Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

  I stood apart from the stream of customers. Must we do things that make us uncertain or uncomfortable? Science suggests that activities that lead us to feel uncertainty and discomfort “are associated with some of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences of people’s lives,” as the psychologists Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd B. Kashdan wrote in Psychology Today. Memorable, certainly, but are they genuinely enjoyable? The researchers found that joyful and fulfilled people seem to intuitively know “that sustained happiness is not just about doing things that you like. It also requires growth and adventuring beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.” Happy people, they said, are curious people. Without curiosity, Kashdan explains in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, we would not explore both ourselves and the world, would not engage in a search for any meaning in life, and would have no foundation for aesthetic appreciation, scientific pursuits, or innovation.

  Even when the outcome isn’t what we hoped it would be, making the effort to experience something new can still be good for us. It can help us think of ourselves as the kind of people who are capable of taking action, as Lyubomirsky has written. Plus, she said, it can whet our appetite for future risks. These risks need not be major. Simply getting out of our comfort zones—trying a different route to work, introducing ourselves to a new neighbor, speaking up for something we believe in—is important, she found, because it can help us spot opportunities, discover a strength, and shape the trajectory of our life rather than regretting our inaction.

  I stepped up to a sign that described the hamam’s three twenty-first-century offerings:

  TRADITIONAL STYLE. Includes 15 minutes body scrub & bubble wash by your attendant and afterwards you may bathe yourself again and rest on the marble platform as long as you like.

  LUXURY STYLE. Includes 15 minutes body scrub & bubble wash + 30 minutes oil massage on the table and afterwards you may bathe yourself again and rest on the marble platform as long as you like.

  SELF SERVICE. You may bathe yourself and rest on the marble platform as long as you like.

  A booklet prepared by the hamam explained that a good scrub reduces stress, keeps skin young and smooth, alleviates muscle aches, and increases circulation as well as “the happiness hormone.” I was willing to forgo the happiness hormone in favor of an option that didn’t include the words “body scrub.” There was only one: Self Service, a choice that travel guides caution tourists against because no instruction is offered about what to do on your own. That lack of direction might seem perilous when, say, bungee jumping, but how complicated could a bath be?

  Besides, while Cemberlitas is a classical hamam, it’s exceedingly tourist-friendly. A copy of Time Out Istanbul in my hotel room called it and its ilk a “decaf version” of a Turkish bath. The list of services was written in English and Spanish. And there was a F.A.Q. sign with essential questions such as “Are there any hairdryers?” (Yes.)

  I paid 60 Turkish lira (about $17 U.S. dollars at the time) and almost instantly regretted it, because in return I was handed a large red card that said SELF SERVICE. I was also given a key; a small, thin, striped towel known as a pestemal; and a sparkly drawstring bag with a pair of black underwear inside. A woman pointed upstairs. I followed her finger with relief and a dash of hubris at being offered directions despite my big red SELF SERVICE sign.

  Within seconds I blew by my dressing room, mistakenly walking up too many steps. Another woman directed me back down where, on the way, I passed a visitor in a pestemal—a fortunate encounter, because I now knew what to do with mine. (The F.A.Q. sign actually tells visitors exactly what to do, but I was so distracted that while I looked at the sign, I didn’t read it).

  There was a natural beauty and simplicity to the pale wood stairs and changing rooms. Inside one, I wrapped as much of myself as would fit under the pestemal (not much), then emerged to put my clothes in a locker and follow more pointed fingers past women in towels sipping tea, waiting for manicures and pedicures, until I reached a small room.

  Where was the big heated platform? Where was the dome? I turned around to ask, but no one was there. Perhaps those who selected Self Service were sent to a no-frills area of the hamam. There was a shower and a little room with a massage table. What was I supposed to be doing? WHY did I choose Self Service?

  I noticed a large wooden door and considered the possibility that on the other side of it might be a woman in the midst of a private massage. Or even a man. I stood looking at the door, trying to will someone to come out. But there’s only so much time you can spend standing around in a towel. Finally, I went through.

  * * *

  Steam.

  Echoes of falling water.

  I’d found the hot room. Soaring columns held up a vast dome. In the center was the large marble platform, the gobek tasi, on which a handful of women were lying. But it was not this platform, or even the tall white columns, like old, petrified trees, that gave the space its magic. It was the scattered glass “elephant eyes,” as the openings in the dome are called. They allowed long, hazy shafts of daylight to pour in, down to the marble pedestal, over bare arms and legs, like sunlight falling through the canopy of a dense forest.

  A few of the women were being scrubbed. It didn’t look particularly vigorous. One woman near the door was on her back, feet dangling off the platform, a loofah in one hand, resting on her chest.

  It was unclear to me whether the protocol was to wash in one of the bathing cubicles before or after lying on the slab. Maybe it was both. In my zeal to research the bath’s history, I’d neglected to read up on the present. (I decided to do both, though I later learned that guests are encouraged to sweat and then wash.) After a quick rinse, I laid my pestemal between two women and stretched out.

  Heat radiated from under the marble, seeped through the towel, into my back and arms. I pressed my shoulders, which in New York are generally perched up around my ears, into the stone and looked up, as if under a hazy night sky. The dome was ringed by six-pointed stars. Steam and dust floated in the slender rays of light falling toward us.

  I closed my eyes and listened to nearby whispers and watery echoes, feeling a kind of silent kinship with the other women on the marble. My mind drifted back to a summer afternoon near the Delaware River where in my twenties I came across a copy of Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions in a used-book shop. A chapter called “In Praise of Women’s Bodies” begins with a question: “How long has it been since you spent a few days in the intimate company of women: dressing and undressing, talking, showering, resting—the kind of casual togetherness that seems more common to locker rooms of men?”

  In my case it had, in fact, been years. Steinem was advocating for diverse, unselfconscious togetherness, for women to find time to be with their own bodies and those of other women when they aren’t on display for men.

  I opened my eyes and looked around. Women were lying on their stomachs being scrubbed by attendants with buckets of soapy water. Some were off on their own, washing under the arcade. Others lounged on the warm marble. No one seemed to pay any mind to what anyone else was doing, let alone to what they looked like.

  I sat up, swung my legs over the edge of the platform, and wandered back to a washing station. I turned a handle on the faucet, released a little hot water, then a little cool, swirled them together in a pretty copper bowl, and tipped it over my shoulder. The sound of water filling the metal bowl, the weight of the bowl in my hands, the act of raising it above my head and pouring water over my shoulder instead of standing under the steady flow of a showerhead—it was a ritual at once ancient and new. I filled the bowl again.

  Social scientists have found that new experiences tend to make us more intensely happy than new things. One reason why is that unlike material objects, experiences help prevent a psychological phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation—our ability to swiftly adapt to whatever happens to us and r
eturn to our own typical level of happiness. While that ability is a powerful survival tool, in daily life, adaptation can lead to boredom. The pleasure of owning a new bracelet may fade with familiarity, but a performance by whirling dervishes, for example, is not likely something we’d adapt to, even if we saw it every day, because the dance is never quite the same.

  We’re also less likely to compare our experiences (as opposed to our material possessions) with those of other people, which in turn staves off a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality. If you and a friend went on separate Caribbean vacations, and if your friend’s account of his trip sounded better than yours, it still wouldn’t bother you nearly as much as if you went to his house and saw that he had a bigger, sleeker television than the one you just bought, “because you have your memories,” Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University told the Cornell Chronicle. “It’s your idiosyncratic connection to the Caribbean that makes it your vacation. That makes it less comparable to mine, hence your enjoyment isn’t undermined as much.”

  Of course, having new experiences and trying novel things doesn’t magically endow us with confidence. But it can begin the process by demonstrating to ourselves that we’re capable. It allows us to look back and say, I did that. We don’t need proverbs, because we have proof.

  Outward Bound, the organization founded in 1941 that offers wilderness and other educational programs, is known for giving participants the opportunity to “solo”—to go off alone and reflect on the journey they’ve just completed. For many students, the solo is the highlight of their experience, the organization has said, and that after the course, students report higher levels of confidence and self-esteem.

  Walking back to the locker after the hot room, I had a tingling, bodily calm, and an unexpected feeling of gentleness toward the women I encountered along the way. I retrieved my clothes and slipped into a changing stall. I wasn’t necessarily leaving with a dewy glow, but with renewed appreciation for the skins we inhabit. When I came out, a woman pointed at a bin.

  I dropped the towel in, and returned to the city.

  Call to Prayer

  Learning to Listen

  The sounds bore an invitation.

  —Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, A Mind at Peace

  The voice of the muezzin echoed across Ortaköy pier and out to sea. It crackled through loudspeakers on the minarets, over the women in black abayas with pink iPhones on selfie sticks, the men in polo shirts on white yachts bobbing in the water, like the ghostly jellyfish between them.

  A small, cheerful crowd was taking photographs at the lip of the Bosporus on the sliver of land between the suspension bridge built in 1973 and the Baroque-style Ortaköy mosque, designed by Nigoğos Balyan (who worked on the sprawling Dolmabahçe Palace, one of the city’s top tourist destinations, as well).

  People strolled along brick paths under banners of Turkish flags strung from one lamppost to the next, past umbrellas and tents with tables where merchants were selling blue evil eyes (nazar) and hand of Fatima charms the size of door knockers. Children climbed plastic slides in a play area with public telephones shaped like dolphins, while their grandparents licked ice cream cones on benches in the shade of trees. No one stopped for the muezzin. His cry was but one more sound among many on the pier on a summer afternoon.

  It came like an ache, like a song, like a yearning before sunrise, at bedtime, and three times in between. It was the adhan, the call to prayer by a man in a tower (or, as it can be these days, a recording).

  All cities have their soundscapes, their particular symphony. In New York, subways scream as they pull into stations and jackhammers ring in the morning. And still, we manage to read our books and finish complex projects with the necessary concentration. Yet the adhan and its haunting melisma went over and in me, stopping my thoughts until the voice was gone and the air shivered in silence. Over the course of several days it became for me, Western and secular, a kind of call to solitude—“a bell of mindfulness,” to borrow a phrase from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Several times a day it snapped me back into the moment when I was distracted by heat or a tough walk up one of the city’s hills, which in August was nearly every walk.

  “Every time we hear the bell,” Nhat Hanh wrote in Peace Is Every Step, “we stop talking, stop our thinking, and return to ourselves.” The monks pause, he said. They breathe. When they inhale they sometimes say, Listen, listen.

  In the old city, calls to prayer wash over the teeming Eminönü pier. People pour off boats, everyone with somewhere to be or someone to meet.

  Women rolling luggage stopped to buy the Hurriyet and Daily Sabah newspapers under a red umbrella advertising Coca-Cola. Tourists in shorts ate fish sandwiches on low stools in boat restaurants with little golden domes. Men sold corn cobs for 2 lira; children bought simit from pushcarts with red-and-white-striped awnings; fishermen dangled rods over the Bosporus; couples on benches looked out at the sea; a man in an orange vest swept the plaza. Gulls circled them all.

  Eminönü is among the city’s busiest ferry stops, though each stop features its colorful port scenes: men selling flowers from pushcarts and tents; white-haired shoe shiners sitting behind their brass boxes under trees and umbrellas; yellow taxis idling at the curb. Nearby, the clock towers of the Sirkeci Terminal, once the final stop on the Orient Express, rose beside an empty train car. The domes of vast mosques shined in the sunlight.

  “I liked to be alone in Constantinople,” Greta Garbo told Photoplay magazine in 1928. “I was not lonely.” She walked around the old city mostly by herself, explaining, “It is not necessary to have company when you travel.”

  In the old city, there is plenty of company. I melted into the crowd descending into a tunnel under a busy road and was carried along past stalls selling headphones, sandals, and plastic toys. At the far end I climbed more stairs back out into the heat, heading south to the ancient arcades of the Grand Bazaar.

  I’d pictured finding there labyrinthine corridors piled with spices and handmade textiles you couldn’t buy anywhere else. And so I felt naive when at last I reached a vast stone gate to one of the world’s oldest markets and saw that it was flanked by displays of plastic sunglasses, like the entrance to a Times Square gift shop. A door fit for a giant was partly covered with Istanbul magnets, some shaped like whirling dervishes, others doing double duty as golden beer bottle openers. But of course the bazaar had such trifles; it wasn’t the fifteenth century.

  Inside, under the vaulted ceilings, things got more interesting. Everything mingled: the old, new, cheap, extravagant. There were hills of spices and dried fruit—apricots, mulberries, mangos, grapefruits, pineapples, strawberries, ginger, cranberries—and bins of colorful tea in flavors like kiwi, lemon, apple, and orange. There were boxes of lokum (Turkish delight) flavored with fig-walnut and apricot, almond and honey. There were baskets filled with pastries the color of pale roses, and glass display cases with even more lokum, this time formed into logs, and in more variations of pistachio flavors than I knew possible: grape pistachio, milk pistachio, honey pistachio.

  In the maze of covered streets, merchants called out as I passed, pools of light illuminating gold bangles, scarves, ceramics, and hookahs for sale. Many of the shops were not unlike mall boutiques, with electric signs, glass storefronts, and shelves of accessories and housewares.

  Outdoors, under tarps and awnings, were entire streets lined with stalls selling cookware and household sundries (brooms, feather dusters, honey wands). Some of the items, whether an economy-size pack of sponges or a wood chair, dangled like piñatas from ropes above shoppers’ heads.

  I’d expected the bazaar to feel different from other places I’d gone browsing, yet having come from a mall and Walmart culture, saturated with name brands and knockoffs alike, I was on familiar ground among the clothes and sneakers displayed beside signs that advertised Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren.

  Next to a crumbling w
all, up a short flight of steps adjacent to the Grand Bazaar, the Sahaflar Carsisi (or Old Book Bazaar) is comparatively tiny, a quiet square ringed by low-slung bookshops. Turkish flags were tacked to tree trunks and hung here and there from stalls and tables chock-a-block with novels, dictionaries, textbooks, and pens.

  Seeing the textbooks deepened my desire to visit Istanbul University, a five-minute walk away, but there was only so much time, and it was in the opposite direction of a place I simply had to see: the Basilica Cistern.

  A vast underground lake built in the sixth century to store water that flowed from woods north of Istanbul, the Cistern, I had envisioned, was the city’s romantic haunted house. The nineteenth-century French poet and journalist Théophile Gautier described it as grim and lugubrious. He imagined that the boats that used to glide on its black waters never returned, as if led to Hades by the boatman of the Styx, and he said the Turks believed the Cistern was populated with djinns and ghouls. I couldn’t wait.