The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan Page A

didn’t really enjoy it. You just had to have it. With me, the boy me, it was fantasy. Fantasy like mist—mist like ivy—twining around me, enclosing me. I didn’t like it anymore. I just couldn’t make it stop.
    So I did what most addicts do at that juncture. I resolved to break the habit. From now on, I decided, I was going to pay attention . Maybe not to everything, maybe not all the time. I would begin with something small, something manageable. The walk to school, say. Yes, that would do it. I would pay full attention during the walk to school. No more daydreams. I would focus on what I saw. I would listen to the sounds—the birds, the breezes, the passing cars. I would smell the air. I would live in the experience of the moment.
    I was eight years old.
    I began the project on a Monday morning in autumn. I banged through the front-door screen with my books beneath my arm and marched off to school resolutely alert.
    Now, anyone who has ever practiced any of the Eastern-style mindfulness techniques, zen or yoga or tai chi or suchlike, knows just how incredibly difficult it is to do what I was trying to do. To be aware, to be present in the moment, to silence your own interior jibbering and face life naked-minded is, as I would later learn, the entire goal of some spiritual enterprises, the very essence of enlightenment. No wonder too. It’s hard. Most of the time we can’t even unglue our noses from our screens and devices long enough to pay attention to our internal dialogue, let alone break out of that dialogue into pure existence. Try it. Try it for sixty seconds. Complete inner silence. Not one word of thought. Utter awareness. It’s hard.
    But I tried. I walked along. I focused diligently on the tremulous green lobes of the neighbor’s pachysandra. I wondered if I’d forgotten to bring my math book. No, I had it. Now where was I? Back to awareness. The lofty clouds billowing over the sky above the ghost house. Would there be kickball at recess? I liked kickball. I could see myself sending a solid shot over the heads of the outfielders. No, no, that’s no good. Focus, focus. Look at the texture of the Macadam where it meets the stone curb. Ah, now, I’m doing it! My mind is clear. That’s amazing! It’s as if I’ve invented a whole new way of thinking. I’ll become the first truly enlightened child. Aliens will come to earth searching for our wisest human and discover, through their advanced brain scans, that it’s me. They’ll implant their alien powers in me, powers that will allow me to govern the world. With my mind so clear, so focused, I’ll be able to use those powers more wisely even than the president . . .
    And then I was at school and could not remember how I had gotten there.
    Total failure. I’d hardly paid attention for more than a consecutive couple of seconds before the dreams overtook me. But I was not yet discouraged. I tried again a second day. Again, I couldn’t get more than three or four steps before my concentration was broken by a random thought and the thought became a chain and the chain became a dream and I was gone, gone, gone.
    It was dispiriting. It was even disturbing. Was my whole life going to be strangled by a clinging ivy-mist of dreams?
    Then, on the third day: a breakthrough.
    I was walking on the longest straightaway of the journey, the stretch of Piccadilly Road that ran from the ghost house to where you turned up Devon to the school. I was passing lawn after sloping lawn and leaf-hidden home after home, psychically trying to claw the tendrils of fantasy from my mind so I could see clearly. There’d be moments of awareness, seconds of naked reality. And then a drifting thought. And the tendrils would twine back around me, thicker than before.
    I was about two-thirds of the way to the corner, almost out of time, frustrated to the point where I was beginning to consider abandoning the entire experiment. Then suddenly I spotted a high tree branch off in the