Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

Perhaps the person in the elevator is someone you knew a long time ago and are pleased to see. Like a childhood friend or an older relative whom you’ve missed very badly since her death. Or it could be someone you don’t really care whether you see or not, your fifth grade math teacher or your mother’s hairdresser. If it is one of those people, you can probably go ahead and get inside the elevator without fear.

But then again, perhaps it is a complete stranger, someone who doesn’t seem quite right when you look at him. Maybe he’s shaped strangely, as if his limbs had been stapled to one another after they were manufactured separately rather than growing altogether the way normal people do. When he moves, it might be in a disjointed, marionette way, one muscle at a time, so when he turns to look at you, he moves only his head, not his neck or body. You see his face in the dim, watery light of the single bulb stuck in the low ceiling and it looks like a cloth bag full of flour, white and ponderous; his eyes are nearly swallowed up by it. He is tall and broad and he is wearing an old leather jacket that is too small for him and that looks like he found it in the trash. His white T-shirt and jeans are covered with the dark blotches of grease stains the size of fingerprints. His hair is like the stubble after a field has burned.

Have the elevator doors slid closed yet? If they have not, you could wait for the next car, although who knows how long that will take, or you could just get in and ignore the person standing in the corner. It could be that he won’t do anything, that he is just an unfortunately unattractive man with dirty clothes, someone who’s had a hard time for reasons that you can’t know. Your forebodings could very well be just your own shallow judgment based on his appearance. You’ll have to make up your mind and get in the elevator to find out. Whatever you decide, could you consider doing it soon? It is time to go on to the next part of the exercise.

Have you stepped inside? Press the button to go down to the lowest floor. Watch the doors slide closed. Is there a man beside you in the car? Is the man watching you? Look over. Don’t be too obvious about it, because if he does turn out to be a threat of some kind, you don’t want to provoke him. The doors have just slid shut and now you are inside the elevator, trapped there until it gets to the bottom of the shaft and that could be a long time, depending on whether the elevator is fast or slow. If you imagined a corridor in a municipal government building or something like it, this is probably a slow elevator that takes whole minutes to go through each floor. I wish you had followed my advice and that you were in a Ritz-Carlton somewhere, but we’ll just have to make the best of what you’ve created here.

It’s descending now, you can feel that wobbly, lifted feeling you always feel when you ride in elevators. There are numbers on a panel by the door and you watch the lights blink as you pass each floor. The man beside you, if there is one, makes a noise that is somewhere between a grumble and a snort. It’s possible he smells. Only you can know what the ingredients of that odor are and whether it is mild or strong, a faint whiff or a stench so powerful it starts to make your eyes water.

Don’t blame me if that is happening. I didn’t put the man into the elevator with you, you did. In fact, I told you to imagine the elevator was empty and then warned you not to get in the elevator if it was occupied. So this is not my fault. However, although it is not my fault, I will nevertheless try to help you deal with this problem you’ve created. Don’t thank me; it’s my job.

So, if you can, try to visualize him disappearing, winking out, the way the picture on the television used to become a white dot in the middle of the screen before it vanished. Close the eyes inside your head, the ones you are using to see the corridor and the elevator and the man, and concentrate hard. Be warned that it is easier to imagine something into being than it is to make it go away, particularly if it is something unpleasant that you don’t want to think about. Unwanted, looming things have a tendency to hang around more insistently the more you try to get rid of them. So don’t be disappointed if you open your eyes again (inside your head) and find that he’s still there.

Open one of your mind’s eyes cautiously. Is he gone? He is? Thank god for that. Now we can get back on track and work on relaxing without such a powerful distraction.

Finally you feel the elevator come to rest. After a moment, the doors are going to slide open and you will look outside. But before they do that, wait a moment. Don’t let the doors open yet. Listen to me first. Only if you want to of course, nothing is mandatory. But this is important and if you’ve bothered to come this far, you might as well hear what I have to say, don’t you think? Because I want to warn you about something.

Beyond the open elevator doors is the place that you have been longing to go but didn’t even know it. What is it like? I can’t tell you that. It is whatever place makes you feel like you belong there. That will be different for each of you. Once I tried this exercise with a man who, when the doors opened, saw his own office with its desk and chair and telephone. He was a lawyer and it turned out that what he really liked most in the world was to be at work, with the clock of his billable hours ticking by nicely while he prepared divorce papers or personal injury suits or last wills and testaments. At home, with his beautiful wife and three small children, he was always slightly on edge; he felt like he was an actor playing a father and flubbing almost half his lines and most of his entrances and exits. He would come into his office on Monday and experience a great surge of relief, but it was not until he opened those elevator doors and saw his favorite place — as he had always in his heart of hearts known it to be — that he could admit this to himself. He was happier after that; it changed his life but only because he was honest.

What I’m telling you is this, and I hope you’ll listen to me because I am after all the one guiding this meditation: be honest. It might be that your favorite place is a lovely, bosky forest glen with the smell of pine trees and a crystal-clear blue lake beyond with a waterfall emptying into it in the distance, blah, blah, blah. There might be deer grazing amid the shafts of sunlight and a breeze ruffling the leaves. But really, the number of times I’ve gone around the “sharing circle” after a class and someone has talked about a place just like that, or about being on a beach with golden sand, or about a garden full of blooming flowers like one they saw when they were a child, well, please: if I got paid for each time that occurred, I would not have bothered to make this recording because I’d be too busy shopping. And for at least half of those people, I knew that they were not telling the truth, that they were telling me about a place they thought they were supposed to like, what they’d seen in advertisements on television. Not the place that really, deep down in their hearts, they truly longed for.

You can make up something like that if you want. There’s nothing I can do to stop you because it’s your mind and your desire and only you can know if you have really told yourself the truth. You may not even know you are lying to yourself when you look out of those elevator doors and see a Disney-style castle with white spires and banners waving and liveried footmen and a red carpet leading you inside. Or a boat the shape of a swan filled with silken cushions and all the chocolate you can eat. You might really believe that is the place you long to be. And perhaps you will be right. But I don’t think so.