Paying Second Attention...

A Personal Essay by EUGENE BISCONTE

Someone once told me that we are all born with every answer inside of us that we will ever need, but that the only way we will ever find them is not by looking for them but rather by simply letting the answers find us. I thought it was ridiculous too when I first heard it, but now I see why—I thought he meant the answers I wanted. He meant the ones I needed.

As I grow older I see that he was right. It is in moments of joy and happiness when we doing what we love and spending time with the people that we love that our mind is open to all of the answers we truly we need. 

The Buddhist—and I hope any reading will forgive me for over simplifying this point—call this the “second attention”. They believe this is the part of the mind that wanders free of this physical world seeking answers for something when we are focused on something completely different. This is why we remember things in the middle of the night or think of something that escaped us weeks ago in the midst of a conversation—in the very moments we aren’t even looking for them.

As I grow older I see it is possible for us to free this special attention whenever we want. We do so by being who we love in doing all we love for in these times that we are focused on happiness, we can never know fear. It is this happiness that frees our second attention allowing it to find answers, it is fear and sadness that muddle the mind with thoughts self-centered thoughts of pity which hold the second attention here.

We often become frustrated that we can’t find the answers we want that we become miserable—as though we need these very answers to live. Think about it. Are there any answers you truly cannot live without? If this were true—with all the mysteries this beautiful world holds—there would be no one reading this article.

Rather than drive ourselves mad over the answers we foolishly think we need, perhaps we should just be thankful for the ones that do find us and choose us ready. This will lead to more happiness… and more answers. Frustration and anger will only shield us from these answers we need—sometimes for years—until we learn to let it go.

I know this well as what follows is a simple message my mother revealed to me moments after she died in the most blatant, obvious fashion. But I missed this simple, straightforward message. I was so angry and frustrated trying to understand why my mother died—an answer I sought—that I closed my heart to her beautiful message—the answer I needed. Only in a brief moment of happiness did this answer that sat within me for over six years beat me over the head.

My hope in submitting this is to show you why I believe that only by seeking happiness can the world can reveal so many beautiful answers we need in each and every moment. Once we see this we come to realize that there is no limit to the beauty and joy this world can show us.
I only ask that you approach it with genuine joy and openness so that it may reveal something to you—maybe as you read it or perhaps decades later. In any case, pay second attention as you read it.

If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad
-Sheryl Crow

Those lyrics blasted out of the radio in my Jeep as I drove home from the hospital the night my mother passed away. It’s been over six years since she ended her eighteen month battle with leukemia -- a battle several doctors gave her no more than three months to lose-- and I still remember the night my mother left this world like an angel.

It was a chilly October night when I told my mother to stop hanging around for me. My mother, Jennie, had weathered eighteen months of hospital stays, blood transfusions (often accompanied by allergic reactions), as well as the brutal fact she was sharing her once vibrant body with an uninvited evil that was methodically destroying it. Now, as the horrible dance was drawing to a close, my mother lay motionless in her bed in a sterile hospital room filled with devices more concerned with not dying than with living. The room was several feet down the corridor from the one mom lay in seventeen months earlier while her husband was being buried. Leukemia doesn’t take a rain check, mom had to miss that too.

Around nine that night, the nurse explained to my brother and I that though mom was unresponsive, she could certainly hear us and that this may be our last chance to speak to her. I didn’t want my mom to go. I wanted to take all my hate, all my anger, all my rage that I had bottled up inside and use this raw energy to summon my mother back. Even if I could have done such a thing, it would have been selfish. If there is a beauty in everything, and there most certainly is, it is this selfishness we feel towards the people we love the most. Mom needed to go. Mom was still alive, but she was no longer living.

So I said what I still suppose had to be said.

I wish I could remember the exact last words I said to my mother, as much for myself as for this piece, but I can’t. I can remember a blinding rage. I can remember the paralysis of my self-pity. Most of all I can remember how each word burned as it choked its way through my throat. A few hours later, at 12:04 am on October 4th mom was gone; and I was alone.

My next recollection is driving alone in my black Jeep down Vineland Highway Route 55 to my now empty childhood home. It was a road that I driven down hundreds of times in my life, yet never had I felt more lost. The emotions of despair, relief, agony, guilt, and anger all combining to make me perfectly numb. Luckily my mother was there for me, as always. I turned on the radio and Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” played. Now, you can take it as a sign, as a coincidence, or as a song that simply had come up in the overnight rotation and you would be exactly right. Things are simply what any of us perceive them to be, no more, no less, but in that car at that moment I know now my mother was speaking to me. Yet despite all the beauty and the simplicity of the message being spoken by one of my favorite singers, I heard nothing. I couldn’t understood a thing, I could only wail in anger at the infinite sky.

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself
 -from Albert Camus’s The Plague

I kept up a strong appearance the year and a half that my mother was sick but the daily commute between New Jersey and Delaware was taking its toll. I look back now and realize that this is when I forgot to be happy—trapped alone for long car rides with only my anger and sadness as it twisted my weak heart and mind. I didn’t see it then, but my mother did. I still see her beautiful questioning smile as she would look into my confused, frightened eyes pleading for me to remember how easy it was to be happy. She would have told me if she could, but words are useless, only actions lead us to happiness.

I see this now because now I see beauty again. Then I saw only anger.

Happiness is like anything else we practice-- a language we speak in word as much as much as action. Like any language, the less we speak it, the more we forget until we understand nothing of it at all. It sits lost in our head waiting for us to reawaken it. But once we do see it again, as with any language, our understanding of it increases, we better express ourselves, and most importantly, we begin to think in this language.

We reawaken this language every moment of everyday simply by listening with our hearts. It is then we are able see that people speak of joy only when they do what they love. In these moments we hear this language and-- when it leads us to act out of love-- we most certainly respond in kind. And the beauty of it is, no matter how long it takes, happiness will always be there waiting for us the moment we simply choose to see it.

In a twinkling we will all be changed,
and I’ll wait for you, and I’ll wait for you…
-Jonatha Brooke

In the 43 years my mother was a teacher, I never saw her teach in a classroom. I did see her come home from school every day smiling, singing and dancing. I saw her get up every morning and make breakfast for my brother, father and myself and smile so brightly that it literally filled the kitchen. I saw this every morning. I saw her do the same when she came home from work each day. I felt joy every day but I took it for granted. I thought it happened everywhere, I assumed it happened everyday.

Then my mother got sick. And everything stopped. Rather then focus on my mother's joy of being alive, of being with her son, instead of seeing her smile when she talked to me, elated to be able to spend another day with her family, with this beautiful world—a God-given gift that in my anger and stupidity I failed to realize— I saw anger. I was used to seeing hate, I was blinded to the beautifully courageous fact that despite machines, doctors and bleak diagnoses, mom was still finding beauty in every moment she was alive. I thought she was sad because she was sick. She wasn’t. She was sad that her son had forgotten how to smile and that she couldn’t bring me back to something she’d taught me every day, something she was still teaching me. I look back and am ashamed that I had forgotten everything her smiling, beautiful, passionate heart showed me.

Thank God someone helped me remember.

Recently I went to see another of my favorite singers, Jonatha Brooke performing solo in an intimate little venue-- stripped of everything but her voice and instruments. She stood behind a microphone singing in her perfect voice as though it were the only place in the world she could ever be. I sat in amazement as I realized that microphone, that crowd, that moment gave her more life than any machine that will ever be put in a hospital room. I felt the chills of joy as she beat on her guitar less as though playing an instrument and more as though wringing every last life-giving note out of it. I heard not only each beautiful note and lyric of her angelic voice but saw the urgency in her voice, one that told me how important it was for her to be doing this, how anything else would be death.

I watched as her life’s work sustained her, and felt the joy in her soul literally fill that room. And in that moment six plus years of frustration subsided as I realized a simple fact.

Each of us need to do only one thing. We need only to do what our hearts will not let us NOT do. This is our passion. This is the language of happiness. This is all around us in every moment of life. It is in our work, in our hearts, in our friends, and in the beauty that finds us every day if we are simply open to it.

I can’t tell you how to do it. I only know only I am happy right now searching for what I want to say and so happy to be able to come to this page and share my journey with you. I feel the passion in my hands as I literally beat the words from this keyboard and I need this ache as my eyes well up with anger and joy remembering my mother, remembering the stupid little boy I was. I cannot NOT do this and I hope that these words will continue to find people each day and fill them with the joy and passion I feel simply being alive and awaken a remembering in you that will remind what we always know but sometimes forget.

We need to be happy.
We deserve to be happy.

There is joy to be found in every moment and we find it as we follow our souls to those things we cannot live without. Those things that allow joy to pour forth from our hearts as we tap into the beautiful energy that is all life. Jonatha Brooke showed me that night behind that microphone. My mother showed me everyday by simply being alive.

As I sit here on yet another mother’s day, i know she is so very much here with me now. I can’t take credit for anything written here. There’s nothing here I haven’t known my whole life, it is just what I remembered when I opened my heart to the beauty of music, passion, and life. But I do know I would have never gotten this piece out of my head without mom’s beautiful eyes watching over me. I know she watches me every day; is with me when I am on stage making people laugh, when I am holding my niece, and right now as I sit hiding behind this keyboard, feeling a burning in my heart that most certainly is my mother sitting beside me just as she was that night in that jeep.

But this time, THANK GOD, this time I finally hear her voice speak those words that have been frozen in time waiting for my stubborn stupid heart to open up and hear them. They crash down on me like angry waves breaking against a rocky shoreline as I hear my mother’s beautiful voice. Gently she instructs me as though I were a child again and she were telling me something important, asking me to repeat her words so that I never forget them….

“Now say it to me one more time, Eugene. I want to know you understand. We've waited long enough to get it right. What did I just say to you in that Jeep”

I answer timidly, a little game I played when I knew the answer. Down deep I was certain I was right and would receive my mother’s proud smile.

"You said… ‘Do what you love. Smile, laugh, write, sing, dance, sleep, and be good to each other. Do whatever your joyful heart won’t allow you NOT to do.’”

A pause, and while I’m taking in the beautiful language of her smile that i so ache for every day, she demands softly, yet insistent, as though I may have forgotten the most important part, “What else, Eugene?”

“Oh yeah. ‘If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad…’”

copyright Eugene Bisconte