things in this life
may make it possible to achieve the Longest Journey.1
MARRIAGE, A CHILD, AND A HOUSE
After finishing college I trained as a teacher, and was soon thrown into the chaos of the classroom, the noise and confusion of teenagers. I worked in a south- London public girls’ school, trying to make myself heard and understood. There is a tradition in such schools that the newest teachers are given the most difficult classes, full of the most unruly children, where the sole desire of the new teacher is to keep some kind of order and survive. Each day I would return home exhausted, rest, try to meditate for an hour, and then prepare my work for the next day before going to sleep. This was a painful initiation into the “real world” of the classroom.
Here was a very different world from the ordered, disciplined life of my boarding-school years. I remem- ber one particularly disruptive girl who would never keep in her seat and was often talking and shouting, making it impossible to teach the class. I found her so difficult until one day I heard her story, how she and her younger sister never had a hot, cooked meal, always coming home to either a drunken parent or a cold, empty flat. She became a lesson in compassion as
I glimpsed the environment that had formed her. Then, even when she was most disruptive, I felt that I could no longer judge her or inwardly complain.
At this time I was living in a small room in the same house as Anat. My room looked out over a rose garden, and the house was full of peace, a complete contrast to the classroom! This was the same house in which Mrs. Tweedie used to live—a year earlier she had moved to a nearby flat as the group had grown too big for her small room. It was wonderful to live in a house singing with the energy of meditation, with the heart’s praising of God. There was a silence and a song in the very walls of the building, permeated by years of meditation and love. I was happy there, despite the exhaustion of teaching. Anat had a room across the corridor, facing the street and the same trains that had rattled the house when I had come to Mrs. Tweedie’s for meditation.
We were married from that house, with a recep- tion in the garden. Mrs. Tweedie and all of the friends from the group were there. I cooked the food for the reception and my mother made the cake. We were one of the first couples in the group to marry, and also the first to have children. Our son, Emmanuel, was con- ceived in that house, and came back from being born in the hospital to the small room with a gas fire, a cooker, a sink, and a bed. I was so happy when he was born, seeing this soul come into the world. I remember walking down the street full of utmost joy. Sufis believe that we choose our parents, and the miracle of birth was combined with the wonder that a soul would want to come to live with me.
Life was simple, contained, and exhausting. Anat was exhausted from a son who needed to be fed every
few hours. I was exhausted from teaching, from the demands of unruly children. On Fridays Anat would go to the meditation for an hour and then come back so that I could also go. This was to be a routine for many years, as one of us would look after the children so that the other could meditate. It was very rare that we could both go to the meditation meetings together.
We could not live forever in the two small rooms, which were not at all suitable for a child. The moment he started to crawl, everything would be dangerous— the cooker, the fire, the pots and pans. I had inherited some money from a family trust, and we were able to look for a house. I knew with a deep conviction that I needed a house rather than a flat, a piece of space between earth and sky that belonged to nobody else. We found a house nearby that seemed perfect. The house had been built in the nineteen-thirties, when the tube train extension made the area accessible for people working in central London. Then, in the sixties, the house was converted into two flats, one on the ground level and one upstairs. We had been looking for a house for our family and to my astonishment we found a home for the whole group: we asked Mrs. Tweedie if she would like to live in the ground-floor flat and she accepted.
Mrs. Tweedie had been unhappy for some time in her other flat, which had become increasingly unsafe for an elderly woman living alone. I had no idea of this as I only saw her at the weekly group meetings, and she was for me still an impersonal teacher-figure. However, Anat has a far more intimate relationship with Mrs. Tweedie and before Emmanuel was born would spend time with her. Anat was aware of how difficult it was for Mrs. Tweedie to live alone in her flat, with squatters next door, a dog always barking, and
drunken soccer fans sometimes climbing into the garden from the railway line that ran at the end of the garden. Once she was assaulted and almost strangled by a man who robbed her of her small pension. She had opened the door to him, thinking it was one of the group she was expecting. So when we found our house, Anat suggested what I would never otherwise have considered, that we offer Mrs. Tweedie some- where to live. I was totally shaken by even the idea of living in the same house as my teacher. But we were to live in the same house for eleven years, and the imprint of that experience will last with us forever.
A SENSE OF FULFILLMENT
We spent the summer decorating and remodeling. The house had been neglected for years, and the previous occupants had removed everything, from light fittings to door handles. We first moved in upstairs and then prepared the downstairs flat for Mrs. Tweedie. My external relationship with Mrs. Tweedie began to change as I found myself more often in her presence. One day I had to drive her to a store to choose door- handles, and in the midst of the morning traffic she told me, “Remember, we are all dispensable.” I did not know it then, but a different part of my training was beginning. I had many lessons to learn.
Mrs. Tweedie moved into the house in September and the energy of the path and the power of her presence permeated everything. For a while it was very difficult to even begin to have an ordinary life upstairs. Before, I had only visited her for meditation and was grateful for the energy of her presence that stilled the mind and awakened the heart. Once, when we were
still living in our bed-sit, she had asked Anat and me to look after her flat when she went away for a week. The energy in her room was so powerful that the only way I could go to sleep was to put a mattress on the kitchen floor! Now I was living with this energy constantly flooding up through the floorboards. I would sit at my desk to work and my mind would become still and empty. Finally Mrs. Tweedie put an inner barrier between the two flats, allowing us to have an almost normal life.
But having a house was wonderful. For weeks I would wander from room to room just feeling the space. For almost two years we had lived in two small rooms without a separate kitchen and with a shared bathroom down the hall that in winter was intensely cold. Now, for the first time in my life, I had my own place. I could have a bath and leave the door open. I marveled at having a whole kitchen, and for a few weeks delighted in stocking the shelves and the refrigerator with the foods I liked most. There is something immensely satisfying in seeing a row of jars filled with different grains and pulses. A primitive longing in me was being satisfied.
For many years I had sensed that I had three primary desires: for a wife, a child, and a house. These desires had rested at the threshold of consciousness, occasionally appearing. I remember at school when we were discussing our ambitions, what we wanted in life, I had surprised myself by saying that I just wanted a wife and children. Now I was unexpectedly fulfilled, feeling that I had everything I wanted from life. This sense of fulfillment was so deep that I felt that life could give me nothing more. Why were these natural desires so important? The full shelves in the larder also evoked a satisfaction beyond what seemed normal or rational.
Maybe many lifetimes as an ascetic or monk had left their traces in a longing for what was denied, a home of my own, a woman, and a child. Now I had what I wanted, what I had denied myself for so long. The spiritual path was taking me full circle, completing something within me.
LEARNING ABOUT MONEY
The traveler on the journey is never allowed to rest for too long. States of fulfillment or completion give way to the next turn of the spiral, the next test. I had to learn a painful lesson about the responsibility of being a householder, a husband, and a father. This inner drama began to unfold with the feeling that the rest of my inheritance should be put to use to help others. Some friends in the group were looking for small self- contained flats, which were difficult to find in our area. One man who came to the group was a builder, and he had helped in the remodeling of my house. We came up with a plan that if I bought a nearby house, he would convert it into flats for our friends. I would supply the capital for the house, and he would sell a houseboat which he owned to finance the construction work. In exchange for his work and financial input, he could have a flat in the converted house. This was our arrangement, but nothing was written down, because I felt that this was unnecessary between spiritual friends.
We found an appropriate house and I agreed to buy it. I remember asking inwardly if I should do this, and received the answer, “Trust.” Maybe I did not hear the first part of a well-known hadith, “First tie the knee of your camel, then trust in God.” Possibly I just heard
what I wanted to hear; certainly I needed to learn a lesson. I signed the papers and my “friend” then told me that he wasn’t going to sell his boat. He had thought that I was going to pay for both the house and the conversion. I was left with an empty house on my hands without even the money to pay for it because at that time the family bank which held the remainder of the trust would not release any funds due to some legal complication. I was unemployed—my first teaching contract had been for only a year—and so I could not get a mortgage. I talked to my father, but he wisely refused to help me. Bank interest rates had just reached a high of nineteen percent, which was what I had to pay when I finally found a banker willing to lend me the money on the security of both houses.
Mrs. Tweedie was furious and Anat, who was then pregnant again, was very upset. Mrs. Tweedie said that she could not live in a house with the aura of money worries. The worry in the atmosphere disturbed her work. One morning I came down to her flat to find that she had gone, leaving just a typed note on the kitchen table. “This flat is not to be used. If I am not back in three months consider me dead.”
My so-called spiritual friend had let me down, and I learned never to trust appearances, especially when they appear to be spiritual. I felt guilty, a fool, and a total failure. Maybe there was a hidden wisdom in this failure as it destroyed any sense of inflation I might have had about having Mrs. Tweedie living in my house. She was gone and the group was closed on my account. During the day I walked the streets, dejected and depressed. How could I have let down myself and my family, allowed myself to be caught so naively? This was a bitter and painful lesson.
Added to this situation I felt the collective depres- sion and guilt at being unemployed. For a year I had been a teacher, had a position and an identity. Now I was one of the unemployed, and there are few places more depressing than the “dole queue” at a social security office. Walking the streets during the day, or just going to the shops, I felt that people were looking at me, thinking, “Why isn’t that young man at work?” I felt the power of the collective and its imprint of worthlessness on those who are not working. I came to realize the strength of the collective identity of being “part of the working humanity,” and the sense of guilt and failure if you are not employed. On a personal level there was no real reason for me to feel this way. My inheritance provided enough money to live simply, and I was only a year out of college. But an individual has to be very strong to dismiss the influence of the collective.
During this time I learned that my responsibility was first and foremost to my family, and that my inheritance was for this purpose. Sufis say that the family comes first, that this is the wayfarer’s first responsibility. I had to look after my money. It had been given to me for a purpose. In later years Mrs. Tweedie often spoke to me about money and the importance of being responsible. Bhai Sahib told her that when we die someone will ask us first if we have left any debts, and then how we have used our money. Money is energy and should be respected as such.
Half a year before I was married I had been given a lesson that also pointed out my irresponsibility. At the time I cycled to college, and the quickest route involved cycling the wrong way down some one-way streets. Being carefree, I thought nothing of this, until
one morning, as I was cycling down a one-way street, I was suddenly hit by a car. I remember nothing except waking in a nearby hospital with a hairline fracture in my skull. I discovered that I had been hit by the local minister who was taking his children to school. Fortu- nately a nurse was walking nearby, and she looked after me while the minister, who was very distraught, phoned for an ambulance. When a policeman came to see me in the hospital he said there would be no charges brought against me as obviously I had “learned my lesson.” Even in the hospital I knew the message: I could no longer afford to be reckless. If I was going to be married and have children, others would be dependent upon me.
What I had learned about physical carelessness was repeated on the level of money. I tried to sell the house I had inadvisably bought, but with interest rates so high it was a bad market. I waited all winter, until one night I had a dream in which Mrs. Tweedie told me, “You have learned your lesson.” The next week there was a buyer, and I was glad to be free of the property, even though I lost some money. Mrs. Tweedie also suddenly reappeared, just before the three months had passed. She had been in India, traveling in the foothills of the Himalayas and meditating in Nepal. For a while after she returned she was in silence. But the group soon reopened, and then, unexpectedly, I found a job.
LEARNING FROM CHILDREN
My next and last job as a schoolteacher was in a small, private girls’ school in central London, near to Hyde Park. An English teacher had had to leave in the middle of the school year because she was pregnant, and I was
offered her job, mainly because my younger sister had been a student at the school a few years before. On the first day of my new job I was delightfully shocked. The girls sat quietly at their desks; there was no shouting, no chaos, no disturbance. Before, I had taught classes of over thirty students. These classes had fifteen to twenty students and it was like paradise. I could teach, not just attempt to keep order.
I worked there as a part-time English teacher for over five years and it was very enjoyable. As in any job there were difficulties and periods of boredom, but teaching adolescent girls was always full of fun. The principal soon wisely moved me from teaching gram- mar and spelling—I have never been able to spell— and I focused on Shakespeare and other literature, trying to awaken their interest in the deep meaning of these classics. As a part-time teacher, and also one of the few men in an all-girls school, I managed to avoid the politics of the staff-room; I always felt more at home with my students than with the other teachers. Teaching teenagers, I was also able to relive my own adolescence, which I had never fully lived, as at the time I was too serious and weighed down with prob- lems.
The main interests of my students were naturally parties, boyfriends, and clothes, which provided a good balance to the seriousness of my inner life. The school was not overly academic or disciplined. I remember one girl arriving late to class and giving the excuse that she had been taking her dog to the hairdresser! I tried to prepare these girls for their exams, and at the time I thought that I would continue to be a teacher for many years—it was my chosen profession. But my students knew better. They saw that I was very different from their other teachers, and
would ask me how long I was going to teach at their school. I lived in the moment. I gave myself fully to my work, but I had no ambition, no desire for worldly success.
I taught three days a week and spent the other days with my family. My daughter Hannah was born the May after I started work, and I helped at home, cooking, cleaning, changing diapers. I was not able to be present at Hannah’s birth, as I had to look after Emmanuel, who was only sixteen months old when his sister was born. Hannah was a baby in bliss—for many