Essays and other writing.
The Frog
My story begins at the end of a yoga class. The instructor has dimmed the lights. I’m lying flat on my back, my body weak from exertion. There’s warm incense in the room and a cool melody hanging in the air. I can sense the breaths around me, the soft rise and fall of strangers’ chests, yet just as easily shut them out. I can feel the ceiling above me and, with almost no effort, imagine it as open as the sky. My mind empties. I am totally empty. Peace. PEACE!
…For three whole seconds. Then I crash. The distraction from distraction only lasts so long. Fear returns. Want returns. The suffering resumes.
On the J-Train back home, rattling over the Williamsburg bridge, I’m doomscrolling when an article crosses my feed. A Harvard study of hundreds of thousands of self-reported logs found that the more you let your mind wander, the less happy you are. The more you think when you shouldn’t be thinking, the higher the rates of anxiety and depression. How interesting, I think. I look up from my phone at ads to lose weight and find love and make more money. I look back down at my phone. As I bounce from Ozempic ad to article to Hinge ad to article, I let out a kind of half snort half cry of anguish. The woman across from me looks at me funny. Yeah, fair.
I get home and put on my favorite TV show. There’s a cartoon green frog (not named Kermit) and he’s just finished taking over the world. But he’s bored and sad and unfulfilled. Nothing seems to matter and everything is pointless. Until, one day, he sits down on a lily pad and meditates. And he comically reaches enlightenment instantly. He transforms into a real actual frog, and the episode ends.
I remember seeing this idea before. Another TV show, much more serious. It was a science fiction tale of an artist whose career escalates —bigger canvases, broader acclaim, deeper abstraction—until there is nowhere left to go. Like the frog, even success doesn’t bring peace. He searches for truth, until one day he remembers. He remembers that, in the deep past, he was a pool cleaning robot, slowly upgraded over time until he developed consciousness. It ends with his last performance – dismantling his mind and body piece by piece, returning to a single, bounded task: cleaning a pool.
Both stories end the same way. A being finds peace not by becoming something greater, but by letting go of the effort to be something at all.
What surprises me isn’t the idea itself, but where it shows up. One of these stories is deliberate, profound science fiction. For an artist traversing the stars on the path to transcendence, the ending feels right – unexpected, maybe, but not unfamiliar. The other is a show that generally comprises slapstick, awkward silences, and dick jokes. Yet somehow it makes sense because the show is constantly shutting down the audience for trying to make things mean something. Every bit points out how ridiculous we are for trying. There’s a bit where a guy argues with Satan over property lines. There’s a bit where aliens force two guys to blow up a planet, only to reveal it was a prank. And of course, the bit where a cartoon frog reaches Nirvana, only to become a fucking frog. The resolution of these stories doesn’t come from insight, mastery, or effort. It comes from not trying.
I don’t mean trying like trying to get out of bed or write this essay. I mean trying like desperately holding on to who you are.
And wow, is that a familiar feeling for me. I am the guy reading a book on writing before writing a single sentence. I am the guy sitting on the stoop for 15 minutes before I ring the doorbell as I plan every step of the imminent social situation. I am the guy predicting your reaction to this reading, preparing to protect my feelings when I walk off stage. It is all one and the same – an effort to defend, with my life, the illusion of being something.
I don’t want to write, I want to be a writer.
I don’t want to connect, I want to be popular.
I don’t want to perform, I want to be a performer.
This is not easy to change. But luckily, I’ve found one place that helps.
It is next week, and I am again at the end of a yoga class. My thighs burn from lunges. My core burns from planks. Sweat pools in the small of my back. I lie still.
Peace.
PEACE!
I make it about five seconds this time.
Then, inevitably, I come back. The story of who I am reassembles itself. The wanting resumes. The suffering follows close behind. But for a moment—brief, fragile, and completely unearned—I was not trying to be anything at all.