Walking Wisdom

by Gotham Chopra

  Walking Wisdom

  THREE GENERATIONS, TWO DOGS,

  and the SEARCH for a HAPPY LIFE

  GOTHAM CHOPRA

  with DEEPAK CHOPRA

  To:

  Krishu, Leela, Tara, Kiran, Noah, Alex, Aanya, Mira, Dakshu,

  Sumair, Cleo, and Nicholas. You’re all my babies.

  Thank you for all the love and licks.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Introduction

  OBSESSED. THERE WAS NO BETTER WORD FOR IT. WE WERE obsessed. When I was seven and my sister, Mallika, was eleven, all we could talk about—all we could think about—was getting a dog. I appreciate that as obsessions go, this one was hardly unique, that most kids are fanatical about dogs and cats, most families suffer through the phase. But when you’re seven and every waking moment is taken up with this need—this desperate, urgent desire—well, the idea of a universal experience doesn’t seem to matter. This wasn’t some rite of passage. It was life or death. And we behaved accordingly.

  Mallika and I nagged our parents morning, noon, and night. We moped. We pleaded. We cajoled. We made promises we knew we’d never keep. I offered to forgo my allowance in exchange for a kibble for work program, while Mallika swore she’d bathe the dog every day. We’d take care of the mess. We’d take care of the walks. We’d take care of everything.

  “We’ll look after the dog, Mom. Honest we will.” That was me.

  “You won’t need to do anything at all. You’ll hardly notice the dog even exists.” That was Mallika.

  My mom, always open to negotiating, took advantage of the situation by horse-trading tasks she’d been fighting hard over for some time. My father, on the other hand, was unmoved. A hardworking physician with multiple jobs, he had no interest in our adding another being to our household, especially a four-legged one. Never what you’d call a “dog person,” Papa looked at our neighbor’s St. Bernard—an oafish, uncoordinated, sloppy, and constantly drooling beast—with open disgust. Hence he pretty much regarded all dogs as oafish, uncoordinated, sloppy, constantly drooling . . . and unintelligent to boot.

  It might have ended there, but as was always the case in our family, once my mother had green-lit the enterprise, my father’s opinion didn’t really matter.

  Mallika and I celebrated the imminent addition to our family.

  The Chopras were getting a dog.

  NICHOLAS WAS A blaze of energy and anarchy, a little Samoyed pup that was nothing more than a fluffy white ball of fur. We could hardly tell which end was up. Nicholas was goofy and playful and eager to please, but like most puppies, he was ill equipped to do anything quite right. So what if he peed where he wasn’t supposed to? So what if he chewed a table leg, broom handle, or couch pillow? These actions only served to make him that much more lovable. No matter what he did, no matter what high jinks he got up to, Mallika and I were happy. Ridiculously happy.

  How could we not be?

  Our dream had come true: We had a puppy dog.

  Nicholas spent most of his time barreling around the house, wrestling plush toys and those little bones that we’d pick up daily from the local pet store. He’d tear from one side of the house to the other with speed and cunning. When we finally tracked him down, he’d be hard at work ripping apart a pillow or another piece of furniture. Shoes were another favorite, as were the stuffed animals that sat in our bedrooms.

  Bath times, which were frequent at the beginning when we naively thought we could keep him clean, were a sudsy bonanza that often concluded with Nicholas escaping. We’d follow the slick, soapy trail throughout the house from the book-cluttered den through the art-laden living room and usually to one of our bedrooms, where we’d find our pup chewing up a pillow or tearing apart one of Mallika’s many pairs of jelly shoes.

  “Oh well.” She shrugged, prying away the ragged remnants before pulling Nicholas in for a cuddle. “It’s no big deal.”

  It was indeed a big deal, considering how much my preteen sister loved her shoes.

  “Nicholas is our baby,” she assured me. “Nothing will ever compare to him.”

  And that pretty much summed it up. For both of us.

  My father, meanwhile, tried to lay down the law. He insisted we keep Nicholas in the basement of the house, where we set up an elaborate playpen-slash-doghouse with food and water, toys and blankets, and, now that we knew he enjoyed them so much, an old pair of shoes. But all through his very first night with us, Nicholas whined and cried. His whimpers echoed throughout the house. None of us slept a lick. That first night in the basement turned out to be his last.

  Over the next few months, Nicholas rapidly grew from a small white fur ball to a sizable and beautiful canine. Still, despite some halfhearted attempts at training, he never quite lost his puppy-like attitude. Nicholas was an oafish, uncoordinated, sloppy, and constantly drooling blaze of energy. He was my father’s worst fears come true. But for the rest of us, it was love.

  Nicholas was becoming a part of the family. Our three cousins who lived just fifteen minutes from our house in suburban Boston—and whom we regarded more as siblings than the strange American term of “first cousins”—came over almost daily so we could all romp and play with Nicholas. More anarchy.

  My father, however, held the line. Nicholas was kept in a separate room during mealtimes and, unless Papa wasn’t looking (in which case, Mallika and I would slip our boy a people ration), he only got to eat dog food. And while Nicholas had succeeded in escaping the basement, which Mallika and I now regarded as little more than a dungeon, he was only allowed to snuggle up with a dirty piece of laundry at the foot of either my or my sister’s bed. Doctor’s orders.

  Despite his protests and obvious disapproval, in Nicholas Papa soon found another appeal. Even at our tender ages, both Mallika and I had learned to resist our father’s experiments. From as far back as I can recall, he would practice some routine or ritual he’d recently read about on us: from hypnosis, to diet, to observing silence for hours at a time (to enhance our creativity, he claimed), to “communicating with the universe” via a Ouija board in order to propel us to higher consciousness, whatever that meant. Mallika and I were used to being Papa’s test subjects, and we reacted with a mixture of annoyance and entrepreneurship. Mallika, always the math whiz, devised a sliding scale that, depending on the intensity of the experiment, required Papa to up our weekly allowance. She was also nice enough to maintain my accounts and charge me interest for doing so, a relationship I found reasonable.

  Nicholas, on the other hand, was always up for a new game, especially if there was a reward like a bone or a doggy treat at the end of it. He’d show remarkable aptitude for learning a routine—from staying still to retrieving a ball to other forms of advanced Deepak Chopra trials—only to quickly abandon them once he had received his prize. This created great frustration for my father, an admirer of the scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who pioneered many progressive theories on consciousness largely based on his study of animal behavior. On the contrary, Nicholas’s behavior challenged Sheldrake and Papa’s joint hypothesis that the evolution of intelligence and consciousness should not be dependent on a bone or a doggy treat.

  “Darwin presumably had better test animals to work with,” Papa said, frustrated.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but Mallika was all over it. “We could get another dog,” she
offered. “A trained dog. You know . . . so you could establish a variable.”

  “No thanks,” Papa replied. The mad scientist in him was determined. “I’ll work with what I have.”

  One of my father’s long-standing intentions with Nicholas was for us all to recognize and appreciate our instinctive trust in one another. The embodiment of this, Papa claimed, would be in letting Nicholas off his leash and trusting that he would stay by our side and not run off. Mallika and I knew that other dogs had managed such a feat, that millions of dogs before Nicholas had been trained to stay by their owners’ sides without the benefit of a leash. No big deal. And yet we were nervous.

  Papa wanted to establish the remarkable power of trust, to prove to us that simply by showing love and trust in Nicholas he would love and trust us in return. “Trust is the basis of any nurturing and evolutionary relationship,” he proposed. “Only with that basic and strong foundation can we then move on to the bigger stuff like nonlocal communication.”

  It sounded fishy to us. But who were we to question a man so confident in his wisdom? Who were we to question Papa?

  So one New England autumn afternoon, when the leaves had turned our street a magnificent blaze of fiery orange and deep yellow, it was showtime.

  Papa began by speaking to Nicholas the way he would any other member of our family. “In a few moments, I’m going to unhook the leash from your collar, okay?”

  Nicholas stared at him with a blank expression. His chest heaved. His heart pounded. “We trust and love you and never want you to feel restricted,” Papa continued. “And we know that you’ll return that love and trust by staying close to us.”

  Nicholas played along skillfully as a gentle papa slowly unfastened the leash. “We trust you,” he repeated. “We all trust you.”

  Nicholas stood for a beat, smiling ear to ear, a string of drool dripping from his mouth. To my father, Nicholas appeared a divine, if somewhat oafish, picture of innocence and obedience. Mallika and I knew better. Faster than you could say “limbic resonance,” he took off out of sight.

  I cried.

  Mallika grew angry.

  Papa appeared totally confused.

  I remember it distinctly as the first time I had ever heard the word reckless, something Mallika had just learned in her first few days of junior high and now unleashed on Papa. He too was distraught, more so with the realization that his latest theory had gone so catastrophically off track than with any regard for the dog. We spent the next two hours traipsing through the woods, searching neighbors’ yards and a nearby park, but there was no sign of Nicholas. We were devastated—as much for the loss of our beloved pet as for the growing recognition that we were going to have to break the news to our mother.

  There is only one thing in life, I would learn years later, that rivals the instinct to protect your child from any sort of pain, and that is protecting your mother. The clock was ticking toward that end.

  As we made our way home, Mallika and I stewed in our silence. We were convinced Nicholas was lost forever and we fully intended on staying angry with our father for just as long. But then, as we climbed the driveway that led to our house—and we did this slowly, so that Papa would understand with each heavy step the measure of our sadness—we saw my mother, and beside her, Nicholas. She smiled. We smiled. Relief washed over us.

  “Mr. Casparian saw Nicholas swimming in the reservoir. Luckily he recognized him,” Mom informed us as Papa grimaced. “Thank heavens for good neighbors.”

  She stroked Nicholas affectionately. His white coat showed evidence of dried blood, marks of a playful scrape with another dog. Mallika and I rushed to Nicholas’s side and engulfed him with a barrage of affection.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” I chastised Nicholas, digging my hands deep into his fur and going nose to wet nose with him so he knew I meant business.

  “It’s not his fault,” Mallika reminded me, throwing an angry glance Papa’s way. She buried kisses onto the top of Nicholas’s head and rubbed his tummy.

  “Did Mr. Casparian bring him home?” Papa inquired.

  Mom shook her head. “He tried to but couldn’t. Nicholas came home by himself.”

  Papa couldn’t help but smile triumphantly. Years later when reminiscing about the incident, my father told us that Nicholas proved us all right that day—he was defiant and obedient at the same time. He demanded freedom, but he knew we were his family and purposefully and loyally returned home to us. More importantly, he had given us a tremendous gift: By putting the family through such worry, he ultimately brought us closer than we were before. Nicholas had taught us a great deal, Papa said. Not only about himself and his pure innocence of just being, but also about one another and ourselves.

  “You know,” Papa affirmed at dinner a few days after the frost between us had started to thaw, “maybe this dog has a lot more to teach us than we have to teach him.”

  Nicholas stared up at Papa with a big, goofy grin. He had earned his way to the table side during dinnertime and Mallika and I were free to offer him full food rations without fear of reprimand from Papa. It was, after all, Papa who had discovered that Nicholas had a fondness for pork chops.

  AS FAR BACK as I can remember, every single day of my life someone somewhere has asked me what it’s been like to have Deepak Chopra as a father. They want to know if I am a master practitioner of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. Or whether I am of Perfect Health, meditate all day, communicate exclusively nonviolently, know my dosha quotient, or if I am a perfect yogi—in summary, if I live the perfect spiritual life.

  The answer, of course, is: almost.

  Actually, it’s NO.

  I like to think of myself as relatively normal, someone whose mood is too often dependent on the Red Sox box score from the prior night, who stresses out over the private school vs. public school debate for my kid, and who fantasizes about switching careers and becoming a Top Chef Master someday. Admittedly, though, it has been a pretty wild ride. From the Bible to the biology of the human soul, the Bhagavad Gita to The Great Gatsby, my father always believed in exposing my sister and me to the deepest reservoirs of knowledge he could find. To that extent, we also met a lot of interesting people along the way, including seers, psychotics, and many a celebrity who during or after their fifteen minutes of fame became spiritually obsessed with our father, Deepak Chopra. There were also a few prophets we encountered along the way, some for peace and others, well, for profit. Many of them had valuable lessons to share, some . . . not so much.

  Still, recently when someone again asked me what it was like to grow up with Deepak as Dad, I found myself telling them the story about Nicholas and some of the lessons we all drew from him, including most notably my father. Even more recently, I, my father, and my two-year-old son, Krishu, went on a walk in the neighborhood in which I live with our current dog, Cleo, and I found myself thinking about those days with Nicholas once more. Along the walk, at some point Krishu saw something in the distance and pointed toward it. Instinctively, my father and I looked toward where Krishu was pointing, while Cleo stared at his little finger.

  Noticing this, Papa laughed to himself.

  I asked him what was so funny.

  “It’s an example of the difference between humans and dogs,” he said. “Dogs are rooted in the present moment. They don’t worry about tomorrow or wallow in yesterday. They have total present moment awareness and one-pointed attention.”

  Papa pointed ahead, mimicking Krishu. “Humans, on the other hand, are always looking for meaning and significance in things, longingly gazing toward the horizon for some deeper explanation to existence.”

  Papa reached down and petted Cleo’s fluffy head. He turned to Krishu. “As you become a big boy, we’re all going to learn things from one another. Cleo too.”

  “Dada!” Krishu smiled, an affirmation of Papa’s tenderness.

  THESE DAYS, WHEN I THINK of the many influences in my life, the usual suspects rise to the top: t
eachers and mentors, friends, siblings, significant others, business partners, even adversaries and rivals who have managed to drop important lessons along the way. But amidst them all, three beings crystallize. One, predictably, is my dad. The others, not so predictably, are my dogs.

  My dad has taught me about wisdom, curiosity, open-mindedness, and the richness of having a relentless passion for knowledge. My dogs, Nicholas and Cleo, have taught me about simplicity, innocence, devotion, and true spiritual freedom. And there are more qualities that I’ve learned from them: loyalty, trust, forgiveness, and the desire to play. The more I asked around of others, the more I learned that they too had learned great (dare I say spiritual) lessons from their canine companions.

  Most recently, like countless before me, I have embarked on a new and critical path in life: parenting. I’ll forgo all of the usual clichés about how my life changed the day I saw my son born. Seeing my child actually emerge from the womb was not high on my priority list. I was perfectly happy to wait outside the delivery room and receive the joyous news with a pat on the back and a cigar. But I did the right thing. I stayed beside my wife, Candice, holding her hand and saying what I hoped were comforting and encouraging words. Still, this so-called miraculous event didn’t affect me the way I thought it should. (Watching the 2004 Red Sox beat the Yankees in Game 7 after being down three games to none, or seeing the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl against the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI—now those were miracles.)

  Maybe I’m a slow learner, but it wasn’t until a few months in, as I watched my son slowly transform from that gooey alien life into an infant driven by survival instincts into a real human being flooded with consciousness, that it hit me: I’m going to have to think about the values that I’m going to impart to my child.