I’ve seen them since, and those who followed their zeal, their bliss, they have led decent, wonderful lives; those who did what [others] said they should do because it’s safe found out it’s not safe. It’s disaster.
— JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Hero’s Journey
Iliked teaching, and I loved the kids, but I was bored by the math. It was actually driving me mad. One day I was at the chalkboard teaching side-angle-side proofs for congruent triangles in my third geometry class of the day, and I lost it. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I had to leave the room and ask a student to take over.
While I was bored to tears by my seven hours of math every day, my colleagues could get worked into a tizzy, giggling like schoolkids, about a new fractals poster for the math building hallway.
I believe that we each have a calling and that it is our job to find it. The calling can be to teach math, practice medicine, build schools in India, raise a family, trade stocks, or whatever. Me? I wanted to eat, sleep, and breathe yoga. So at the end of that school year, I left the math job.
At the same time, my brother, Larry, got married and moved in with his wife, Pam, so with our other roommate, Minsheng, I moved across the train tracks to Hoboken, New Jersey. The town of Hoboken is one square mile and rumored to be more densely packed than Calcutta, India. And in 1995 downtown Hoboken was densely packed with recent business school grads who worked in Manhattan but lived in Hoboken for one-fourth the rent.
Downtown Hoboken is essentially the five blocks of town nearest the PATH trains, which go under the Hudson River to bring you two thousand feet to Manhattan. Minsheng commuted daily to the World Financial Center (across the street from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to stand) and often commented that he could nearly hit a golf ball across the river to his office, yet his one-and-a-half-laps-around-the-track commute could take more than thirty minutes.
To make money I began tutoring math and also waiting tables at a chain restaurant. The tutoring paid pretty well, so the waiting was really just for some extra cash and to hang out with people, because at 7:30 every weekday morning, all the other residents of my newly renovated apartment building got dressed in starched suits, waited in line at Starbucks, and boarded trains to Manhattan, leaving me alone in a ghost town.
All the artists and yogis of Hoboken lived eleven blocks north near the YMCA or seven blocks west in five-story walk-up apartments rented from long-time natives of the Polish district. (The Polish district was legit and still hosted a yearly parade of parishioners hoisting bleeding-saint statues on their shoulders.)
So I needed something social, something to connect me with the other daytime denizens of Hoboken — the artists, the yogis, the out-of-work actors. The restaurant job was perfect for that, though at first I stank at the job. I was attentive and could make diners feel very at home, but waiting on five tables at once left me mixing up orders, bringing soup after main course, serving cold food, and mumbling to myself as I paced the restaurant in a cold sweat.
I might not have been so bad, but on the first day the manager accidentally scheduled me for the busiest section of tables, thinking that I was the other, far more experienced Brian who worked at the restaurant. So on my first day, I was juggling six tables and everything went wrong. Guests were going to the kitchen counter to pick up their own food, and one guy returned his coffee cup four times because I kept bringing cups that were dirty.
I enjoyed the social aspect of the job, but I never really became one of the gang. It takes time, and I was only there for a few months. Not only that, but I was different from these folks. They waited tables, auditioned for roles, and partied at night. I worked the lunch shift, then drove thirty minutes to suburban New Jersey to tutor all afternoon, and went home to upscale, downtown Hoboken to hang out with my Georgetown friends. I had no SAG card, no tattoos, and no criminal record. I was a bit square compared to everyone else at the restaurant.
Being a waiter did afford me some power to make people happy, though, and I enjoyed that. One day at one of my tables I had a bunch of twenty-somethings who were clearly very high. They were hungry the way only marathon runners and pot smokers can be, and when they all emptied out their pockets they came up with only $7.25, so they ordered the nachos appetizer. I brought the nachos and watched them devour it. At this restaurant when it was someone’s birthday we could comp them a beautiful brownie sundae, so I clicked the button on the register for a birthday sundae. When I presented it to them, it was Christmas in O’Malley’s. I bet they still tell stories of that unexpected, fully loaded sundae in 1994.
Even though this job basically fit my need to interact with human beings during the daytime hours, I was growing uneasy with it. In my personal life, I was doing a lot of yoga and beginning to study natural health. Meanwhile, at O’Malley’s, I was dishing out platter after platter of deep-fried calamari, oily French fries, and fried stuffed mushrooms. Plus, O’Malley’s was a chain, so all the food was prepared at the mother ship in Texas and delivered weekly, and who knows what additives and fillers were in those five-gallon tubs o’ processed gloop.
I grew increasingly uncomfortable and guilty, and eventually I felt that I could no longer in good conscience shop for myself at the Hoboken natural foods market and dish out O’Malley’s food to others. I know that people ate there of their own accord, and that there are worse things in the world than deep-fried mushroom caps, but I could no longer eat one kind of way and serve food that represented another. Plus, I wanted to grow a beard. (At O’Malley’s, workers were not allowed to have facial hair.)
One day a friend came to visit from Virginia, and I wanted to spend time with her. I canceled my shift that day and was told that I’d need a doctor’s note to return to work. I had no note, so it was essentially like quitting. To celebrate, I grew a big beard that would have made Dr. Andrew Weil, Oskar from Georgetown, and even Zach Galifianakis proud.
I have since found that feeling good about my work is absolutely crucial to my happiness. When I work a job that is out of line with my values, I become depressed, and when I am in dharma, following my heart, doing what I believe in and what feels right, I am filled with energy.
The Buddha called this “right livelihood.” He taught that one who seeks liberation cannot hope to find freedom on the backs of others. Right livelihood is critical to the spiritual path; often when people are out of line with their values they have to numb out or shut down, not only because they are bored and uninterested but also because the pain of being outside their morals or their heart’s call is too much to bear. Interestingly, yoga brings these issues to the surface. Many times I have seen students of yoga realize that their job is hurting them. Sometimes making a change is too much to face. In these cases, people usually stop practicing yoga, and the revelation fades.
One time I was in a new relationship and had moved far away from New Jersey to be with my girlfriend. I had been practicing yoga consistently for years, but without even noticing, I gave it up. A month later, browsing in a bookstore, I stumbled onto a quote from yoga teacher Dr. Jeff Migdow: “When people do yoga consistently they’re much more open to change. That’s the key: If I’m not open to making changes, then I won’t let myself be aware.”
The quote was a slap in the face. As if waking from a daze, I realized that I had not done postures in a month. And I saw that I had avoided yoga because it sharpened my awareness and showed me that I was unhappy. But because I had been unwilling to make a change — to move and leave the relationship — I had stopped doing the thing that increased my awareness. In this way, yoga is a catalyst that demands truth.
This truth includes, but is also subtler than, simply doing what is right or wrong, ethical or moral. It means listening to your heart’s
