|
|
The Law of EconomyThe Spiritual Traveler
|
I
awoke on an early April morning and suddenly remembered that the
Eckankar Springtime Seminar was taking place that weekend in
Washington, D.C. I hadn’t planned to go, hadn’t even thought
about it, but there was no reason I couldn’t go! There was
little to keep me home that weekend. The few commitments I
had made I could easily get out of. The Springtime Seminar
was one of a handful of major seminars sponsored by Eckankar
year. The normal attendance was between four and five
thousand people—so it was a big event. I called up John
Zissis, whom I knew was going to the seminar with his daughter
Athena. He was driving down Thursday evening, and planned to
spend four nights there—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—and
drive back on Monday.
“Do you want to ride with us?” he asked.
“No. I’m not that
comfortable riding with other people,” I replied. “I prefer
to drive myself. Besides, I’m leaving a day later, and
probably will only spend a couple of nights. But I wouldn’t
mind sharing your hotel room on Friday and Saturday night.”
“That’s fine with me,” John
said. “The room costs $95 a night, and I’d be happy if I
could split the cost.”
I called my mother in Florida and told her that I was planning on going
into Washington for the weekend. “If I had a place to stay
for another night or two, maybe I could do a little job hunting in the
area,” I said.
“You could stay with Geoffrey Lanning in Arlington,” she suggested.
 Geoffrey
Lanning was a man who had recently invited my widowed mother to live
with him. She was not adapting well to life alone in the
apartment she had shared for the last few years with my
father. Her apartment was expensive, and she had places in
Maine and Florida where she stayed during the spring and
summer. The weather in Michigan during the winters was
always gloomy and depressing. I was sick of it, myself, and
determined to move to a warmer location. I knew someone who
had just moved to Virginia, and loved it there.
“You could move to Virginia,”
I had suggested to my mother, without mentioning where the inspiration
had come from.
She treated the suggestion
with derision. “Why would I possibly want to move to
Virginia,” she wanted to know. “I don’t know anyone there!”
“Well, you could meet new
people. You could find a more reasonable
apartment. You would be in a better climate.”
“That’s impossible,” she
said. “My home is here. I’m familiar with this
place. I can’t just move somewhere completely different at
my age.”
“Why not?”
I kept after her, bringing up
the subject every now and then, but finally dropped
it. Finally, she went off to Florida for three
months. One day she called me up from Florida and told me of
her recent correspondence with Geoffrey, and his invitation, which was
initiated through some mutual friends. She had never met
him, and was curious about him. “Since you’re planning to be
in the area, you might as well call him,” she
suggested. “You can check him out for me.”
I agreed to this, and my
mother called Geoffrey to ask if it would be OK if I paid him a
visit. The next day I spoke to him on the phone, and made
arrangements to visit him after the seminar.
When I got to Washington, the
seminar had already been in full gear for a day. It was
about ten o’clock in the evening when I made my way through the hotel
lobby, and got in touch with John on the house phone. He and
Athena were just getting ready for bed, and I came right
up. John was short, solidly built, about ten years younger
than I was, with dark hair and glasses. His daughter Athena
was about nine years old, blonde, pixyish, and very precocious.
“Do you want to order a cot?” John asked.
“No. I really prefer to sleep on the floor,” I told him.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I just
need an extra blanket is all.” John called down for an extra
blanket to be delivered. I brushed my teeth, and the blanket
arrived. John turned off the lights. I stretched
out at the foot of Athena’s bed, and fell asleep quickly.
I enjoyed the seminar on
Saturday, and spent another night sleeping at the foot of Athena’s
bed. The next morning I asked John if he had any plans after
the seminar ended at noon. “I don’t have to go to Arlington
until the evening,” I said, “so I wouldn’t mind tagging along wherever
you’re going.”
John seemed agreeable to this, and we arranged to meet in the hotel
lobby about three hours later. I hadn’t registered for the
Sunday morning session, and decided against paying additionally to
attend it. I was satisfied packing up my things and getting
them loaded into my car early, to escape the post-seminar
crush. I munched casually on some food that had still been
in my car, and enjoyed the spring morning. When the morning
session was over, I spotted John and Athena hanging out with a couple
and their two children. They didn’t seem ready to go out
yet, so I wandered around the hotel lobby. After a while, I
came back. Now John and Athena were no longer in
sight. I struck up a conversation with the couple, who said
that they were also going out with John and Athena. I felt
my enthusiasm for going with them beginning to wane. It
seemed like it was going to be a parents-with-children kind of
thing. The only thing was that I hadn’t settled my share of
the hotel bill with John yet.
 Just
then, Gary and Helen, two other friends of mind,
appeared. “Can you help us jumpstart Gary’s car?” they
wanted to know. “It’s down in the hotel garage.”
“It’ll mean losing my parking
spot,” I replied, “But sure, I’ll help.” I walked out with
Gary. My car was parked just across the
street. We got in, and I drove down into the garage and
helped him jumpstart his car. Afterwards, I drove past my
old parking spot, but it was taken. Suddenly, there didn’t
seem to be any reason to stay, so I drove off. I didn’t have
to call Geoffrey until later in the day, so I decided to kill some time
by visiting the Washington Cathedral. It was Easter Sunday,
and when I got there, an Easter mass was in progress. I
parked my car, and looked in at the service for a
while. Then I went back to the car, fished out some fruit,
and sat down at a bench to eat it, with the church bells resounding in
my ear. I called Geoffrey from a pay phone, and arranged to
call at his apartment a little later that day. Then I drove
across the Potomac in mid-afternoon, stopped at a visitor information
center, and got some maps of the area.
I continued on to Crystal City, a colony of high-rise luxury apartment
buildings sandwiched between Reagan National Airport. It
seemed like a very cold and pretentious place to live, but I screwed up
my courage and knocked on the door of Geoffrey’s suite.
He turned out to be a man of
my father’s height and build. He also had the same type of
face, a little gaunt, with a prominent nose. Although he was
clearly in better shape than my father had been during the last five
years of his illness, he made a frail impression overall. In
particular, he walked with a stoop and shuffle that was reminiscent of
my father in his later years. His apartment was not huge,
but it was elegantly furnished. He had some marvelous
oriental art on the walls, and some beautiful furniture. The
place was in a huge clutter, however. A large easy chair was
wedged between the entrance hall and a stairway that led to the
bedrooms on the second floor. There were so many papers and
other paraphernalia strewn around this area that it was almost
impossible to get past the hallway into the rest of the
apartment. My impression was that this was a man in dire
need of someone to manage his household, but I couldn’t see my mother
in that role.
I spent a pleasant evening
with him, however. He put me up in a spacious guestroom for
the night, and the next day I went with him and a female friend of his
to a restaurant on the banks of the Potomac. It was about
three o’clock in the afternoon when we got back to Geoffrey’s
apartment, and I felt suddenly restless. I had done
everything I wanted to in the Washington area. Although it
was very late to start driving back to Michigan, I figured that if I
got onto the highway by four, I would have a shot at getting back home
my midnight or one a.m. So I bid farewell to my host,
thanking him for his hospitality, and assuring him that I would report
back positively to my mother regarding our encounter.
After about an hour on the
road, called my mother, and gave her a full report. “He’s
very nice, very sincere,” I said. “He’s loaded, so you don’t
have to worry that he’s after your money. But what I’m
worried about is that you’re going to have the same problems with him
that you did with Dad. He’s getting on in
years. Do you really want to get into a situation where
you’re caring for someone else again the way you had to with Dad?”
“No, of course
not. I couldn’t go through that again. That’s why
I have no intention of letting this get that serious. He’s
just a friend that I’m going to visit for a while.”
“My point is that it may get more serious that you
think. And that means you may find yourself in the same
situation again. So just be careful!” With that
admonition, I rang off and hit the road again.
 In
another hour it had gotten dark and I was approaching
Breezewood. I was going in my mind over the whole seminar,
thinking of the people I had met. Something was nagging at
me, and I realized that it was the fact that I had not paid John for my
share of the hotel bill. I had rushed off to help Gary
jumpstart his car, and never returned. John must have
thought I had disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I was
thinking about how I should approach the subject of paying him—whether
he would bring it up when we saw each other in Ann Arbor, whether I
should bring it up… Just exactly at that point, I was slowing down on
the highway off ramp, looked at the lane to my left, and saw a blue car
next to me—with John and Athena waving their hands to get my
attention! I followed their car to a gas station up ahead,
and stopped right behind them.
“Do you have any idea what I was thinking about at the moment I saw you
two?” I asked.
“No, what?” John inquired.
“I was thinking that I hadn’t paid you for my share of the hotel bill!”
John shrugged.
“I’m serious, John. That’s what I was thinking when I saw
you! What are the odds of that?” In fact, I was
trying to calculate in my mind the odds of simply meeting up with them
in Breezewood. About thirty hours had gone by since I had
been with them. They had spent the intervening time at the
Hilton in Washington, while I had been in Arlington with
Geoffrey. Even allowing for the fact that we must have left
at approximately the same time, the chances against it seemed
astronomical.
We decided to have a bite to eat at a nearby Taco Bell. The
lights were characteristically bright, and the place almost
empty. Athena played with a bunch of pastel helium
balloons. John looked tired.
“What time do you think
we’ll get to Michigan?” I asked him.
“Right now, we’re
looking at about two-thirty or three in the morning.”
“That’s
crazy.”
“I know.”
“Look. Why don’t we drive a few more hours, past Pittsburgh,
or to the Ohio line, then look for a motel, and share a room
again. I’ll pay for it. I owe you for the two
nights at the Hilton anyway. This way I’ll get to pay you
back.”
“The hotel in Washington cost $95 a night…”
John was figuring it out.
“Well, consider it a partial payment then.” I was doing
arithmetical calculations myself, wondering whether it was quite fair
of John to ask me to pay for half the bill when Athena had also
occupied it and I had slept on the floor both nights.
“OK. It sounds like a plan,” John replied. After
consulting a map, we agreed to continue driving, and to meet again at
the first service plaza on the Ohio Turnpike.
“How fast do you drive?” John wanted to
know. “Eighty? Seventy?”
“Not eighty,”
I said. “Seventy sounds about right.”
We took off, and I lost John in the night right away. Every
once in a while I glanced at my speedometer and saw that I was doing
nowhere near seventy—more like sixty-two or sixty-three. I
figured John would probably have to wait at least a half an hour for me
at the service plaza, and wondered if he would get impatient and drive
off. When I finally arrived at the service plaza, I saw no
one around.
“Did
you see a man and a little girl hanging around here the last half
hour?” I asked the server at the McDonald’s station.
“We get a lot of people in here,” she said, gesturing to the empty
tables. I was about to leave when John walked out of the
men’s bathroom.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Driving.”
“At what speed? Fifty-five?”
“Well, not quite that slow.”
“Yes, at least that slow.”
“Where’s Athena?”
“Asleep in the car.”
I realized I had imposed on him, and was grateful that he had stuck
around. I called up a motel on one of the courtesy phones on
the reservation board and reserved a room four miles up the
road. We got back into our cars and arrived at the hotel.
“Just wait here, and let me make the reservation,” I told
John. I’ll get a room with two beds and tell the clerk that
it’s for my little daughter and me. They don’t have to know
that there’ll be a third person sleeping on the floor.”
“Do whatever you’re comfortable with,” John said. I went in
and ordered the room.
“I guess your little girl is still on vacation from school today,” the
desk clerk said.
 “Uh,
yeah. That’s right,” I ad-libbed. I grabbed the
key hastily, stumbled outside, and led John to the
room. Once again, I brushed my teeth and spread out a
blanket at the foot of Athena’s bed, just as I had at the
Hilton. I was thinking of the strangeness of sharing a room
with them again, and wondering what it meant.
The next morning, we had breakfast together in a café next to the
motel, and then I paid for the room. The charge was just a
little over $60. I started figuring what my share of the
Hilton bill would have been if it had been split three ways, between
John, Athena, and me. My share would have been a little over
$30 a night, or over $60 altogether. It came out about the
same. I concluded that the whole encounter was providing a
way for me to pay John back in the most efficient way, without a lot of
dickering and hassling. The whole incident was showing me
something about how the ECK, or Spirit, operated—in the most efficient
and economical manner. This was the Law of Economy, often
referred to in the Eckankar writings, in action |
|
|
Date Submitted:
1/2/04 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
|