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It was a little after 5:30 a.m. on a cold June dawn, and I was sitting on a meditation cushion in a big red barn in the Hudson Valley. A dozen people were sitting with me in deep silence. Hundreds of birds began to sing in the meadows and trees. In the distance, we could hear the sounds of livestock and machinery waking up the farm.
I hadn’t seen an email, a chat, a headline, a breaking news item, or a tweet in days — a strange situation for an editor who leads the breaking news team at The New York Times.
I’ve been meditating on and off for many years, but my practice deepened after I became editor of the Express team in 2015. The Express team now consists of 23 journalists from around the world, covering breaking news around the clock. That was also the year I started regularly attending retreats hosted by a small Zen meditation center in Manhattan.
The news cycle is relentless and exhausting, and often involves stories of profound human suffering. The week before the retreat had been busy enough: a building collapse in Iowa left people dead and missing; Rosalynn Carter was diagnosed with dementia; the Pentagon banned drag events on military bases; the first tropical storm of the season formed in the Atlantic; and, on a more positive note, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned a new champion.
I rarely step away from my screens or the dings of my devices. Working alongside other news desks, the Express team tracks competitor stories, social media posts, alerts from police and emergency agencies, and other news sources. Stepping away from it all is, to borrow a Zen metaphor, like jumping off a 100-foot pillar into the unknown: it’s both thrilling and terrifying.
I learned to trust that the news would come, but it wasn’t always easy to step away from the gridlock. Shortly after completing my first week-long retreat in 2015, I saw a front-page headline about a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a horrific event, and I felt the unique pain of being a journalist who wasn’t there to cover important news. Since then, we’ve covered more mass shootings than we could have ever imagined.
During the retreat, smoke from the Canadian wildfires painted the New York City sky orange and former President Donald J. Trump was indicted. I smelled the smoke. I learned about the indictment later.
For seven days, from sunrise to sunset, I meditated alongside serious meditators, sitting still for 25 minutes and walking along country roads for 10 minutes. Breaks were for meals, exercise, and, wonderfully, a daily nap. I was asked to refrain from conversation and to pass notes only when unavoidable. My work assignments included making salads for meals and chopping vegetables in silence with the rest of the kitchen crew. For part of the week, I also served as timekeeper, ringing a bell to signal the start and end of meditation.
Freed from the internet, I wandered the grounds and woods, gazing up from my hammock at the most vibrant green treetops I’d ever seen. I always fell into a deep sleep sometime after 9 p.m.
Non-meditating colleagues and friends imagine a serene experience. “Enjoy it!” they say, with a bit of envy. But meditation is hard work. There’s the physical discomfort of trying to stay as still as possible despite the itching and pain. And then there’s the mental effort of focusing on your breath while plans, memories, and emotions come to mind. All of it is not enjoyable.
Then, just when you think you’ve finally relaxed, a fly lands on your hand.
With slow, careful practice, you can develop the skill of being more focused. “Leave the front and back doors open,” Zen monk Suzuki Shunryu used to say. “Allow thoughts to come and go, but don’t serve tea.”
Meditation has helped me get through the COVID-19 pandemic, even though my retreats were held on Zoom. (You might chuckle if you knew that even Buddhists forget to mute.) I’ve recently returned to the newsroom, and it’s helped me stay a little calmer amid the stress of breaking news. (But as those I work with on deadlines will attest, I’m still not completely calm.)
After the first day of the retreat in June, work was all but forgotten, except for one thing. During a talk, a lecturer approvingly cited Dennis Overbye’s recent Science Times column, which explored the prediction that the universe and all sentient life will disappear in 100 billion years. Some physicists believe that this stark fact of the universe’s impermanence should allow us to “focus on the magic of the moment,” he wrote. I was doing my part.
On the bus ride home, I felt calm but energized. I wasn’t worried about my packed schedule, the hundreds of emails in my inbox, or the end of the universe. The week ahead would bring a flurry of new news headlines, many of them dire: more smoke from wildfires, tainted strawberries, deadly tornadoes in the South.
But at the moment all was well.