The Sky Diet
1. Sleep
Ambitions are the turds of the soul.
That came to me the other day as I pondered all our striving through the years.
Some people are born to striving. Others are taught. We got the double whammy— immigrant father and mother who grew up with less than she needed.
Striving sent dad from Tehran to being a doctor in New York. It took mom from a nurse in Brooklyn to homemaker in Connecticut. Striving was a proven formula for a better life.
It’s what got us both into Yale. And why you chose the most demanding speciality in medicine. Striving made you the man we all remember: a supreme surgeon scientist.
Sleep? How many times over the years did I watch you sip coffee before you stretched out so you didn’t go too deep, so you could rise in just a few hours to meet another challenge?
2. Kale
Achievement was always the most important thing. Anything laudable and difficult would do.
We were two sides of a coin. Same alloy, different pattern stamped on the surface. You were the noble sober head. I was the signs and symbols.
I was Peace Corps, law School, start-ups — over and over — that almost unwinnable struggle to make something new that people love.
You were achieving more and faster than ever when I decided to quit climbing so hard.
Meditation had a lot to do with my change of approach, as did Eckhart Tolle, the Ennegram, David Deida, and other gurus who taught me ways of being that allowed me to observe my striving instead of being swept along by it.
I took a break from start-ups and moved to San Francisco to spend more time with you and your kids.
I remember how concerned you were about my sabbatical and how you teased me about my spiritual talk and yoga poses. Anything less than the fastest ascent up the steepest slope registered to you as slacking, as peril, as back-sliding.
Your body was a vehicle for your head — the star of the show — that tireless engine that accomplished great things faster than anyone else.
You didn’t eat, you swallowed. Fuel for the fire.
You knew the science of sleep and diet and exercise. You knew the risks you were taking.
But you were so close to summiting the next major peak. You promised that you’d take it easier once you reached the top.
3. Yoga
Not long after you died I had a comforting thought: that to become something out of nothing is so shocking and traumatic that we must all carry the terror of that transformation with us into the material world.
We think we fear death and the disintegration of our distinct and individual identities, but really it could be that we are confusing a fear of death with our shock and terror of coming into this world. To return to the great unmanifested might be a sweet relief, a return home, a release from always needing to do more, to be more, to win and be praised.
Were you the youngest chairman of a major university neurosurgery department? It wouldn’t surprise me.
And of course you didn’t take it any easier. More responsibilities, more ass-kicking, more accolades.
I tried to jujitsu your striving by proposing we collaborate on a health and wellness book. The SKY Diet: Sleep, Kale, Yoga.
You’d do the science and be the subject, the guinea pig, proof that the regime was effective. I’d do the writing and monitor your slumber, your asanas, and your intake of the one leafy green to rule them all. It would be a celebrated best-seller, a New Age Atkins Diet.
It would be hard to do — hard for me given my new family and new start-up, hard for you because of your incredibly busy life — but wasn’t that what strivers do? Take on more than they can handle in order to complete great missions? I was hoping to trick you into a healthier life by appealing to the core compulsion we shared.
You just laughed. You always found my concern for your well-being at once endearing and irritating. How could crazy little brother ever know best?
You wouldn’t have liked my scato-spirtitual aphorism either. Ambition is what guides us to our highest purpose. Turds are a byproduct of biological survival. Soul is a hippie-dippy term that is meaningless to a scientist like you.
As for the sky diet, it means something different to me now. It means swallowing your enormous absence every day, being filled up by it, a sky of missing you inside me.
And it means hoping Whitman had it right when he wrote in Leaves of Grass: “And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”
