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It was a little after 5:30 in the morning, a cold June morning, and I was sitting on a meditation cushion in a big red barn in the Hudson Valley. A dozen other people sat with me in profound silence. Hundreds of birds began to sing in the meadows and trees. In the distance, we heard cattle and machinery, the sounds of a working farm waking up.
I haven’t looked at an email, chat, headline, news alert or tweet in several days. What a strange situation for an editor who runs a breaking news team at The New York Times.
I’ve been meditating for many years, but my practice deepened in 2015 after I became an editor for the Express team, now a group of 23 journalists from around the world who cover breaking news hour to hour It was also the year I began regularly attending meditation retreats hosted by a small Zen meditation center in Manhattan.
The news cycle is relentless and heavy, often featuring stories of deep human suffering. The week before this retreat was busy enough: a building collapse in Iowa left people dead and missing. Rosalynn Carter was diagnosed with dementia. The Pentagon banned drag events on military bases. The first tropical storm of the season formed in the Atlantic. And, in a lighter moment, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned a new champion.
I’m rarely away from a screen or free from device pings. Working with other news boards, the Express team tracks competitor articles, social media posts, police and emergency agency alerts, and other news sources. Disconnecting from all this is both exhilarating and terrifying, like descending a 100-foot pole into the unknown, to borrow a Zen metaphor.
I’ve learned to trust that the news will be reported, but it wasn’t always easy being off the grid. Right after my first week-long retreat in 2015, I saw a front-page headline about the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, SC. It was horrible, and I felt the pain of that peculiar reporter of not being there for an important story. Since then, we’ve covered more mass shootings than I ever imagined possible.
During this retreat, smoke from wildfires in Canada turned orange skies over New York City, and former President Donald J. Trump was impeached. I could smell the smoke. I learned about the charge later.
For seven days, from sunrise to sunset, I was among serious meditators sitting still for 25-minute periods punctuated by 10 minutes of walking meditation along a country road. We took breaks for meals, exercise and, gloriously, daily naps. We were expected to refrain from speaking, passing written notes only when unavoidable. For my work assignment, I made the salads for the meals, chopping vegetables in silence with the rest of the kitchen staff. For part of the week, I was also the timekeeper, ringing a bell to start and end meditation periods.
Unchained from the Internet, I wandered the grounds and woods and gazed from a hammock at treetops more vividly green than I had ever realized. I was usually fast asleep shortly after 9pm
Co-workers and friends who don’t meditate imagine a serene experience. “Have fun!” they say, with a hint of envy. But meditation is hard work. There is the physical discomfort of staying as still as possible, despite the itches and pains. And then there is the mental effort of focusing awareness on the breath while the mind offers up plans, memories and emotions, not all of them pleasant.
And just as you finally relax, a fly lands on your hand.
Little by little, with enough practice, you learn skills that allow for greater concentration. “Leave your front door and your back door open,” said the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “Let the thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
Meditation also helped me through the Covid-19 pandemic, although the retreats ended with Zoom. (You might be amused to know that even Buddhists forget to shut up.) These days, in the newsroom, I’m better able to make a rhythm amid the stress of breaking news. (But I haven’t achieved perfect equanimity, as the people I work with will agree with the deadline.)
After the first day of retreat in June, thoughts of work went out the back door. One exception: In one talk, a professor cited with approval a recent Science Times column by Dennis Overbye, which reflected on predictions that in 100 billion years the universe and all beings sensitive will no longer exist. Some physicists, he wrote, believe that this sad fact of universal impermanence should free us to “focus on the magic of the moment.” I was doing my part.
On the bus ride home, I felt calm, but energized. I wasn’t worried about my full calendar, the hundreds of emails waiting in my inbox, or the end of the universe. Next week would bring new headlines, many of misery: more wildfire smoke, contaminated strawberries and deadly tornadoes in the South.
But for now, everything was fine.
