This is the irony: Buddhist meditation teachers counsel a kind of detachment that should in theory leave you neither happy nor sad. But by the end of one of these retreats, almost invariably, you're happy. And you're happy in particular ways: more appreciative of beauty, feeling more distance from ordinary anxieties, feeling more kinship with other humans and with other forms of life. You're also easier to be around--less defensive, less emotionally reactive, etc. My family always likes the post-retreat Bob, and is sorry to see him fade away as time wears on (though I find that the benign effects can be sustained in modest measure if I keep doing, say, 30 minutes of daily meditating).

In that post I wrote in early December, I said that the strikingly pleasant feelings I've had on retreats, "though warm and fuzzy, are the product of a sharp, even cold, clarity." But I didn't elaborate, and I promised to try to put a finer point on that observation when I got back from the retreat. The finer point, I guess, is more or less what I just said: a key step on this path to warm fuzziness is indeed a kind of austere detachment--a cool appraisal of your own emotions that involves dropping your instinctive labeling of them as "good" or "bad," and allows you to see them, in a sense, more clearly, and that leads them to slowly loosen their grip on you.

On this most recent retreat, I was outside doing some walking meditation around twilight, and I looked up at the horizon and saw the pink-purple legacy of a just-descended sun, set off by some barren winter trees in the foreground. I got this melancholy feeling that a winter twilight can give me. But then I examined the melancholy and suddenly it just seemed like physical waves moving slowly through my body--nothing more, nothing less, not good, not bad; its emotional content disappeared.

What happened next was interesting. With this twilight vista now uncolored by melancholy, I could focus on its sheer visual beauty. The scene had morphed magically from a source of sadness into a pleasure to behold.

Which brings us back to the irony I alluded to above: Why do certain good feelings--in this case the pleasurable appreciation of beauty--endure, indeed deepen, even as affect more generally subsides? You would think that since detachment in theory neutralizes positive and negative feelings equally, it would leave you affectively neutral, like Mr. Spock on Star Trek, who, so far as I recall, didn't spend much time reveling in life's aesthetic delights. But, as a practical matter, that's just not the way it works. Cool detachment leads to something that feels kind of warm.

And that emphatically includes warmth toward other people. I remember a day or two after my first meditation retreat, riding in a little monorail car that takes you to Newark airport from the nearby train station, striking up a friendly conversation with strangers. Believe me when I tell you I wasn't previously known for that kind of behavior. Fortunately for strangers everywhere, this phase passed.