My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  My room was still freezing when I got back so I drew a bath. I wouldn’t have figured Alice to be the type to install a Jacuzzi, but I liked where her head was at. I cranked the water as hot as it would go and stepped delicately into the tub. My scalded skin bloomed into a happy pink. Leaning my head against the wall behind me, I said a quick prayer of thanks, wondering if I was the only one whose prayers sounded like an Academy Award speech. “I’d like to thank God for my Jacuzzi. Really, this was just so unexpected. I don’t know what else to say. Um . . . free Tibet?”

  I closed my eyes and wondered what I should do tomorrow. Maybe walk the labyrinth behind the main house? When I’d first read about it on the retreat center’s website, I’d pictured a maze with towering walls or people-eating bushes that magically rearranged themselves like in the movies. But as I’d passed it on the way to the chapel earlier, I saw it was just a brick footpath on the ground. Still, in expectation of walking this path, I’d looked up the history of labyrinths.

  During the early Middle Ages, there was a cathedral boom across Europe. Twenty-two cathedrals were built with labyrinths placed in their floors. Up until then, Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem was regarded as a sacred obligation of faith. But when the Crusades swept across Europe, the journey became dangerous and often deadly. The Christian leaders came to the same conclusion that all smart kids reach when they dare to venture into a bad neighborhood at night: “Uh, let’s not and say we did.” So it was decided that walking a labyrinth could serve as a substitute pilgrimage for the faithful unable to travel to the Holy Land.

  Over time, walking the labyrinth became a metaphor: the path to the center symbolizes the journey inward to our own center. One loses track of direction in its twists and turns, and theoretically, the distractions and anxieties of the outside world are left behind. This quieting of the mind allows you to open yourself to the journey. The center of the labyrinth represents the ultimate surrender of self so that one can receive peace, clarity, illumination, or God. When I’d read that, I was skeptical but intrigued.

  New Age mystic Jean Houston was considered the grandmother of the modern labyrinth revival, even adopting a labyrinth as her logo. In the 1960s, she began advocating walking their coiled paths as a means to spiritual enlightenment. She acted as something of a guru to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady, leading her into guided meditation sessions to contact—wait for it—Eleanor Roosevelt. She had Clinton carry on imaginary dialogues with Eleanor, with Clinton supplying both sides of the conversation.

  My thoughts were brought back to the present by the water, which had turned lukewarm. Had my body already gotten used to it? I’d only been in here a few minutes. I plunged my right foot under the still-running faucet. Ice cold. My good mood turned instantly. I splashed my two inches of tepid water around in frustration.

  “Oh, come on!” I called out. “Seriously?”

  The combination of franks, beans, and tapering off my sleeping pills kept me up half the night, so I let myself sleep through the continental breakfast. By lunchtime I was ravenous and arrived to find the dining room empty. There was a note on the counter from Alice:

  Margaret + Noelle,

  I left butternut squash soup and a chicken salad sandwich in refrigerator.

  Enjoy!

  —Alice

  I peered inside the fridge. There were two Tupperware cups full of soup and half of a small chicken salad sandwich on a plate. Margaret must have come earlier, eaten her half of the sandwich and passed on the butternut squash. I popped the container into the microwave for a few minutes and settled down at the table with my portion. As I was sampling the soup, trying to determine if it was actually curry that had been repurposed, Margaret walked in. She opened the fridge and cocked her head. She read the note and looked over at me sitting at the table with my food. She opened the fridge again. Margaret hadn’t been here already, I realized. Confronted with the options of entering into a lively game of charades or breaking our vow of silence, I went with the latter.

  Hoping she wouldn’t be too offended by the intrusion, I said, “This is all there was.” My voice was a little too loud and reverberated across the linoleum.

  She looked at me gratefully. “Oh, thank you, I was so confused!”

  “We can split this,” I offered, pushing the plate with the sandwich into the middle of the table.

  “I appreciate it!” After heating up her soup, she sat down across from me, picked up the plate with the sandwich, and set it directly in front of her.

  Oh, this is uncomfortable. Maybe I should just let her have it and not say anything? We’re having such a nice moment. Why ruin it? But Dr. Bob would call this “avoidance.”

  I cleared my throat. “Um, actually, when I said that this is all there was, I meant that this half sandwich is all there was. I only just got here myself.”

  “Oh!” She flushed red. “I do apologize! I thought you’d already eaten one half.”

  “You can have it if you want,” I said, suddenly feeling generous in spite of my hunger.

  “Nonsense! We’ll divide it.” She reached for a butter knife and began the dissection. “I saw a teenager working in the yard earlier. Perhaps Alice offered him a sandwich and he took more than his share? Boys eat a lot, you know.”

  “You have to give him credit for a brilliant strategy: steal food from the silent retreat guests. Who are they going to tell?”

  She returned my grin, and we munched our quarter sandwiches and sipped our curry/soup with a new air of comradeship. Miraculously, when we finished I was completely full. It was exactly enough.

  Margaret’s maternalness made me miss my mom. I wished I hadn’t been so hard on her at Christmas. The more I’d learned about worry in the last few months, the better I understood how easily worrying became an addiction. People worry for many reasons, according to Dr. Bob. We believe that if we chew over a problem long enough, eventually we’ll figure out a solution. Worry gives us the illusion of control over the future. We dream up worst-case scenarios, thinking we can prevent bad things from happening. We think worrying will motivate us to get things done. We worry about exams, thinking it will get us to study. We worry about our appearance, hoping it will encourage us to work out or stick to our diet. Also—and this was a hard one for me to wrap my head around—we worry because it makes us less afraid.

  “Worry is your body’s way of trying to suppress fear,” Dr. Bob had explained in our last session.

  “Aren’t fear and worry basically the same thing?”

  He’d shook his head. “Fear is an emotional response. It manifests physically. Think tension, muscle aches, rapid heartbeat, sweating. Worry suppresses that arousal.”

  “So it’s more like a defense mechanism.”

  “It temporarily makes us feel better, so we keep doing it.”

  It continued to rain through the next day. Even an umbrella was useless because the cold wind whipped the drops around so they came at you from below, delivering uppercuts of sogginess. Thankful that I had brought a few Eleanor books along, I spent the day reading her thoughts on religion. All I knew was that she was a lifelong Episcopalian, and I was pleased to discover our views were pretty well aligned. Every individual, she wrote, “has an intellectual and spiritual obligation to decide for himself what he thinks and not to allow himself to accept what comes from others without putting it through his own reasoning process.”

  She added: “The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life.”

  Her views were progressive for her time. Her only requirement when it came to a person’s faith was that “whatever their religious belief may be, it must move them to live better in this world and to approach whatever the future holds with serenity.”

  Then I came upon something so shocking that I physically recoiled from the book. In 1920, at
the age of thirty-six, Eleanor wrote to her mother-in-law, “I’d rather be hung than seen at a gathering that was mostly Jews.” Even as late as 1939, she wrote to a former German classmate that “there may be a need for curtailing the ascendancy of the Jewish people,” but acknowledged that “it might have been done in a more humane way by a ruler who had intelligence and decency.”

  When it came time for the afternoon prayer meeting, I was happy to get away from Eleanor. Over the past nine months, she had become something of a deity to me. Discovering such a fatal flaw caused within me a crisis of faith. Did my beloved equal rights advocate seriously dismiss Hitler as a dunderheaded schoolyard bully? I wondered during our prayer service, which was led by Alice’s husband, Jim, who’d just returned from a business trip. He had a master’s degree in divinity and a wonderful booming voice that drowned me out and delivered me from humiliation during the hymns. I ate slowly at dinner and then practically plodded back to my cabin, wary of returning to Eleanor.

  Instead, I decided to try mindful meditation, which is based on the Buddhist philosophy that much of our unhappiness comes from the need to hold on to things and react to them.

  Life was full of things that provoked me—traffic jams and computer malfunctions, screaming babies on airplanes, annoying coworkers—and when faced with these things, I inevitably became upset. I formed a judgment about what was happening (“That baby is so annoying!” “I can’t believe the subway is late again!”). Likewise, when I was worried about something, I became overly attached to that thought and treated the worry as something I must pay attention to until the problem was solved. Mindfulness would apparently train my mind not to react to these everyday stresses but to let them go.

  During mindfulness practice whenever thoughts came into my consciousness, I was to simply acknowledge the thought but not react or attach emotions to it. For example, if during my meditation a noise distracted me (a car horn), I was supposed to acknowledge the noise but then let it go. I’d simply go back to observing my thoughts. If a worry arose, instead of following the narrative of that worry by trying to solve it or predicting how it will affect my future, I’d simply notice the thought but not dwell on it. Mindfulness meditation teaches us to distance ourselves from our worries and stop engaging with them. Like a journalist who’s covering an emotional story but remains an unbiased observer, instead of becoming emotionally wrapped up in it.

  Eleanor, wise old dame that she was, knew the importance of a quiet mind. “I know many people who find it impossible to do anything unless they have complete calm around them,” she wrote. “This must be because they have never learned to gain an inner calm, an oasis of peace within themselves.”

  The thought of Eleanor reminded me of the anti-Semitic remarks, and, shuddering, I put her out of my mind. I scooted back on my bed until my spine was straight against the headboard. I brought my attention to the rise and fall of my breath, as Dr. Bob had instructed. I observed it without trying to control it. After a few minutes, I found myself looking around the room. My eyes fell on the flat-screen TV. I miss television. There’s a new episode of Law & Order on tonight. Though I must say, I’m not enjoying the swaggering new assistant district attorney. And the medical examiner has done something ridiculous with her hair color.

  When I noticed my thoughts wandering, I brought my attention back to my breath. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Wait, did I ask Jessica to feed my parakeets? And I hope Mom didn’t forget that I was on a silent retreat this week so I can’t call her back. She probably thinks I died in some fear-facing accident. No, no, no, I scolded myself. You’re supposed to be meditating. I focused on my breath for a minute or two, and then my heart started pounding. I can’t believe I still have so many fears to face! And time is running out! I’m going to run out of energy before I get to them all! Wait, what am I doing? This isn’t working at all.

  It wasn’t technology that had distracted me all this time, I realized, it was me that distracted me. My BlackBerry, computer, and TV were simply the devices I used to distract me from my worries—just as I’d been using sleeping pills to escape my worries at night. I decided to call it a day and try mindfulness again tomorrow.

  My eyes drifted back over to the Eleanor book next to me on the bed. I opened it with a sigh. But, of course, Eleanor didn’t disappoint. During the 1940s, her anti-Semitic beliefs faded away as she developed strong friendships with several Jews. Although she never publicly commented on the shift in her viewpoint, perhaps it’s what she was thinking of twenty years later when she noted that “the narrower you make the circle of your friends, the narrower will be your experience of people and the narrower will your interests become. It is an important part of one’s personal choices to decide to widen the circle of one’s acquaintances whenever one can.” Because of those friendships she became one of the biggest public supporters of Jewish causes. She lobbied Congress to ease immigration laws for Jewish refugees seeking asylum in the United States, and when she was unsuccessful, she gave the lawmakers a public spanking.

  “What has happened to this country?” she scolded in her newspaper column. “If we study our history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.” By 1947, she was calling for the creation of the Jewish state that would become Israel. “It isn’t enough to talk about peace,” she once wrote. “One must believe in it. It isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” I still felt betrayed by her anti-Semitic remarks, but in a way I respected her more now. It was one thing to try to change other people’s minds about something, but she was willing to change her own mind first.

  By my third day, I was going out of my damn mind. The rain made it impossible to go anywhere. Meals were the most exciting part of my day. Turning on my disco fireplace each night was a wildly anticipated event. The quote was “Do one thing every day that scares you,” yet somehow not doing was even harder.

  After the ceremonial flipping of the fireplace switch, I decided to try one of the tactics Dr. Bob had recommended to help me stop my fretting and focus on the here and now. “Start by compartmentalizing the worry in your life,” he’d said. “Establish a thirty-minute ‘worry time’ during the afternoon where you write down everything that is troubling you. Every day that time—and that time only—will be solely devoted to worrying. Keep a pen and paper by your bed. If you start worrying while you’re trying to go to sleep, write down the worry and leave it for your worry time the next day.”

  “But won’t dwelling on my worries just make me more worried?” I’d asked him.

  “On the contrary, your worries will seem more manageable. You’ll realize that you don’t have as many worries as you thought you did. It’s not a hundred different worries; it’s the same five over and over. After a while, they’ll probably start to bore you. Once you’re bored with something, you lose interest in it.”

  Another reason writing down worries is useful is because you can look back on them later and have proof of how unproductive worrying is.

  “Studies have shown that when people are asked to write down their worries over a two-week period and predict what will happen, 85 percent do not come true,” Dr. Bob had told me. “What does that tell you?”

  “Most of the time there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Exactly.” He looked triumphant.

  Sitting cross-legged on the bed with a pad of paper, I started writing: “I’m worried my parachute isn’t going to open when I go skydiving in a few weeks. I’m worried I’m going to bomb onstage doing stand-up comedy. I’m worried I’m going to get my ass handed to me by Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m worried that I still don’t have a full-time job. I’m worried that I’ll run out of money before I—” I stopped midstroke and the ink pooled on the paper where I’d left the tip of the pen. There were so many I’s in that paragraph
. Worrying, in addition to accomplishing nothing, is also self-indulgent, I realized. So often it’s about you and your feelings. Yet another reason why it’s good to limit it. Give yourself a bit of time, then get on with living.

  I arrived at dinner on my last night to discover Margaret had gone home. Left without a word, obviously. I was surprised by how much I missed her presence. I knew nothing about her except she was married, according to her left hand, and favored nubby sweaters. Before bed, as I packed my books in my suitcase, it hit me that in lieu of gadgets, I’d been using the Eleanor books to distract myself too. Every time I started to face my worries this week, I’d turn to the books. They were just another form of avoidance. Wow, what a failure this week was.

  After five days of storming, I heard the patter of rain stop almost immediately. I eased open my sliding glass door. I slipped into the backyard and walked to the labyrinth under the moonlight, taking care to step with intention. When I arrived, I told Alice I wanted to learn to just be. But just being required work. It wasn’t enough to go on a silent retreat. You couldn’t get rid of a few little objects and accomplish a major change in mental awareness in a matter of days. I’d have to work at it, not just for the rest of the year, but probably for the rest of my life. As I spiraled toward the center, I felt less guilt about the silent retreat not being an unqualified success. When walking a labyrinth, you could think you were going one direction, only to find out you were going the opposite way. Unlike a maze, there were no dead ends, just as there were no true dead ends in life—just opportunities to turn things around. Yes, I’d failed at meditating and been so distracted that I couldn’t even focus on worrying, but we were all a work in progress. Even Eleanor, a onetime anti-Semite, became one of the biggest supporters of Jewish causes. “It isn’t enough to talk about peace,” she’d said. “One must work at it.” She was referring to actual war, of course, but the same could be said of inner peace, as well.