When an obstacle is really a blessing

Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash

As my regular readers know, every year I do a survey to check in with you on the articles I offer, the balance between fiction and non-fiction, personal stories and Dharma insights, etc. One question I nearly didn’t include, was on whether or not subscribers have read any of my books. I was pleasantly surprised to find how many of you have read more than just one or two.

People who come across my work almost always know me as the author of Buddhist fiction and non-fiction. But this wasn’t what I planned for my life as a young man. It only worked out this way because of a massive derailment. Or that’s how it felt at the time.

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Like many writers, I was a compulsive scribbler from a young age. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Ames, with whom I was secretly in love, ran creative writing sessions every week which I remember enjoying. One week in particular she chose the theme of witches and wizards. Despite her disapproving attitude towards all things occult, it was, nevertheless, a theme that resonated with me!

So taken was Mrs. Ames by my poetic efforts, that she had me stand on a chair and read my work out to the massed ranks of my fellow seven year olds. They were then required to applaud. Was that the dizzying acclaim that started it all off, I sometimes wonder? Was I urged to seek self-acceptance later in life through the acceptance of my creative work by others?

Who can tell? What I know for sure is that when I arrived home with the poem, my parents carefully filed it - only after, by the looks of it, my pet rabbit took a couple of bites from the corner.

The poem has been sitting in various files for over half a century. With some trepidation, I am revealing it to you today ..!

My very first creative effort. My legibility was at its high water mark and has been on the decline ever since.

Poems and short stories in my teen years were followed by my first novel when I was eighteen. By the time I was thirty, I had written ten full length novels which were roundly rejected by every agent and publisher I sent them to. And I queried many. I did receive a few crumbs of comfort – an ‘almost made it’ rejection letter here or doomed agency representation there.

Did this trouble me? Of course! Despite Herculean efforts I was failing to make any headway in my chosen vocation. I never doubted that I was ‘meant’ to be a writer. And not just any writer. A ‘major international best-selling novelist’ was my chosen affirmation. Coming of age in the 1980’s, I bought into the promises of Tony Robbins and Madonna, of Flashdance and the Power of Myth that you can be whoever you want to be.

I kept myself going with ideas along the lines that success is the last rung on the ladder of failure. That it would be a trajedy to give up the struggle at one minute to midnight when one last push would have led to breakthrough. That you always succeed if you just keep trying. I’d even moved across the world from Zimbabwe, where I’d been brought up and which I felt was a cultural backwater, to London, where I would usher in my glamorous anticipated reality.

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And then finally it happened. Or seemed to. I got my first book deal for an expose about spin-doctoring - my day job being in public relations. That non-fiction deal paved the way to me securing the support of Ed Victor, the literary agent more famous than many of his authors, who cruised around London in a Rolls Royce and, whenever I went to see him, seemed to have just got off the phone from ‘Freddie’ Forsyth author of The Day of the Jackal. Sitting on the sofa of his spacious, light-filled office, listening to his wildly entertaining anecdotes about editors and writers on both sides of the pond, for the first time in my life I felt like I was at the centre of the publishing universe. That things were about to happen.

And they did. Within months, my thriller Conflict of Interest was the subject of an auction between rival publishers. An opening bid by one publisher was doubled then doubled again in a two book deal that surpassed my most extravagant expectations.

I still remember being handed the fax saying that Little, Brown had offered a six figure sum when my wife and I returned to the hotel in New York where we were visiting. Along with the tantalizing advance, the marketing section of the proposal contained the spookily precise promise to turn me into ‘a major international best-selling novelist.’ I felt thrilled and vindicated all at once.

The wheels of the publishing industry grind slowly. It took eighteen months for Conflict to be published in hardback, and a further year for the paperback edition to come out, which is when mass market sales really kick in. In the meantime, I had written two further thrillers in the same genre.

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Having met and married my Australian wife while in London, and after ten British winters, we moved to my wife’s hometown of Perth, the warm climate more akin to the one I had grown up in. It was here that we were adopted by the most delightful Himalayan cat. With a lustrous cream coat, charcoal face and clear blue eyes, somewhat wonky on her pins, she belonged to a neighbour but increasingly spent time with us, away from their baying hellhound of a Chihuahua.

When we moved house, the neighbor was only too happy to let us take her with us: little did we suspect what an extraordinarily powerful impact she was to have on my writing career!

Wussik: the beautiful, imperious and somewhat wonky muse of The Dalai Lama’s Cat

In that pre-digital age, long before real-time sales data was available, unless there was a retail stampede, it took time for book sales figures to come through. Eventually when they did, the numbers for Conflict were solid but not spectacular. Regrettably, spectacular was needed to earn out the whopping advance I had been paid.

With an inevitability I should have seen coming, another fax bookended my thriller-writing career. Little, Brown wouldn’t be buying another novel, my agent told me. My editor wished me well. She looked forward to seeing my name rising on future best-seller charts. Only, it wouldn’t be under her imprint.

My writing career seemed over almost before it began.

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That fax was, without question, the most devastating of my life. It is one thing to be turned down as an unknown writer – stupid editors! Don’t they recognize genius when they see it?! – but quite another to be dumped because of poor sales. The ‘major international best-selling novelist?’ Awakening the giant within? The years of honing my craft, relentlessly exploring all options, one minute until midnight, never giving up – what on earth had it all been for?

I was blindsided and utterly crushed. Everything that I’d struggled for had come to nothing. Far from being an up-and-coming novelist, I had been thrown on the trash heap of not-good-enoughs. From wannabe to never-was. Never had I felt so humbled, depressed or purposeless.

Two saving graces prevented me from dissolving into a complete pity party: the constant support of my loving wife. And Buddhist classes. I had begun meditating in London for stress management reasons and began going to Dharma classes soon after getting to Perth. As an animal lover, I liked how Buddhism recognizes the sentience of all living beings.

Of more immediate relevance was the way that the Dharma gently but directly refuted many of my assumptions about the nature of happiness. Did material success really make people happy? Was fame and fortune truly a worthy aspiration? I knew from my time on Ed Victor’s sofa that his most miserable client, one whose calls they must take but always dreaded, was a household name writer.

Buddhism helped me cope with the freefall following that bombshell from London. And given its wealth of powerful and often counter-intuitive ideas and practices, it was the Dharma more than anything else I would talk to others about when socializing. Conversations which sometimes ended: “Is there an intro book to Buddhism you would recommend?”

There wasn’t as it happened. Tibetan lama’s books were too often dry, scholarly and unrelatable. And Western writers who’d ventured into this space, with the best of intentions, weren’t always fully-baked or very clear. That was when the thought struck me: perhaps I could have a go?

I wrote Buddhism for Busy People when I was still only a few years into Dharma practice. My motivation for writing was utterly different from previous books. I wanted, pure and simple, to share my enthusiasm for the life-changing insights I was learning. I had no financial expectations. I earned my living doing PR work for financial services companies. Buddhism is a niche market – surprisingly few people are interested in exploring the nature of consciousness or of reality, or how one gives rise to the other.

I contacted an editor at Australian publisher Allen & Unwin who had published other Buddhist books. To my surprise, she made an offer on Buddhism for Busy People. And to our mutual astonishment, several months after it came out as a paperback original, it had sold in sufficient quantities to trigger a reprint. Months later, another reprint. These were followed by translation deals, a US deal – and a request for me to write a new book.

With a certain inevitability, the storyteller within me began questioning if there wasn’t, perhaps, a way to communicate Buddhist themes using fiction? A lot of intelligent, curious people shun non-fiction for their leisure reading, having to deal with far too much of it at work.

When I heard that the Dalai Lama once had a cat, it occurred to me that the goings-on in His Holiness’s office might be intriguingly explored through the eyes of a feline much like our own pampered Himalayan. And so began a new chapter in which I evolved into writing Dharma fiction and non-fiction, a sub-genre that one of my reader’s memorably described recently as ‘a gateway drug to the Dharma.’

Book covers - missing the most recent ‘The Dalai Lama’s Cat and The Claw of Attraction’

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What I really want to focus on here is the obstacle. That monumental setback. As I have come to learn from my lamas, the way any event is perceived depends entirely on the mind of the perceiver. And those perceptions are shaped by conditioning, or karma. My feelings at the time were that being dumped by Little Brown was the worst thing that could have happened to me.

My feelings, twenty years later, are only of relief.

How lucky was I to be plucked from a career in which I would otherwise have spent years immersed in imagined worlds of corruption, duplicity and evil? Is it possible to do this for decades without it having some kind of effect on your mind? Ed’s household name writer seemed to suggest not. For all his worldwide success, fame and money, he was miserly, suspicious and prickly.

Instead of that, I have spent the past 20 years discovering that external reality is more ephemeral and mind-dependent than I had ever imagined. That we ourselves are not so much passive receivers of what’s ‘out there’ as active creators of it. So, if it’s happiness we’re after, the best thing we can do is change the movie we’re projecting by taking control of where it’s coming from – our minds.

What a rare privilege to have the opportunity to explore this! To be motivated - by the books I continue to write - to deepen my understanding and capacity to communicate what I learn so that I can more effectively share it with others. In doing this, I have had a sense of returning to a much wider perspective in which my time aspiring to be a mainstream thriller writer wasn’t a high water mark, a zenith, but actually a temporary aberration.

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My precious lama, Zasep Tulku Rinpoche, sometimes talks of ‘obstacle blessings’ which come in many guises. He cautions against being overly reactive when apparently bad things happen, and of interpreting everything according to our present, narrow perspective.

The Chinese folk tale of the lost horse is a classic example. An old man loses his horse to the wild and when his fellow villagers come around wailing he just says, ‘We’ll see.’ His horse returns along with a few horse friends he picked up along the way. The villagers are happy – if somewhat envious. He just says, ‘We’ll see.’ Attempting to ride one of the wild horses, his son is thrown off and breaks his leg. The villagers wring their hands, despondently because all hands are needed during harvest time. ‘We’ll see.’ The imperial army comes around recruiting able-bodied young men. His son is exempt. And so on.

All of us, especially us sensitive, creative flowers, are prone to seizing the significance of things, concretizing them, imputing patterns where they don’t necessarily exist and heading inexorably towards full-blown catastrophe.

I pass on the ‘obstacle blessing’ concept as one of Buddha’s many opponent practices from which we can all benefit. A different way of looking at whatever may be troubling us and allowing for at least the possibility that it may turn out not to be such a bad thing – even if we can’t figure out why just yet.

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These days I am able to fulfil my life’s mission which I see as transmission. I return annually to Africa, leading groups on Mindful Safaris. I no longer see Zimbabwe as a cultural backwater so much as a place of unique reconnection. It’s not only the extraordinary animals and people who inspire me. I have also stumbled on revelations of ancient symbols and spiritual practices with direct links to India that have never before been explored. It is one of the great joys of my creative life to share these discoveries with readers on Substack and, in time, my new book: The Good Karma Refuge for Elephants.

Meditating on the banks of the Zambezi River on Mindful Safari.

I am not a major international best-selling novelist in the James Patterson or Colleen Hoover sense. You won’t find my work in airport bookstores or storming the best-seller charts. What spiritual novels ever do?

I have come to see that goal as one of a frail, egotistical creature desperate to be validated - kindy kids clapping - where no such true validation is to be found. My current reality, on the other hand, is one of authenticity and fulfilment. And in the most intriguing of ways it seems to have brought me around the full circle.

That poem I composed for Mrs. Ames in kindergarten was about a witch, a cat and the practice of magic. It seems I had to spend forty years traveling the world and getting side-tracked to find my way back to the most transcendent expression of what was in my heart all along.

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I love you - even though you’re just a warthog!

Helping raise funds to support causes like Wild is Life/Zimbabwe Elephant Nursery was not among my ambitions as a young man, but now I can’t think of anything more fulfilling or truly special. Thanks to all my paying subscribers for helping me donate to such an extraordinary cause. These are some of the gorgeous images released to celebrate World Wildlife Day.

A kudu calf with distinctive white stripes is currently taller than her elie friend. It won’t be long before that changes in a big way!

Little Marimba, the pangolin - scaly ant-eater - reveals the tip of her long, pink and very sticky tongue.

As heart-warming as these photos are, the reality is that each of these animals would be living in the wild, in their normal social structures, were it not for a massive personal loss - the loss of a mother, herd or family. Wild Is Life/Zimbabwe Elephant Nursery is dedicated to helping all the animals in their care and re-wilding them wherever possible.

Thanks to each and every one of you who are part of the circle of support that enables them to continue. We are a very special, virtual sangha around the world who join hands to practice compassion in action. I can’t think of a worthier purpose for us all to bring to our lives.

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