by Pete Holmes
She had mentioned when we first started dating that she always wanted to go on a hot air balloon ride, and, as clever as I am forgetful, I wrote it down in a file in my phone called “Valerie.” This relationship tip alone is worth the price of this book. Just write it down. You’re welcome.
Val knew, because we share a Google calendar, that there was a surprise coming, but she didn’t know what it was, as all I had written in the calendar was “Surprise,” all day (the opposite of a “Hurt Linda”), but after we had both gotten carsick winding up the still-dark-before-sunrise twisty roads of Santa Barbara’s wine country, she saw the balloon and immediately knew I was going to propose. She’s no dummy. You can’t be dating for four years and just casually pull up to a hot air balloon wearing your one good sport coat, a bulge in your pocket from the ring box, like, “Would you like to hover in this basket for no reason whatsoever?” She knew. In fact, if she had been surprised, I might have called it off.
It seemed like a very romantic idea, and it is, on paper, but in reality, the basket is tiny. The floor of it is about the size of four pizza boxes, and seeing as I’m a Lithuanian ogre, as soon as I got in, it was pretty much full. Which is fine. There’s still room for Valerie, I thought. Only I completely forgot there was going to be another fucking guy in the basket to fly the balloon. Just some random guy, standing inches from my face. Some guy I just met, standing so close I feel the heat of his breath and the tickle of his whiskers.
All this would have been okay, I guess, except that balloon guy was a real man’s man. Like a Ben Affleck character in a movie. He was wearing a Carhart jacket covered in scuffs and, worse, once we were in the air he kept calling everything “gay.” We were hovering silently in the air and he’d be like, “That’s Janet Jackson’s ranch down there. It’s fucking gay.” Or, “I used to work at that deli. They fired me. Fucking gay.” The biggest day of my life, and he was calling everything he saw “gay.”
Seeing as this man was in charge of our safety more than a thousand feet in the air, I kept my mouth shut. But in my head I was thinking, Sir, you pilot a balloon—a rainbow-colored balloon—soaring above the rolling hills of Santa Barbara at zero miles per hour. Maybe cool it on the “gays.”
This was the biggest day of my life, and I had to surrender to the idea that this guy was clearly going to be a part of it. He made me nervous. I had plans to be all flowery and tell Val how much she meant to me—how she filled my life with joy, and music, and laughter—but I didn’t want Affleck to judge me. I mean, he was right there.
So I froze.
I took out the ring, Val pretended to be surprised—I’m telling you, she’s the best—and I tried to be as romantic as I could with the most recent Batman watching me.
“Valerie,” I said, the sound of the balloon operator’s loud gum chewing in my right ear. “I would be honored . . . to call you . . . my wife.”
That’s all I said. I blew it.
That is not a proposal.
You’re supposed to propose an idea, you’re supposed to ask a question, “Will you marry me?” Skywriters and kiss cams all over the world know this. But that’s not what I said. I basically just said, “Hey, it would be great—let’s get the law involved.”
But Val—my love, my light—is a good sport, so she said “Yes!” to my nonquestion, I put the ring on her, and we both stared at the openmouthed, gum-chewing man’s man operating the balloon flame. What was he going to do? I was worried he’d say, “A man is marrying a woman?! That’s fucking gay.” Instead, he pulled two celebratory toots of the flame, and then, I swear to God, he said, “A lot of girls up here . . . they say no.”
Val and I just stared at him. But he wasn’t done.
“One girl,” he continued, “said yes in the basket . . . When we landed said no . . . Clever girl.” He said that—“Clever girl”—like the guy hunting velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
I wondered, am I supposed to tip this guy?
Eventually we gratefully landed, drank some pretty shitty complimentary champagne, and as soon as we were alone I opened up another note I keep on my phone—one for stand-up ideas—and Val and I wrote down everything we could remember so I could tell the story onstage. As she gave me punch lines and tags and remembered little details I had forgotten, I knew—as always—I had found the right woman for me.
a deep, unflinching malaise
THINGS WERE GOOD, AND THEY JUST KEPT GETTING better.
On a Tuesday night staying in, eating popcorn and watching Bob’s Burgers, after weeks of excruciating waiting and anxiety, Val and I got the call from the head of programming at HBO that Crashing had been picked up for a second season. I acted normal on the phone, using my grown-up voice—“Oh my goodness, that’s wonderful news”—but as soon as I hung up we screamed like children and jumped up and down on the couch so hard that we broke it.
We were going back to New York, happy, married, and thriving, and fresh from a spiritual retreat that left me feeling connected to the Mystery again, or God, or whatever you want to call it. It felt like I had a nice little garden patch of ideas and methods—some Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Rob Bell, and Richard Rohr—to connect me back to my source, participating again with my what-is-this?
Then, like a big, dumb idiot, I figured that this garden patch would continue to grow and flourish and be just fine with absolutely no maintenance whatsoever.
I was wrong.
As soon as the hustle of writing and producing and acting in the second season of Crashing began, I let my tiny piece of enlightenment slip, like losing a flip-flop on a wakeboard. I stopped reading; I stopped contemplating; I stopped meditating. My showbiz life was big and bright and fast and surprisingly stressful, and there just didn’t seem to be any room for any of that touchy-feely spiritual stuff that in any case only “worked” some of the time.
Because let’s be honest—sometimes meditation feels great, and sometimes you sit there with your legs crossed for half an hour just replaying an episode of ALF in your head, and you don’t feel any better than you did when you started. My friends in Maui had told me to stick with it, that it gets better, assuring me that deep meditation could release the same endorphin rush I was getting from a nightly glass of vodka, but coming home exhausted every day after fourteen hours of shooting a show that I foolishly had designed to feature myself in every single scene, I didn’t have a bottle of meditation chilling in my freezer. I had booze. And I wanted the easiest possible off switch I could find.
In New York, on paper, everything was perfect. But inside, every move, every day, every scene we shot, secretly felt like a slog. For some reason, my dream job had started to feel like something that I had to do instead of something that I got to do. I kept self-medicating, smoking more pot and drinking more than I ever had, mixing up the liquor stores I would go to on my way home for fear that the clerks might watch the show and notice a pattern. I started eating more and spending lots of money. I started saying yes to more fancy two-entrée dinners with producers, sharing innumerable desserts for the table, bottles of wine, and spending weekends taking boat trips around New York Harbor.
I took plenty of photos for Instagram to show the world how happy I was, but like many people who feel the need to do that, I was secretly miserable. What’s worse, no one could tell. While we were shooting, I was riding with Bill Burr in a golf cart in between takes when he said to me, “Look at this! Your own fucking HBO show. If this doesn’t make you happy, nothing will!”
Bill had no idea.
I guess I seemed happy. In fact, I considered the smiling I did between scenes to be the best acting I did the entire season. But underneath it all, I felt trapped under a dense, heavy feeling, like I was pinned under one of those giant blue mats we used to use in gym class.
This continued for months until finally one Saturday, when Val was out of town, I took Brody for a walk and sat for a few minutes on an “S”-shaped concrete bench facing the East River. Moping, the view did nothing for me,
which came as no surprise. Nothing was doing anything for me. Then, as if from nowhere, a thought sprang up: I seem to remember you like listening to Ram Dass.
This was the last thing I wanted to do. I had no faith in my newest spiritual teacher rescuing me. But, having tried everything else—and the nearest liquor store being the one I had been to the day before—I took out my iPhone, put my earbuds in my sad sack ears, and hit Play on a track I had been listening to over a year earlier, paused somewhere randomly in the middle. That track, part of a seven-hour lecture, turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear. It was an eerie feeling, like having my fortune read.
Ram Dass was talking about the time in his life when he, too, had achieved all of his wildest dreams. He had been a Harvard professor at the top of his game; he had money, and boats, and planes, and smoked cigars, laughing in photos with clean white sweaters tied around his neck. If life was a game, he thought, he had won.
“And though I played that game as hard as I knew how,” Ram Dass said, “for all the points I knew how to collect, there was in me the very gnawing uneasiness that I was missing something. A malaise.”
That word, “malaise,” smacked me across the face. It fit me perfectly. I wasn’t down in the dumps or depressed—I was numb.
RD continued:
And when we experience a malaise in our culture, we tend to treat that malaise as if it is our fault. We treat it as if it’s our neurosis, and it’s our lack of adaptability to the existing culture—which must be right because there’s so many of them—and I kept trying to readapt my being to try to fit into the gratification patterns that the culture was offering me. And it just wasn’t working. And I started to drink more and I started to get more extreme in my ways of seeking pleasure in order to gain the kind of fulfillment to give me a feeling of well-being.*
I looked around, suddenly feeling like I was on The Truman Show. I stopped breathing, eager not to miss a word. I leaned forward.
Well, then I got for some years into experimentation with psychotropic chemicals, chemicals that alter consciousness, and that changed my head around a great deal. I saw through those experiments that perhaps my malaise, my discomfort, was not just my pathology, but it was a deeper something in me attempting to awaken, and that maybe instead of treating it as some sickness that ought to be treated as a problem, I should see it as something graceful. To be honored. And maybe it would be useful to allow my life to adapt to tune to those feelings of wrongness or rightness within myself.*
I hit Pause; I needed a minute.
For the first time, sitting there, so stuck in my own little situation, I considered that maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me. Maybe I was right to feel down. Maybe it was grace. Maybe what made so much sense to me in the serenity of Hawaii, or in the comfort of my bed months earlier, reading next to Valerie, was also true in the concrete toothache of the city swept away in the madness of too much work. I had gotten a glimpse of soul consciousness—a taste—and maybe now that I had, chasing the next high, or the next meal, or the next cocktail, accolade, or pile of cash just wouldn’t cut it anymore. Maybe we’re not just here to satiate our sense desires. Maybe we are something more than just our personalities and our drives toward pleasure and our hopes to avoid pain, and maybe when that elemental part of us sees us chasing the wrong carrot on the wrong stick it sends up signals to nudge us back onto the right track.
Maybe it sends a malaise.
I looked at Brody, then at a passing jogger, then at a couple taking a picture in front of the New York skyline. I was back. I was looking not as myself but as the Witness. I was looking at my life as a story unfolding in front of me, lovingly, but detached. My emotional state started to seem like something happening to me—well, to “Pete”—and instead of resisting it, I began to try to work with it and interpret it as a message from a deeper, truer part of myself. My soul, it seemed, was trying to get my attention, so instead of pushing it away, I started giving it a listen. And as I did, “Pete” started to relax.
This was a deeper way for me to start understanding the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” From a soul perspective, the things that happen to us do happen for a reason, but that reason applies to something beyond the events and milestones of our lives, something behind what’s happening in front of our faces. It’s not as linear or as simple as what happened and what happened after what happened because of what happened before. To the soul, whatever’s happening is happening to you to affect your essence—the real You—the simplified, stripped-down, Big You behind the little you.
It started to make sense that every experience, good or bad, was just stuff—stuff to nudge us away from our attachment to ego identification and toward soul identification. The word Hindus and Buddhists use for this stuff is karma.
Everybody wants to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, but Ram Dass’s lecture that morning introduced me to the Eastern idea that everything, including your suffering and your malaise, could be seen, as RD calls it, as “grist for the mill of going home.” Home—our real home.
This is it: there was one Awareness—one single point of Everything-ness—and that Awareness, the One, broke into the many. (That’s us.) Then the many forgot they were all part of the One and got lost in the illusion of separateness, so their karma came to them to run through them like fire or sandpaper until they dropped the grit and the barnacles and started to remember. This, Ram Dass said, is how the game is played.
Our experiences aren’t errors in the system. They are, as Ram Dass calls them, our curriculum. We are trying to wake up as souls, to stop identifying with our attractions and aversions, and in order to do that we have to have some, confront them, and move beyond them. Our stresses, our predicaments, our doubts, our joy, it’s all here to work with. It’s all something to handle lightly, it’s play, to move beyond and, as he puts it, stop being the me and start being the I.
My whole adult life, whenever I was depressed, I had a hard time seeing the meaning in anything. People would ask me if I wanted to go to the park, say, and my despair would respond, “Why? What are we gonna do? See things? Smell things? Touch, taste, and hear things?” What was the point? If that’s all we can do, why leave your bed? My depression made me feel trapped, like I was stuck in one of these ridiculous hungry, bored, horny bodies, forced to play the meaningless game of killing time—shooting pool, eating sandwiches, fucking—until one day I die.
But . . .
. . . if everything—going to the park, feeling low, eating a burrito—was another opportunity for you to awaken, to play hide-and-seek with the truth of who you really are, suddenly life could be charged with endless meaning and electric vitality, snapping you into the moment because it’s all we have, and you don’t want to miss a thing—one clue, one opportunity to snap out of it and reclaim your true Self. Everything is an adventure, something un-Instagrammable, something beyond all this, behind all this to endlessly explore, beyond your senses and your memories and your experiences and getting hungry and eating and getting tired and sleeping. Seen from this perspective, a trip to the park becomes vital and exciting. Can I take my desire for it to be a fun day, a sunny day, and work with that and let it go? Can I observe my panic that there won’t be easily accessible bathrooms or places to sit and work with it and learn to trust and to laugh at myself? Could I learn to see that every moment—eating breakfast, being bored, taking a shit on a plane—is another opportunity to merge with the thing behind the thing and giggle?
I was determined to try.
I took this lesson back to the set of Crashing with me, and whenever I felt jammed up or frustrated or despondent, or another actor didn’t know his lines, or a power outage pushed our day another four hours, I would ask myself, “What does this moment have to tell me about the fundamental nature of the divine?” And, “The reality of the Mystery is not contingent on my mood.”
I stopped taking my life—my story—so seriously. I started to see it as a game.
The Hindus have a word for this game—they call the play or the dance of life “lila,” as in “Relax, it’s all just lila.” Frustrated? Lila. Anxious? Lila. Don’t take it too seriously, it’s just the universe working itself out. It’s all just a passing show.
Watching my life unfold from the soul’s perspective felt strangely like the work we were doing that summer in New York. There I was, making a TV show, and at the same time I was starting to see my real life as a drama that I was watching from somewhere else. And it was all in the game.
You have jumping up and down on the couch for joy on one hand, and in the other a heavy weight that you just can’t get away from. Work with all of it. Ram Dass’s perspective on whatever life threw at him, including his own stroke, was “I will eat it all.” If the entire point is to wake up, whatever gets you there is a good thing, including a divorce, or losing a job, or a depression. God wasn’t asleep at the wheel when my wife left me, as I had believed. It was my work. It was a clue. From that perspective, suffering can literally be seen as grace.
I WATCH A LOT OF TELEVISION. I TRICK MYSELF BY saying “I don’t have cable,” but the truth is you don’t need cable to watch way, way too much television, and Ram Dass’s approach to life as I was settling into it felt a lot like sitting in my well-worn spot on my couch: passionately involved—yelling at the TV during the Breaking Bad finale—but also peacefully disconnected: I’m not Walter White, I’m watching from the couch, eating popcorn.
Joey Cambs said soul consciousness is when the light bulb stops identifying with the bulb and starts identifying with the light. Eckhart Tolle first experienced his soul just as he was on the brink of a suicide and thought, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” He had his epiphany when he asked, “Who is the I in that statement?” I cannot live with myself any longer . . . there’s an “I” and a “myself”?
The soul couldn’t live with the ego any longer.
