much if they just work when you are on retreat or are talking to other meditators. It might take the conversation to a different place.”

“It’s certainly worth a try,” Gary said, just as the gray skies opened. We rushed back through the pelting rain to our car.

The lunchtime conversation didn’t go well. I took a few deep breaths, trying to stay centered in my intentions. Klein turned the conversation to the stem cell initiative and the urgency of making grants as soon as possible. Soon we were engaged in a lawyerly discussion of the conflict-of-interest issue—edgy, precise, focused on scoring points.

After lunch, I walked out into the warm midday sunshine and crossed over to the Ferry Building. I found an empty bench looking over the water and the soaring towers of the Bay Bridge, and pulled out my cell phone to call Gary.

“It didn’t work out the way we had hoped. He didn’t seem interested in anything but proving to me what a good guy he was. ‘Just trust me’—that was his message.”

“Yes, but how were you?”

“Actually, I felt pretty good—clear, but not aggressive. I listened to him carefully, stayed centered and flexible. I didn’t feel the same messianism that I used to feel when I was a full-time public interest lawyer, and I held my ideas more lightly. It didn’t seem to do any good, but who knows? It may have done more good than I can see now.”

“The benefits aren’t going to be linear or obvious,” Gary said. “Here you are on the phone with me, in a reflective frame of mind, thinking about what you learned, how you might do better the next time. You and he have some serious disagreements, and they aren’t simply going to disappear.”

I continued to track the developments with Prop. 71. As I have delved more deeply into the issues of biotechnical advance, I have become more persuaded that we are in the middle of the most serious ethical issues. We are at a point where no humans have ever been before, capable of taking over the evolution of the human species, designing the traits of babies, and altering the genetic package that children carry forward into life. Some enthusiasts say that we are on the threshold of a “transhuman” future, and they are anxious to push forward into the new era. If ever there has been a cluster of issues that demands the highest level of attention and care—wisdom of a high order—this is it. Instead, it is being treated like a political football, with Republicans playing to the fundamentalists and many Democrats mindlessly championing the unfettered discretion of scientists to do whatever experiments interest them, regardless of their social consequences.³ The recent spate of books demonizing all religions, in the name of science and reason, seem to be calculated to heighten polarization and decrease the likelihood that wisdom will enter the discussion.⁴ It would be a tragedy if the voices of wisdom aren’t heard on these matters.

In 2006, on a chilly February weekend, I flew to New York for a conference on meditation in higher education at Columbia Teachers College. As the chair of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, I welcomed the 250 participants, mostly professors, and began to frame the discussions. I described the Center’s fellows program, which we had begun a decade earlier in partnership with the American Council of Learned Societies. “We have supported a hundred professors on campuses around the country who have brought contemplative practice into their teaching in diverse disciplines—from English literature to music, from architecture to sociology. These are the first fellowships for contemplative studies to be offered in universities since the Renaissance. They may point the way to a new wholeness in the way we think about education. At a time when life and study on campus are speeding up and looking outward, we are holding a space and a scholarly justification for slowing down, looking inward, and practicing wisdom.” I noted the enormous progress that had occurred in the last decade—meditation was receiving scholarly attention in the universities, neuro-science was successfully mapping the impact that meditation has on brain function,⁵ and the popular press had moved meditation to the cover of major national magazines.⁶

The next morning, one of our fellows, Marilyn Nelson, an African American woman who has served as the poet laureate of Connecticut, described the poetry course she had created at West Point, where she was teaching at the time of her fellowship.⁷ The core of her contemplative pedagogy, she said, was to ask her “students to explore several ways of listening for, and listening to, silence. I hope they will develop a contemplative attitude, and learn how to hear silence.”

Many of her students continued their meditation practice after graduation while serving in Iraq. Nelson found a connection between meditation, inner peace, and peacemaking. One of her 252students, for example, set up a sister city program between her hometown in Kansas and the Kurdish village where she was deployed. In a visionary moment, Nelson suggested that “if people meditate together they can no longer be enemies. There’s an image to conjure: armies meditating together. World leaders sitting for fifteen minutes of shared silence. Just think of the fruit that that could bear.”

After Nelson’s talk, I went out into the crisp air of early spring, feeling blessed by being part of this event. I reflected on the image of world leaders meditating together—and the unimaginable new vistas that had opened up from this fellowship program we had launched ten years ago. I started to walk slowly to Central Park. Christo’s gates, hundreds of twelve-foot-high saffron constructions, had been erected, and that morning saffron banners had been unfurled from each gate in the fresh breeze. I went into the park from the northwest corner, down a long set of stone steps and along a narrow path pressed up against the west wall of the park, walking under a row of gates framing the vista. I had strolled these paths many times in the years when I lived in New York, but I saw them with fresh eyes through the gates.

I thought back to my first interview for the deanship at CUNY Law School. After a meeting with the chancellor at the East Side headquarters of the City University I had walked in the park, still overwhelmed by the strangeness, intensity, and vague menace of the city’s streets. Washington had seemed so much more manageable and comfortable. Wondering what I had gotten myself into, I found Central Park to be a place of refuge, its granite outcroppings echoing the landscape of central Ontario, where I had met Susan.

After I became president of the Cummings Foundation and moved to Riverside Drive, the city began to seem more accessible and hospitable. My friend Paul Gorman and I used to walk these paths, deep in long, rambling talks about the life of the foundation 253that were infused by the natural beauty of the park and the distant views of the dense high-rise buildings on the surrounding streets, a unique blend of quiet open space with intense human activity This formed the background—and a metaphor—for our conversations about a grants program that combined an activist commitment to social justice with a broader view cultivated through meditation practice. We talked about the subtle seductions of being a foundation president, where everyone wants something. “This is where the meditation comes in,” said Paul. “It will give you some hope of holding onto your center, and walks in the park will help maintain that perspective.”

As I walked through Christo’s gates now, I reflected on how this ambitious work of art continuously reframed the landscape, making familiar paths and crossings look new and interesting. I thought of the critical turning points in my life, how each choice reframed my ambitions and opportunities—my decisions to leave corporate law practice, to start the Center for Law and Social Policy, to start the City University of New York Law School, to commit to daily meditation practice and yearly retreats, to become president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, to leave the foundation and move to California.

I thought about the way that each gate that I had passed through had framed a choice, not only for the work that I would do but for the person that I would become. My decision to move to California to live without a job and without a title was my latest gate, and it felt as if it framed the practice of wisdom, both as an opportunity and a necessity.

As Susan and I settled into our California life—exploring remote corners of the state in our canoe, playing with grandchildren, 254participating in meditation retreats, flying back to New York for board meetings and theater—Susan’s oncologist brought us up short with the news that the cancer was back, in a more aggressive and menacing form. He recommended a stem cell transplant, using her own cells.

After we had checked out information sources on the Web and sought a second opinion, we decided to proceed with this drastic treatment. Susan’s stem cells would be drawn from her blood and frozen. Then she would receive massive chemotherapy, heavy enough to kill the cancer but also so strong that it would wipe out her immune system. Then her own stem cells would be transfused back into her, and they would begin to reconstitute a new immune system. For much of this period, she would be in the hospital in semi-isolation with few visitors.

Our decision to move to Berkeley had been prophetic. This onerous procedure was tolerable in part because we were so well supported by our children—and our grandchildren who rode their bicycles below Susan’s window and held up signs wishing her well. When I entered her room, I wore a yellow plastic coverall to protect her from infection from the outside world. We decorated her walls with crepe paper flowers, the grandchildren’s drawings, and a huge blowup of our official family photograph. For most of the time Susan was extremely weak; a trip to the bathroom, trailing her pole of dripping fluids, would be followed by a two-hour nap. She would fall asleep in the middle of Tootsie and The Graduate, our favorite movies to support us in Norman Cousins’s laughter therapy.

In the long hours that I spent sitting in her hospital room I watched my anxious thoughts arise, but I was often able to let them go, rather than let them proliferate into nightmare scenarios of unbearable future suffering, hers and mine. I could deal with what was happening at the time while she drifted in and out of sleep. Both of us were in the northwest quadrant of the medicine wheel in the cycle of our 255lives, connected to the interlocking cycles of the day and night, the seasons—a vision of birth and death, decline and renewal.

When her immune system had been obliterated and the course of chemical infusions had been completed, three technicians in plastic suits, like priestesses in special ritual garments, came into her room and began their magic—melting her frozen stem cells and slowly dripping them into her arm. Over the following days, her stem cells gradually brought a new immune system to life.

As she regained her strength over a period of months, we began a sporadic, continuing conversation about her disease and its treatment. We were awed by the power of the new technology and grateful for it. A few decades earlier, this treatment would not have been available. We were pleased to have the high-end insurance that made this costly procedure available to us and painfully conscious of the millions of uninsured people who would not be able to benefit from this technology.

We spoke of how valuable meditation practice had been to each of us. We also discussed the surprising gifts that her cancer had given us. I had uncovered my capacity to be a caregiver, not selfless, to be sure, but competent in a role that I would have thought was beyond me. Susan had developed her capacity to be cared for, to surrender to her situation, to be helpless, and to rely on me and on others.

During the course of her recovery she finished her book, The Etiquette of Illness: What to Say When You Can’t Find the Words—truly the product of her practice of wisdom.⁸ She had never written a book before and would not have done so if not for the experiences of her own cancer and her meditation practice. Our relationship to our elderly mothers and to other critically ill friends and relatives became deeper and more empathic. And our rich relationship with each other, after decades of marriage, was carried to a new level of intimacy and love, autonomy and interdependence. We honed our 256ability to relish each precious moment that we have together. Our harvesting these paradoxical rewards from the onset of her cancer was directly connected to the inner work that we had done—alone and together.

I thought of the person I was when I went to law school, and later, when I went off to our West Virginia cabin to deal with my shallowness crisis. I rarely used or heard the word wisdom at those times. I am wiser than I was then, and I am still practicing. My time in California is a time to consolidate this transformation, to bring it forward in the world, and to work at living more fully in compassion and wisdom.