READER SUBMITTED CONTENT
I bought a fucking scooter. I’m still not exactly sure why, but for some reason it seemed like the right time to do it.

I bought a fucking scooter. I’m still not exactly sure why, but for some reason it seemed like the right time to do it. A blue 2005 Yamaha with 49 ccs with one of those idiotic sports helmets. A few days after exams ended I drove it down to the border with Vermont, to attend a meditation retreat. It took a little over nine hours.

It was a big blue square house on a hill in the Appalachians just off the highway. I parked and carried my bags from the parking lot to the house. Most of the other students were already there eating. A man with a beard and a big smile gave me a sheet and told me to fill it out. Most of the questions were about previously existing medical conditions and drug use. In the section where you describe yourself I wrote “Law student” and “Searching for peace.” He choked a little when I handed it back to him.

We had soup. A large Jewish lady sat across from me and started talking about swine flu until one of the organizers came up and and told us that the retreat was segregated into groups of women and men, and told me to sit on the other side of the cafeteria. I looked up and noticed a big curtain that divided the room pulled aside for the time being. I went to a table where a group of middle-aged to old men sat trying to make conversation. It was mostly about the food, salvation, and who done the course before. That was when I found out about the vow of silence.

After we finished dinner, the woman who had told me to change tables gave us our instructions. For the duration of the course, we would have to take a vow of noble silence. This meant we could not communicate with each other in any form; no talking, no reading, certainly no cell phones, not even any communicative gestures for ten days.

We left the dining hall and went up some stairs, leaving our shoes on a platform halfway up. Then we entered a door. Inside there were rows of thin blue cushions with a sheet of paper with our names indicating our seats, women on the right, men on the left. I found mine and sat down, tried to look medation-ish. The room was high and kind of dark and we sat in silence for a very long couple of minutes. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them a thin woman with a short haircut was sitting in the front on a low pedestal in the Buddha position. She had a habit of entering the room really quickly and quietly, and because my eyes were closed the first few times she did this this I secretly suspected her of dropping from the ceiling or just spontaneously appearing. The lights dimmed and suddenly, without any prior indication, a voice boomed from above and to the left. The strange voice sang, ploddingly, heavily, like Snuffalupagus coming down from opium in Hindi.

After about five minutes of chanting the voice stopped. Then it told us to relax. It explained to us that we would be learning a technique that would allow us to find true peace. It told us sit comfortably and breathe through our noses. Then it said nothing else. We sat like that for about an hour, and then we went to bed.

The next morning, and every morning after that, we did the same thing. At 4 am someone rang a gong to wake us up. At 4:30 we went to the big hall upstairs to meditate. At 6:30 we had breakfast, and an hour break. From 8 to 9 we meditated in the hall, and 9 to 11 we meditated in our rooms. Then we had lunch.

We pretty much did the same thing until we went to bed, either sitting in the hall or in our rooms, meditating. So what does that actually mean? Not a whole lot. Meditation isn’t about learning how to send psychic thoughts, or floating, or any of that shit (which actually had me a little disappointed). It’s just about learning to concentrate on the sensations in your body. That’s it.

Which is a little more difficult than it sounds, because three times a day we had to try to sit for a full hour without moving. No scratches, no shifts, just sitting there. You think that’s easy? Try not moving for two full minutes. I mean it. Right now, freeze where you are and do it.

You started looking at something, didn’t you?

Honestly I got bored of it after about seven days and just started thinking about what I would get for lunch when it was over. I had ridiculous daydreams of ripping out of the parking lot on my scooter, spitting gravel behind me while “I think about you” by Guns N Roses played in the background. But I stuck with it, and I can truthfully say that so did the others. No one spoke for ten days.

What surprised me the most was how little our ability to speak affected our ability to function as a group. I had a roommate the entire time, and we got pretty used to each other by the end of it. I knew to turn off the light when I came in after brushing my teeth, he to close the door lightly in the morning because I slept in. It worked.

On day six, one of the girls snapped. I couldn’t see it because the curtain was down between the men and the women in the dining hall, but you could hear her just start laughing. It was one of those weird, insane-asylum laughs, and it must have made everyone else uncomfortable because they started giving those weird, awkward sympathy laughs. She kept doing it, and then you could hear her stifle it and run off to her room. I don’t even know who it was.

The only thing I missed the whole ten days was not being able to laugh. You can’t exactly crack jokes when you’re in a meditation hall, and even outside it seemed somehow inappropriate. There were plenty of times when the whole thing seemed ridiculous, like some sort of social experiment, or cult. Eating the same cereal in the same room for days, staring out the window and listening to the clinks of spoons seemed like some sort of cosmic joke about the banality of existence. Maybe that’s what the girl was laughing about. Or maybe someone farted, I don’t know.

On the last day they have a big lunch and everyone gets to talk again. We sat in our tables, finally getting to know each other. There was a quiet postal worker, an archaeologist, a management student who liked to use the phrase, “Let’s say you were working for me.” There was a business professor from McGill, an old musician who I thought was the happiest person in the world until he told me how every time he looked in the mirror he told himself he was shit, for years. We ate and talked and talked, and somehow, after it was all done we went back in the meditation hall and you could sense that something had changed. We looked around at each other uneasily; now we were people with labels and stories. It was as if we felt guilty of having spoken at all, for having ruptured the harmony that had existed until then.

The next morning I woke to the sound of the gong the last time. After breakfast everyone bustled cleaning up the house, making arrangements and sending text messages. I packed my things, said goodbye to some people, and went to the parking lot to load my scooter.

It was cold and raining a little, and of course the fucking thing wouldn’t start. I sat there watching the others leaving, smiling and waving as they laughed at my petty misfortune. I wondered if I would have to call a mechanic.

Then, the postal worker came up to me. He smiled his kind smile, shook my hand, told me to be safe on the road. I realized that if the scooter had started I wouldn’t have gotten to say goodbye to him.

I tried the kick-start again and the motor turned a little. After a few more tries it went. I walked the scooter to the winding exit, letting the weight of the vehicle carry it forward, not using the gas. I watched my visor fog, glimpses of light from between the trees and the musty taste of mud in the air, and I didn’t feel happy, or excited, or even relieved to be leaving. I felt immensely grateful for the peace I had experienced and profoundly sad at knowing that I would have to learn to speak again.

- Nelson

Related posts:

1. TWO DAYS IN ALBANY
2. MOTHER’S DAY IS IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!
3. DEAR EVERYONE, HERPES’ DAYS ARE NUMBERED
4. FIVE INCH HEELS EQUALS LEGS FOR DAYS
5. COUNTDOWN TO STREET CARNAGE SXSW PARTY – 10 DAYS