Suki had been a meditation teacher for twenty years, which meant she had guided thousands of people toward the thing she had not yet been able to reach herself. She knew the theory with a precision that was almost architectural: the specific attention required, the quality of noticing, the posture of mind that allowed the moment to exist without immediately being sorted into past and future. She could describe all of this and had described it, in studios and retreats and one-on-one sessions, to people who were grateful for the description.
Three months ago, she had arrived.
She had not announced it. There was nothing to announce; it was not an event. One morning she woke and was simply here, in a way she had not been before, and the quality of it was immediately recognizable as the thing she had been pointing toward for twenty years, and she understood within the first hour that she had not known what she was pointing toward.
She had expected peace. The literature suggested peace. The traditions suggested peace. What she found was something more like standing inside a struck bell: the vibration was not painful, not pleasant, simply present in every part of her simultaneously.
The man at the bus stop who was crying silently into his coat collar. She could feel it from across the street, not metaphorically, the actual weight of it pressing against her chest. She had had to sit down on a bench for several minutes before she could continue walking.
Light on water, which she had loved her whole life and had often used as an example in her teaching of the beauty available to anyone who paid attention. At full presence, the light on water was so precise, so complete in its particularity, that she could not look at it for more than a moment without something in her giving way. She had taken to walking with her eyes slightly lowered in certain parts of the city.
The students in her classes, their breathing. She had led breathing exercises for two decades. At full presence, she could feel every breath in the room as a distinct event, could feel the room as a collection of bodies doing the work of staying alive, and she had stopped mid-sentence in a session and had to ask the students to continue on their own while she went to stand in the hallway. She had not taught since.
She called her teacher, who was eighty-four and lived three time zones away and answered the phone on the second ring the way he always did. She told him what had happened. He listened without interrupting. When she was done, he was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said.
"You knew this would happen?"
"I thought it might," he said. "I wondered when."
"Is this permanent?"
Another silence. "I don't know," he said. "It was, for me."
"What do you do?" she asked. "How do you live in it?"
"You learn to bear it," he said. "Or you don't. Either way, you're here."
After the call, she sat by the window. Outside, a child was trying to fly a kite. The kite kept dropping, skimming the ground, snagging on the air without catching it. The child was laughing. Not frustrated: laughing. She watched the child try and fail and try again, and she could feel the fullness of the child's presence in the moment, the complete sufficiency of it, the way the kite and the wind and the grass and the laughing were all equally and exactly themselves.
She watched until the kite lifted.