Practically Spiritual.

Don't take this "personal," but...

Unmitigated jerks and extremely spiritually advanced people have (at least) one thing in common. Both kinds of people love to tell you not to take things personally.

When I'm feeling particularly copacetic and one with nature, this might roll off the back like water from a duck. But typically I feel like saying: "How interesting! Would it be personal to you if I shoved your meditation pillow down your throat?"

Recently, though, I came to a realization. People are like icebergs. Most of who and what we really are is floating beneath a dark, uninviting sea. Only our everyday selves poke through up above the surface, and they are often unrepresentative of who we really are. Under the waves of everyday life, we are enormous, tender, strong, guided by currents that the surface doesn't see.

Using the heart, you can sense some of what is really there, hidden under the cold sea. So lately I've been much more interested in doing that. I forget about the world above, and I find it easier to be kinder, more generous. Oddly, I feel like I'm getting to know people better.

A Guru Among Rats

I am twenty-three years old and working a series of ill-fitting temp jobs. A few days a week, I work in a dark office as "support" for doctors who research anesthesiology.

Even though it is officially the twenty-first century and this is an institution with an impeccable worldwide reputation, I spend at least an hour or two each day wrangling with a screeching electric typewriter. The rest of the time, I reorder office supplies of which we already have a vast quantity. How many cartons of red Bic pens might we need suddenly? At least thirty, apparently. (I don't know this yet, but this urgent overstuffing of an already-full cornucopia of office supplies is a regular feature of such jobs.)

My favorite task is typing up research manuscripts, as this stimulates my mind and makes me feel like I'm actually being useful. Reading along as I type, it becomes clear to me that what they do in this particular lab is anesthetize rats and then torture them with electric shock. In order to tell how well the anesthesia is working, the researchers count how many times the rats' legs twitch, and then graph this information. To me, this seems to be an appallingly medieval sort of "science."

One day, the secretary who works there full-time asks me quietly, "Have you figured out what we really do here?"

I twist up my mouth. "Yes."

"Are you going to leave? The last part-timer we had ran when she found out."