WISHING YEAR, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Noelle Oxenhandler is the author of two previous nonfiction
books, A Grief Out of Season and The Eros of
Parenthood. Her essays have appeared in many national and
literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times
Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Vogue, Tricycle,
Parabola, Utne Reader, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She
has taught in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence
College and is a member of the creative writing faculty at Sonoma
State University in California. A practicing Buddhist for more than
thirty years, Oxenhandler is the mother of a grown daughter and
lives in Northern California.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　“Inspiring . . . fascinating . . . Similar in style to
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, The Wishing Year
offers a thoughtful approach to the notion that we can create
change simply by signifying our intent.”—Sunday
Oregonian
　　“Readers will enjoy watching Oxenhandler
realize her dreams through diligence, hard work and a ‘willing
suspension of disbelief’ in the captivating magic of
wishing.”—Publishers Weekly
　　“[Oxenhandler] mines her
quotidian ups and downs during a twelve-month period with the
exacting honesty and hopefulness of a Buddhist Anne Lamott. . . .
[An] endearing combination of meticulous research and winsome
enthusiasm.”—Kirkus Reviews
　　“Recommended . . . joyful
and humorous reading.”—Library Journal

　　Chapter One
　　January
　　Shrines: Honoring Desire
　　It’s New Year’s Day: bright and cold, with wind moving through
the tops of the eucalyptus trees and silver clouds gathering in the
distance. Beside me on the table are the remains of last night’s
rather quiet celebration: in a glass bowl, four walnut sailboats
float on water, their mission accomplished. Bobbing in a small sea
of varying good fortunes, each made its way to one particular
rolled-up paper message, tied with a gold ribbon. Mine read: “This
year you will make a remarkable voyage to a place you’ve never
been.”
　　Hawaii?
　　Whenever I encounter the word voyage, the word Hawaii springs up
like a flower. For as long as I can remember, it’s been my wish
place, a place in whose actual existence I’ve never fully believed.
I’ve looked through travel books, gazed at other people’s
photographs, and tried to imagine myself actually there among its
iridescent green valleys, its waterfalls and lava beds, its banks
of plumeria, hibiscus, and bromeliad. Yet Hawaii has always seemed
out of reach to me, a place for which I lacked some crucial piece
of paper, a ticket or permit saying, “Let her pass.”
　　In any case, I already sense that the fortune I’ve drawn is about
a different kind of voyage—not so much to a place as to a different
state of mind.
　　Fortunes, oracles, signs, and omens: don’t they belong to the
same family as the wish? They all spring from that great human need
to gain some purchase on the future—if not actually to alter its
course, then at least to see into its shape, discern its contours,
its pattern of light and dark.
　　When I look up the word wish in the dictionary, here’s what I
find: it comes from the Middle English wen, and is related to the
Latin venus as well as venom (originally a kind of love potion) and
to venereal (referring to love disease), along with venison
(containing a link to hunting).
　　Already, in that one small word, so much is gathered: desire,
danger, seeking. It seems in itself a kind of omen for the
“remarkable voyage” I’m about to embark on. But let me begin by
laying my cards on the table, alongside the glass bowl with its
four walnut boats.
　　Like most people I know, I have a long list of wishes for the
world around me. However, when it comes to things on the cosmic
scale— things as immense and complex as ending war, hunger,
poverty, disease, and the destruction of the natural environment—I
don’t yet have much faith in the power of wishing. Perhaps such
faith will emerge as I move forward, but for now I need to focus on
a smaller scale. Using my own life as a petri dish, I’m going to
start with the two wishes at the top of my personal list.
　　One is to be spiritually healed. The second is to buy a
house.
　　Is it crazy, a kind of blasphemy even, to set these two cards
alongside each other, as though they belong to the same deck?
　　Not long ago, while I was slumped on the sofa late at night, I
happened to catch a popular TV evangelist who was dressed to the
nines with big hair, major earrings, and bright makeup. “I’m
expecting radical favor!” she beamed, raising her bejeweled hands
toward God in His heaven. “I’m expecting favor, blessings, and the
best cut of meat in the house!” Her audience beamed back from their
stadium seats, as though God, at that very moment, was processing
their order for prime rib.
　　Where does such chutzpah come from? I wondered. When I was young
I was taught not to engage in petitionary prayer. Or rather, I was
taught that it was all right to petition God for things of the
spirit, but not for things of the world. Ask and ye shall receive,
I was taught. But it was understood that what ye asked for was
grace, peace, forgiveness—not jewels on your fingers or Angus
beef.
　　Of course, you might pray for someone who was ill to be healed,
for someone who’d lost his job to find employment, for a family
whose house had burned to find shelter—but such specific requests
for divine intervention in earthly affairs were reserved for dire
occasions, for situations of acute suffering and drastic need.
Though God was omnipotent and omniscient, the source of time and
the end of time, He didn’t have time to fritter away. He had to
focus on matters of supreme importance—sustaining the universe from
moment to moment, forgiving sins, granting life everlasting. You
didn’t badger Him for lesser favors, and you trusted Him to take
care of your deepest needs.
　　A few nights ago I was invited to join a gathering of women in a
beautiful house in Sausalito, which is just south of where I live.
They ranged in age from thirty to sixty-something, and among them
were therapists, artists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs. They
were an impressive group: highly educated, well traveled, creative,
accomplished, and spiritually oriented. Though most of them had
never met me before, they were gracious and welcoming. And yet as
the evening wore on, I began to feel very estranged. After dinner
our hostess lit the logs in the fireplace and asked us to gather in
the living room. Flopped on the sofa, chairs, and pillows in front
of the fire, we were invited to share our wishes for the coming New
Year. One by one, around the circle, each woman spoke—and as the
ritual went on, I felt more and more uncomfortable.
　　“I wish for world peace,” the first woman said. Then, after only
a slight pause, she continued, “I want to develop a new product
line. And I want to lose weight.” The next woman began, “I wish to
become more forgiving. I wish for a boyfriend. And new client
referrals.” And so it went around the circle until it was my
turn—and I could barely speak. I stammered something vague and
abstract about “seeking more balance in my life,” and then—when
they went out to the garden to light candles—I slinked away in the
dark.
　　Driving home, I tried to figure out what was the matter with me,
why I had fled from a group of kind and intelligent women who were
openly and sincerely articulating their desires. That’s when I
realized: I’m a terrible wish snob. It’s not that I mean to be.
It’s that somehow I grew up with a powerful wish hierarchy in
place. Under this regime, it’s okay to wish openly for compassion
or world peace. It’s okay, if someone asks you what you want for
your birthday, to say you want a sweater or a bracelet. It’s okay,
if you’re having a conversation with your friends, to say you want
to find a lover or switch careers or lose ten pounds. But in a
ceremonial setting, to openly declare certain desires for personal
happiness, and to set them alongside more universal and spiritual
goals as if they were all simply part of a continuum: that’s
taboo.
　　Recently, while reading a magazine, I came across a letter that
John F. Kennedy received from his mother during the last year of
his life. “Dear Jack,” she wrote, “In looking over my old diary, I
found that you were urged on one occasion, when you were five years
old, to wish for a happy death. But you turned down this suggestion
and said that you would like to wish for two dogs instead.”
　　Clearly, the little boy hadn’t yet grasped the hierarchy of
wishes, and that’s partly what makes the story comic. It
presupposes a certain spiritual framework, one in which adults do
not merge the categories because to do so is actually a serious
matter, a metaphysical breach. And indeed when I dare to say in the
same breath, “I want to be spiritually healed and I want to buy a
house,” I feel a visceral dread, a sinking in my gut, and an
impulse to run for cover like a scared rabbit in an open field.
It’s the feeling that something out there in the universe, some
form of the powers that be, is going to swoop down and do me
in.
　　But heck: here I am, living in northern California, the land of
Putting It Out There. Which is to say, the land of unabashed
articulation of desire, a place where one out of every three people
subscribes to the belief that—so long as what we want does not
cause harm to others—the universe wants us to be happy. And if only
we will take the time (1) to discover what it is we really want,
(2) to focus and articulate this desire, and (3) to remove the
obstacles that arise in the form of certain negative thoughts and
habitual behaviors— the universe will cooperate with us to bring
about our goals.
　　When I returned to California thirteen years ago, the move was
not just a huge geographical shift. I was also trying to shed a way
of life that was the opposite of Putting It Out There—a way of life
that might have been called Warding It Off or even Making It Hard.
Why is it that some of us seem drawn to hardship as if it’s a
magnet, entranced by the uphill road? Isn’t our behavior
counterrevolutionary, unadaptive, like fish trying to swim without
fins or birds clipping their own wings?
　　Of mixed Jewish and Catholic heritage, I grew up with an
alertness to suffering and a fear of disproportionate earthly
happiness that seemed equally reinforced by both traditions.
　　Consider the Jewish custom of breaking a glass at a wedding. Many
people believe that it symbolizes the breaking of the bride’s
hymen, but some scholars tell a different story. In a village in
medieval Poland, a distinguished rabbi came upon a wildly exuberant
wedding party. Amid the laughter, the feasting and dancing, the
rabbi grew anxious. The joy was so intense and uncontained that it
was bound to catalyze misfortune. The solution? Break a glass, in
order to restore a proper sense of measure. Create a small
disaster, in order to stave off the looming presence of a big
one.
　　That solution makes perfect sense to me. It’s a kind of
mathematics of existence, a chemical equation: too muc…