If possible, although George doubted his perception, the quantity of her tears increased. “Oh, Dr. Goldrosen, I didn’t get the promotion I was hoping for. I just feel so unappreciated. Like I work hard, I do. And I really wanted the chance to write a column—you know, sort of a society column, what’s happening, what’s hot, what’s new—and now it just seems as though I’ll never get to do that. And what’s worse is that they hired someone just out of the J-school at Michigan State, somebody with no real newspaper experience at all. And I’ve been there for six years. It’s just not fair.”
George’s first thought, luckily unspoken, was that he’d never want to read such a column, but he could see how unhappy Cynthia was. He put down the sheet of colors and sat on a stool so he was facing her.
George would have sworn that he had no recollection of what Dr. Kallikow said about suffering, but now he unexpectedly remembered bits and pieces of what he’d learned. He began talking slowly, feeling his way through his memories and trying to be as clear as possible in what he said to Cynthia.
“You know, Cynthia, I had a class in college that I probably haven’t thought about since I took the final exam. But now I see how it could apply to you. Listen, most of us think that getting what we want will make us happy. You know, because not getting what we want isn’t pleasant, like how you’re feeling now. But if that’s how you’re going to define ‘happiness’—getting a raise or a promotion, having a successful marriage, being the best at beer pong, whatever it is that you want—then sooner or later you’re doomed to unhappiness, because we just don’t get what we want all the time.
“See, what my professor said was something like what’s important is learning how to respond the right way, the healthy way, when you don’t get what you want. It’s the difference between responding to something and reacting to it.”
Cynthia’s tears slowed. “I don’t get the difference between ‘react’ and ‘respond.’ I’m pretty sure that I’ve always used them as synonyms.”
The more George talked, the more his memories of the class came back to him. He could see Dr. Kallikow in full lecture mode, walking back and forth in front of the class, sockless in his Earth shoes, talking about suffering. “What he said was that a reaction is more like a reflex, sort of like a sneeze. It just seems to happen. But you can choose how to respond. Dr. Kallikow talked about how to train yourself to respond skillfully to not getting what you want.”
Cynthia was doubtful. “‘Skillfully’? That’s a weird word to use. Are you sure he said that?”
George nodded. He was absolutely sure because he’d had the same questions about the word that Cynthia had. “What he said when I asked was that ‘skillful’ in this context was more or less a technical term, which makes it sound unfamiliar. So we could say ‘respond wisely’ instead, or even ‘respond well.’ The point is, we can learn to respond so that the experience of losing, or not getting what we want, isn’t a problem for us.”
He paused for a moment, to see if she had any questions for him, but she just waited for him to continue. The tears had stopped.
George went on. Whole paragraphs of Kallikow’s lectures had now come back to him, almost verbatim. “See, we’re always writing the narrative of our lives, and when you respond badly you turn the event into a burden, something that you carry forward into the next moment, the next hour, the next day, and the rest of your life. It fills up your narrative. It weighs you down. You never forget it. But when you respond well, you have nothing to add to the narrative. You simply experience the unpleasantness, then let it naturally pass away, and then greet the next moment of your life with no trace of the last.”
Cynthia seemed doubtful. “That sounds impossible. How can I do that?”
“It’s not so easy,” George admitted. “One problem is that trying to avoid unpleasantness only makes it worse. The smart response is to relax, to accept the experience, instead of turning away from it. It might seem counterintuitive, but that’s what makes it better.”
“So having an experience of failing at something doesn’t mean that I’m a failure?”
He nodded.. “Yes, that’s it exactly. Think about it. Give it a try. But now”—picking up the sheet of colors—“here’s the one that I’m thinking will work best for you.”
When they’d agreed that was the right shade, Cynthia got up out of the chair and shook his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Goldrosen.”
“It was amazing, what happened with this patient,” George told Lizzie excitedly over dinner that evening. “It was so strange; it’s never happened to me before. It must be what people who have a photographic memory can do. It’s like all of a sudden I could remember in great detail everything I’d read for that class, and everything that Kallikow said. When I needed it, there it was.” He began to tell Lizzie what he’d said to Cynthia Gordon but then stopped. What if Lizzie’s unhappiness could be eased by the same method? How would that work? How could he convince her to try it, to start responding to her unhappiness—hell, to her life—in a more skillful way?
George didn’t say anything to Lizzie about that—he needed to think about it more—but he did finish telling her what exactly he’d said to Cynthia Gordon. Lizzie replied that she had never understood a word that he’d said all throughout their married life, and now had given up any hope of doing so. George thought that perhaps that didn’t bode well for his developing plan to make Lizzie give up her sadness. But he was determined to try.
The following Sunday George was showering after his morning jog when he heard Lizzie calling. He ran out of the shower, forgetting to turn off the water and neglecting to grab a towel, only to find Lizzie sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.
“What? What’s happened?”
“Oh my God, George, look at this: that Cynthia Gordon wrote an op-ed about you in the Ann Arbor News!”
“What? Really? What’s it say?”
Lizzie handed him the paper, open to the editorial page. “The headline’s ‘My Dentist Doesn’t Just Know Teeth.’”
When he sat down and read the whole article, it was clear that not only had Cynthia heard what he’d said to her, she remembered most of it, nearly word for word. She either had an awfully good memory or carried a voice-activated tape recorder around with her. Since she was a reporter, either one was a reasonable possibility.
Then the Detroit News ran Cynthia’s op-ed, and as a result USA Today sent a reporter and a photographer to Ann Arbor to do a story on George, which they called “The Philosophizing Dentist.”