James Doty was twelve years old in the summer of 1968. Living in the high desert of Lancaster, California, he was, in his own words, “beginning to go down the path of being a delinquent.”
Among his transgressions had been slapping a nun, during what was to be the last day of a brief stint at a Catholic school. (In his defense, she did slap him first, thinking he had done something which he hadn’t done.)
One day that summer he was looking to buy a new plastic thumb for some tricks he was learning to do. He wandered into a magic shop — and things would never be the same.
The owner of the shop wasn’t there. The owner’s mother, Ruth, visiting for six weeks, was minding the store while he was out.
The story plays out in Doty’s book, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart.
Day after day, he would return to the shop and she would teach him a different kind of magic, one of personal rewiring, which involved the techniques we now call mindfulness and visualization. During those weeks, Ruth would change the course of his life.
Ruth was, according to his 2016 interview with Krista Tippett of On Being, an “earth mother type . . . wearing a muumuu with this flowing grey hair.” She had a “radiant smile.” No one could have expected what happened as a result of their time together:
When I met her, I had limited to no possibilities. After that six-week period of time, I suddenly had this vision that anything and everything was possible.
He would never see her again.
Doty would go on to become a preeminent neurosurgeon, but it was not a straight road. A night of drinking with fellow residents turned into an accident in which he was seriously injured and treated at Walter Reed, his own hospital. That near-death experience affected him deeply:
I woke up in that hospital bed, and I remembered just how far I had come from that orange Sting-Ray bike and a summer spent in a magic shop. What I didn’t know then was how far I still had to go.
He was not talking about his career but his personal development.
The career worked out just fine. In addition to his success as a surgeon, he revived one medical technology company and was an investor in many other highfliers during the dotcom era. He was worth tens of millions of dollars:
I had everything I had ever dreamed of having. People respected me. People deferred to me. I had just agreed to purchase a private island in New Zealand and had wire-transferred the down payment. I owned a penthouse in San Francisco and a villa in Florence overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. I had wealth beyond my wildest imagination, accomplishments that I would put up against anyone else’s in medicine or business.
Then it all fell apart.
Most of the investments crashed. He was effectively bankrupt because he had borrowed money to buy the properties (and to fund his fast life style). The debt was still there but the assets were a fraction of what they had been. And his personal life was a mess.
It seemed that all of my friends disappeared almost as quickly as the zeros in my bank account. There were no more free drinks, free meals, VIP seating at the best restaurants.
When he was flush, he had put his stock in the company he had rescued into an irrevocable trust for the benefit of some charities, so that was out of his reach.
But then he got a call from his lawyer saying the paperwork for the trust had never been signed. The stock was still his. He remained a very wealthy man.
After thinking about it, he called back and told the lawyer he wanted to complete the transaction to fulfill his original intention, in the process giving up a fortune. (As he was hanging up the phone he heard the lawyer say, “Holy shit.”)
The subtitle of Doty’s book references the “mysteries of the brain and the secrets of the heart.” As to the former:
Every time I’m in the position to open a person’s skull, it’s extraordinary in the sense that this is where we live. What you see is these hills and valleys that are sort of pinkish, and you see blood vessels coursing over the surface. There’s a membrane where fluid is, and it’s pulsating. And that pulsating is matching the rhythm of your heart. And to think that within that is who each of us is.
While his skill as a neurosurgeon and his role as a clinical professor at Stanford University restored his financial situation, it was connecting the mysteries of the brain with the secrets of the heart that would motivate his work going forward. He created the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford, of which the Dalai Lama was the founding benefactor. (I love this picture of the two of them together.)
I was intrigued by Doty’s story after hearing his On Being interview, starting with that improbable moment of opening the magic shop door of discovery. While I didn’t read his book for several years thereafter, I returned to the interview several times, often pondering those moments of serendipity in a person’s life that would prove to be pivotal. (Of course, for me the moment on Highway 75 in Luverne, recounted in the first part of this story, is the biggie.)
As I continue to age, I wonder how many more of those moments lie ahead.
Unfortunately, aging involves loss — of family, of friends, of places and customs and people near and far who shaped the world that formed us. Some of those losses are tectonic on their own and there is a cumulative effect.
And then there is the degradation of the body and/or mind — for some of us, more quickly than others — which generally proceeds at a pace that can’t be predicted. Oddly enough, for me the handful of health issues that I’ve had over the last twenty years have each had an element of discovery to them, in terms of new learning about the science involved and about my own reaction to my changing circumstances.
The great risk, certainly for me, is allowing life to get smaller, returning again and again to the comfort of the same environment, people, and ideas. So much of what is familiar to us is essential to who we are; the point is not to pitch it all out, but giving yourself (myself!) the opportunity for some magic is critical. To cite a famous quote from Eleanor Roosevelt:
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Today marks a year since I have written one of these postings. That tells me I need to step up my game (and not just my writing game). Not that there hasn’t been some magic in the intervening months — in a hospital bed, in Honduras, and some other odd places away from my normal routine.
I was going to write about Doty in February but couldn’t get started. I decided to give it another shot in July, but after a few minutes of research I discovered that he had died six days before. That produced more thoughts about his life story and his work (all of which he attributed to his encounter with Ruth) — but no words from me.
I am a long way from being twelve years old and yet I believe it’s still possible to walk into a magic shop of one kind or another and be changed by the experience. May we all be blessed with those kinds of opportunities.