I don’t know why I get
asked for directions. It just happens. Wherever I am. Sometimes people
just spring out, other times I see them coming a mile off. There’s
not a lot I can do; its not as if I mind. It happens so much I have
come to treat it as some sort of urban dharma. Maybe people have a
strange sense of others who are less lost than themselves, in the
physical sense that is. I have learnt that if directions involve more
than four steps a mild panic sets in; people have trouble retaining
the sequence. So I keep it to four. Then I say, ‘That’s
all I can tell you. When you get there, ask someone else.’ I
could tell them the whole sequence but it wouldn’t help. Even
then I repeat the instructions. It ends up being patronising but they
don’t seem to mind that.
There are always complicating factors. A different language will usually turn the process on its head. Then there are people who respond in strange ways. They will say ‘Great!’ or ‘Thanks!’ and then head off in a different direction. Some people just stand there and then I see them asking someone else, as if my instructions were wrong or confusing, or just not credible. Maybe its not what they want to hear. Once I was in Bryant Park, off 5th Avenue in Manhattan. A smartly dressed and clearly spoken woman, laden with a large sky-blue Samsonite wheeled valise, asked me how she could get to Poughkeepsie. I said, ‘Go across to 7th Avenue, then down West 33rd to Penn Station. From Penn Station the Niagara Falls train stops at Poughkeepsie.’ I carried on to the fine coffee shop I was scouting for; suitably mocha’d and muffin’d I then passed back through Bryant Park forty-five minutes later. Can you believe it? That woman asked me again the way to Poughkeepsie. Perhaps she is still there. For some reason it made me think of the old Sufi story about Nasruddin. He is looking for his keys and his neighbour offers to help him. He says to Nasruddin, 'Where did you lose them?' Naz says, ‘Over there, in the dark’. The neighbour says, ‘Then why are you looking under the streetlight?’ Naz replies, ‘Well, I can see better here’. Something happened a while back that was right out of a Samuel Beckett play. A dapper Scotsman with a three-legged dog tapped me on the shoulder and asked me the way to the World's End - an area in Chelsea. I needed to think for a while as there were several ways to get there. Then a nosy, rumbunctious passer-by, thinking I didn't know, asked Scotty where he was trying to get to, and proceeded to give him the wrong directions. So I started telling him he is wrong, he says he has lived here all his life and what do I know about the World's End? Soon we are having a real argument. In the meantime Scotty and Hoppy the Dog were nowhere to be seen, I don't know where they got to, but we were arguing for several minutes before I noticed they had just vanished, leaving me and Nosy muttering insults at each other as we went our separate ways. I have this curious quirk. Whenever I give people directions, the whole experience stays with me long after we have gone our ways. I go over in my head everything I said to them. Sometimes I even run after people to correct my original directions. 'Stop, stop! I missed something out!' It gets more surreal; hours, days later I wonder what happened to this or that person I gave directions to. Why were they going there, how long were they going to stay, what joy, tragedy, transaction, encounter or indifference awaited them? These things stay with me and percolate through the inner self. I remember a lucid dream I once had. My time in this world over, I was working my way through the lokas to unravel the tangled threads of an unresolved life. I arrived on a misty other-shore evening to a silvery castle all lit up; there was a strange reunion taking place. I walked up steps worn smooth through the ages and into a mahogany'd foyer. Someone I am sure I met long ago said to me ‘They are all waiting for you’. Another familiar-looking person took me down a long luminous corridor and into the grand hall, which was full of dining tables. Groups of people were sitting around smaller tables that had little lights on them. The band were playing the songs that are always on the edges of my dreams. I blinked in shock at the dawning realisation that I had met every single person in the room before, and there were hundreds of people there. Over in the corner there was a group looking at me accusingly; they clearly had issues to settle. They were the ones from my wild teenage years, when I would take malicious delight in giving people the wrong directions. Still, I took heart from the middle section; so many raised their glasses to me and cheered as I entered, recipients all of precise directions, each one I had helped in some small way. As I walked among the tables everyone was talking about journeys they had made in their time on earth, small journeys, maybe down to the corner shop for milk, long journeys, Borobodur, Asmara, Santiago, and most of all their last great journey through the eternal gates. There, my friends, is where you will truly need immortal directions, and there is only one luminous being I know who can be trusted for that. Oh, and if you ever set out for Poughkeepsie, be sure to send me a card. A postcard from Poughkeepsie, just so I know you got there.
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