No News is Good News

Maybe I got the idea first from Andrew Weil. He called it a “news fast.” He was describing an aspect of my sesshin experience. One of Kyudo Roshi’s instruction for the seven days of silent meditation was bigger than no news: no reading. I would go out each day during the midafternoon respite from sitting, walking from the Soho Zendo uptown to Washington Square Park and back, and then because there was still time before I had to be upstairs, into the Rizzoli bookstore on the corner, just to wander among the shelves. No news, but I couldn’t keep myself from reading. As soon as sesshin ended, as much as I tried to hold onto the peace, by week’s end, life was soon back to normal. Normal was knowing what was going on in the world and on Staten Island.

It wasn’t until years later that I began to give up the news. Strangely, the first thing to go was the sports news. It just happened. I had been such a big fan all my life – the Dodgers (and later, the Mets), the Knicks, the Rangers and Islanders, the football Giants and sometimes the Jets – so many memories entwined with memories of my dad. And then Dee’s dad, particularly toward the end, when sports was one of the few things that broke through his dementia: we watched together. When he was gone, I stopped watching. I don’t think I’ve looked at a sports section since.  

For years, Dee and I got The Times weekend delivery. I was in it for the puzzles, but maybe once a week, I’d leaf through the news. It is only since I retired (for the second time), when I no longer needed to keep abreast of charter school news or local politics, that my news fast blossomed. Not keeping up on what’s happening in the world – particularly the horror stories of genocide and hatred, of starvation – have become a guilt trigger. Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, a sort of Buddhist saint, is supposed to have heard all the cries of suffering in the Universe. I’m not even listening. What’s wrong with me? What kind of peacemaker am I? What would Bernie think? What would my mother think?

When the guilt of no news has shaken me, I’ve been saying to myself, “Ken, what’s the point? You are not going to do anything about it anyway. You’re too old for all that stuff. All the news is doing is upsetting you.” But it sounds so negative. Today, I’m looking at the positive side. I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten into my second retirement that my life has been finding a rhythm which it lacked before. I’m settling into routines without rushing. and noticing them. I’ve been calling them my “monastic practice.” All these years of Zen, I’ve been searching for inner peace.  Now, it occurs to me that outer peace counts too. Maybe my news fast is a new monastic element.

Am I becoming a recluse? Withdrawal from the world has always seemed a form of mental illness, the result of a social phobia or, worse, paranoia. The idea takes some getting used to. And I’m not a recluse. I'm still engaged with family and friends and students. I’m just not keeping up with world or local news. I’ve been blogging mostly about this inward journey. I rarely feel a call to blog about world affairs. Maybe this is my moment for the inward journey, an opportunity to appreciate previously unnoticed elements of my life.