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The only online class I ever took was to fill in a gap in my transcript. In college I eschewed science and math as if they were fatal diseases while welcoming literature, history, and philosophy. One exception, a graduate class I crashed as a freshman at Rutgers taught by the British economist E. P. Thompson who wrote The Making of the English Working Class described on Amazon as: “A seminal text on the history of the working class by one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.” I loved the class especially the social history part taught by Dorothy Thompson, E. P. ‘s brilliant wife. The social history was based around stories, stories about labor strikes, union battles, descriptions of families and communities, public health, and education. E. P. took over in the spring and began to unpack statistics, graphs of social mobility, and the industrial revolution’s transformation of the British economy. In other words, math.

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She answered the door in sweats, the hoodie sporting the name of a well-known selective Chicago high school. Before I could speak, she said: “I’m a swimmer. I swim all the time. I don’t want to write about swimming but that’s who I am.” As a writing coach who has a large clientele of clients writing personal statements I am used to this sort of despair and blinkered thinking. Yes, swimming was fine, her rank as a swimmer would be a good thing to include on her application but it was not exactly a great story starter. Good stories need conflict and swimming is a one-person, silent sport, the conflict barely exists and when it does it’s usually something like man versus nature (girl versus nature) with a need for strong currents, crashing waves, possibly a shark, not a high school student stroking in a chlorinated pool, little at stake besides a personal best.

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Years ago, living in a Buddhist monastery that practiced Rinzai Zen as a semi-committed sort of Buddhist-artist-in-residence I had a moment of what could only be described as pure happiness. I was walking down the hill to the temple about to enter the zendo for our evening practice, the sun was setting, my companion was silent, and my shoulders were finally unhunched. This happiness struck me as ridiculous as I was sore, exhausted, and freaked out. They gonged you awake at 4:30 am, we had to eat things like rice with chopsticks and perform a food ballet with bowls, one bowl for each food, bowls washed at the table and rewrapped, all done at warp speed, wrapped in a linen square and the wooden clapper told you to scurry away even if you had barely eaten. We sat for a full day, a break every hour for walking meditation, sat late, sat with moonlight slashing the polished floor of the zendo into rectangles. I had polished that floor.

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