by Harris, Dan
Baldness → Unemployment → Flophouse in Duluth
Inevitably, this led to a nasty rejoinder from some other, more reasonable part of my brain:
Get over yourself, Harris.
When I brought the hair thing up with Dr. Brotman, he leaned back in his chair and beamed skepticism at me from across his desk.
“You don’t understand,” I said to him. “If I go bald, my career is screwed.”
“You don’t understand,” he replied, eyeing my hairline. “You’re not going bald.”
By any rational measure, things were otherwise going extremely well in my life. Nearly three years had passed since my panic attacks. I was off the Klonopin and down to seeing Brotman only once a month or so. Occasionally I’d be ambushed by waves of longing for drugs, but the cravings were vastly diminished. (Although I tried to always keep in mind something a friend had once told me: “Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”) At home, the situation was even better: after living together for more than a year, Bianca and I had gotten engaged and were planning a wedding in the Bahamas. At work, my gig anchoring the Sunday edition of World News continued to be a joy. And even though public interest in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was on the wane, a new opportunity had emerged. The post-Koppel Nightline had moved away from live interviews and more toward lengthy taped stories from all over the world. The producers had allowed me to launch major investigations, such as tracking rhino poachers in Nepal, and posing as a customer in order to expose child slave traders in Haiti. This was a new type of reporting for me. It had a crusading spirit. Corny or not, I found that old journalistic injunction to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” inspiring.
Nevertheless, my worrying over work had grown worse, and the hair issue was just the leading indicator. Increasingly, I was waking up to the fact that the whole industry rested on such an uncertain foundation. In my eight years at the network, I had witnessed seemingly immovable fixtures of broadcast news fade or simply disappear. Among the missing were Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather. When I had arrived at ABC News back in 2000, I was the youngest correspondent on the fourth floor. Suddenly, at age thirty-seven, I was nearly the oldest. All but one of those more senior correspondents had departed, often unceremoniously. These were guys who had given their lives to a profession that could be lavishly kind or capriciously cruel. I’d seen so many careers soar or sour based on seemingly random things, such as changing physical appearance, the personal whim of a specific anchor or executive, or the emergence of a more eye-catching rival. In discussing the unpredictability of my profession with my brother recently, he told me about scientific studies where lab rats were rewarded with food pellets at random, illogical times. Those rats went crazy.
To make matters worse, the country was in the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Bear Stearns had just collapsed, along with Lehman Brothers. The stock market was in free fall. It felt like the world had gone off a cliff no one had seen coming. ABC News went through a wrenching round of layoffs. While my job seemed safe at the moment, I felt bad for my colleagues and fretted about the future. When I thought about alternative careers, I drew a blank. What other marketable skills did I have besides wearing makeup and bellowing into cameras? This was a bit maudlin, but there were a few times where I found myself lying on the couch in my office, staring at a picture on my wall of the ocean, thinking about the word impermanence.
On one such occasion there was a knock on my door. It was David Muir popping by to chat. We had a lot in common. We’d both worked in local news in Boston, arrived at the network before the age of thirty, and loved to travel the planet doing stories. Just a couple months earlier, David had filed some amazing reports from Chernobyl. He had the office down the hall from me and we’d sometimes get together to talk about our latest stories—or just gossip. In the spirit of misery looking for company, I asked him what he would do if the whole TV news business imploded. He shrugged his shoulders with enviable insouciance and said, “Eh, I’d find something else.”
Back in the toilet on the airplane coming home from Brazil, I replayed that scene in my mind as I continued to stare at my faltering hairline.
Easy for you to say, Muir—with your full head of hair.
I’d been in this position in front of the mirror for at least ten minutes. I realized, with a twinge of embarrassment, that there was probably a line outside by now. I let my hair fall back down onto my forehead and returned, sheepishly, to my seat.
About a month later, on a sunny Saturday in September, I was at a block party in New Jersey. There was a cookout, a bounce castle for the kids, and a band with a bassist wearing a do-rag. When the music stopped, a pastor took the mic and declared, with his voice echoing off the brightly colored vinyl siding of the surrounding row houses, “There’s room for everyone at the cross today.”
I was here for a story about Sarah Palin, recently plucked from obscurity to become John McCain’s running mate. A video had just hit the web showing Palin praying for God’s help to get a gas pipeline built in her home state of Alaska. That had sparked a lot of discussion about the fact that she was a Pentecostal, a strain of Christianity sometimes described as “Evangelicalism on steroids.” I wanted to do a piece that would explain to viewers exactly what Pentecostals believed. The closest church was here in Jersey City, and they just happened to be throwing a party.
To be away from the noise, our cameraman, soundman, and producer had set up for the interviews a little farther down the street. The three of them were in the middle of an animated discussion led by Felicia, the producer, a petite, apple-cheeked mother of two with whom I’d worked for many years. She was telling the others about a book she’d just read by someone named Eckhart Tolle. As I approached, she turned toward me: “Have you read him? You might like him. It’s all about controlling your ego.”
The crew burst out laughing. Like me, they took it as a joke about the anchorman’s inevitably inflated sense of self-importance. Felicia, earnest and unfailingly polite, flushed and, speaking rapidly now, assured us that she wasn’t making a joke. Her point was that she had read Tolle’s books and found them personally useful. More than that, Oprah had been heavily promoting his latest volume, and she thought Tolle might make a good story.
Fair enough. I was always looking for stories, and this one—featuring an Oprah-approved self-help swami—sounded like it might include the requisite exotica. So when I got home later that day, I went online and ordered the book.
By the time his book arrived at my apartment a few days later, I had almost forgotten about Eckhart Tolle. I saw the cheesy orange cover shining dully through Amazon’s irrationally excessive bubble wrap. It bore the rather overwrought title A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, as well as the seal of Oprah’s Book Club.
I propped it on my chest that night, an unsuspecting Bianca sleeping to my left, blissfully unaware that her future husband was being sucked into a strange vortex.
At first, the book struck me as irredeemable poppycock. I was put off by the strained stateliness of Tolle’s writing, as well as its nearly indecipherable turgidity. How could Oprah fans stand to drink from a fire hose of jargon like “conditioned mind structures” and “the one indwelling consciousness”? What’s more, the guy was stunningly grandiose. He referred to his book as a “transformational device,” and promised that, as you read, a “shift takes place within you.”
I lay there rolling my eyes, quietly cursing Felicia for inflicting this upon me. But just when I thought I’d been defeated by all the porridge about “inner opening” and the impending “shift in planetary consciousness,” a clearing appeared in the spiritual thicket. Tolle began to unfurl a fascinating thesis, one that made me think he must have somehow spent an enormous amount of time inside my skull.
Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless s
tream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.
Apparently Felicia was right when she got all flustered on that little side street in Jersey City: Tolle wasn’t using the term “ego” the way most of us normally do. He wasn’t referring solely to pride, conceit, or amour propre of the variety often displayed by people who appear on television for a living. Nor was he using it in the Freudian sense, as the psychological mechanism that mediates between our id and our superego, our desires and our morality. He meant something much larger. According to Tolle, the ego is our inner narrator, our sense of “I.”
Certainly Tolle had described my mind to a T. While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.
Per Tolle, even though the voice is the ridgepole of our interior lives, most of us take it completely for granted. He argued that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are—quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head—is the primordial human error. When we are unaware of “the egoic mind” (egoic being a word he appears to have invented), we blindly act out our thoughts, and often the results are not pretty.
I began to recall some of the many brilliant suggestions the voice in my head had made to me over the years.
You should do cocaine.
You’re right to be angry at that producer. Throw your papers in the air!
That Pakistani protestor is way out of line. Even though he’s surrounded by a thousand angry friends, you should have a shouting match with him.
I’d been reading for an hour now, and Tolle had my full attention. As I turned the pages, he began to list some of the ego’s signature moves, many of which seemed to be grabbed directly from my behavioral repertoire.
The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete. Did this not describe my bottomless appetite for airtime—or drugs? Is this what my friend Simon meant when he said I had the “soul of a junkie”?
The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of everyone else. Did this not explain some of my worrying at work?
The ego thrives on drama. It keeps our old resentments and grievances alive through compulsive thought. Is this why I would sometimes come home to Bianca, scowling over some issue at the office?
Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.
I was a pro, I realized, at avoiding the present. A ringer. This had been true my whole life. My mom always described me as an impatient kid, rushing through everything. In eighth grade, an ex-girlfriend told me, “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.” Now, as a grown-up in the deadline-dominated world of news, I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion instead of calmly and carefully enjoying the process. The unspoken assumption behind most of my forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better. Only when I reached that ineffable . . . whatever . . . would I be totally satisfied. Some of the only times I could recall being fully present were when I was in a war zone or on drugs. No wonder one begat the other.
It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life—swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained through the ego: chasing the thrill of war without contemplating the consequences, replacing the combat high with coke and ecstasy, reflexively and unfairly judging people of faith, getting carried away with anxiety about work, neglecting Bianca to tryst with my BlackBerry, obsessing about my stupid hair.
It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.
This is where things got confusing, though. Just as I was coming to the conclusion that Tolle was a sage who perhaps held the key to all of my problems, he started saying some ludicrous shit. It was no longer his rococo writing style that was throwing me; I was getting used to that. No, now what was sticking in my craw was his penchant for making wild, pseudoscientific claims. He argued that living in the present moment slowed down the aging process and made the “molecular structure” of the body “less dense.” He asserted that “thoughts have their own range of frequencies, with negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher.” Sometimes in the course of a single sentence, he would say something lucid and compelling, and then veer straight into crazy town. I honestly could not figure out if he was a genius or a lunatic.
Then I learned more about who this guy actually was. After several nights of reading his book well into the wee hours, I padded over to the computer to do a little Googling. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not this: a small, sandy-haired German man who appeared to be at some indeterminate point north of middle age. His presentation style was totally at odds with the voice-of-God tone he affected on the page. In YouTube videos, he spoke softly and slowly, excruciatingly so, as if someone had forced him to ingest a large dose of my leftover Klonopin. His wardrobe appeared to consist solely of sweater-vests and pleated khakis. One observer described him as looking like a “Communist-era librarian.” Another called him a “pale, kindly otter.”
The seminal event of his personal history was an experience he claimed to have had as a severely depressed graduate student at Oxford University. He said he was lying in bed when he was overcome with suicidal thoughts. Suddenly, he felt himself being “sucked into a void.” He heard a voice telling him to “resist nothing.” Then everything went dark. He woke up the next morning and the birds were chirping, the sunlight was a revelation, and his life was a shiny, sparkly thing. It was, quite literally, an overnight panacea. Bingo. Done. Sorted. After that is when he spent two years living on park benches “in a state of the most intense joy.” This was his spiritual awakening, of which he would later say, “The realization of peace is so deep that even if I met the Buddha and the Buddha said you are wrong, I would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting, even the Buddha can be wrong.’ ”
Eventually, he moved to Canada, which had the right “energy field” for his first book “to be born.” That book, The Power of Now, became a celebrity sensation. Meg Ryan gave it to Oprah, who put copies on the nightstands in the guest rooms of all of her homes. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy produced videotaped testimonials (before they broke up). Paris Hilton carried the book through a gauntlet of paparazzi on her way into jail over a driving violation.
When his follow-up, A New Earth, came out, Oprah put on an unprecedented, eleven-part “webinar.” Millions of people tuned in to watch her and Tolle sit at a desk, deconstructing the book, chapter by chapter. Their personal styles were almos
t comically mismatched: Oprah would whoop and holler as Tolle looked on placidly; Tolle would prattle on about “energy fields” as Oprah mmmed and aahed credulously. At one point she threw up her arms for a double high five, and Tolle, clearly not knowing what such a thing was, awkwardly clasped her hands.
Sitting there in my underwear in front of my computer in the middle of the night, I put my head in my hands. My whole life, I’d prided myself on being a skeptic. I’d spent nearly a decade interviewing spiritual leaders, and none of them had penetrated my defenses. Now this guy—who looked like a character from The Hobbit—was the one who had punched through?
I was looking in the mirror again—this time at an angry red hole, the size of a quarter, smack in the middle of my right cheek.
When the dermatologist first discovered the milky patch on my cheek—basal cell carcinoma, a nonlethal form of skin cancer—I was tempted to just leave it there. Face surgery was an unappetizing prospect for a guy who went on TV for a living. The doctor, however, along with Bianca, argued that inaction was not an option. If I let it spread unchecked, they told me, it could get into my eye socket and blind me. For a nanosecond, I considered whether I might prefer partial blindness to a scar, even though the doctor promised that, if everything went well, said scar would be a small one.
The surgery was Chinese water torture. The surgeon—a crisp young woman—made an initial incision, using a microscopically guided scalpel to remove the cancer. After that first stab, she sent me out to the waiting room as she ran some tests to see if she’d gotten it all. I joined Bianca at a bank of chairs, where I pulled out my copy of A New Earth, which I was now reading for the third time.
After a half hour or so, the doctor called me back and said they needed to dig a little deeper. So I went under the knife again, and then back to the waiting room, where I read more of the book. Another half hour passed, and then the nurse came back and told me they still hadn’t gotten every last teeny bit; they’d need to take a wider slice.
