Abundance

Yesterday, I had one of those weird experiences people sometimes share with complete strangers. At the moment I’m without a car but had to get someplace kind of far away, so I ordered an Uber. I will I admit I’m not the friendliest Uber passenger. Polite, yes, but definitely not one of those “let’s get to know each other” passengers. To my horror, from the moment I got into the car yesterday, my driver wanted to chat. My immediate reaction was, “Please God, no.”

I try very hard not to be an asshole. Let me rephrase: I try - often not very hard - not to be an asshole. What was I going to do? The guy wanted to chat, so I chatted. He was probably in his 40’s and recognized me. “I’m an actor,” I said.

“Oh yeah? What do I know you from?”

This is always a fraught question because you don’t want to have to go through your whole resume with somebody because then it gets embarrassing as you name the stuff you’ve been in only to have them go, “No… no… no…” So I just said I’d been in a bunch of random shows and hoped that would satisfy his curiosity. It seemed to.

Perhaps feeling like he could open up to a fellow artist, he started telling me about his newfound passion for singing. My immediate reaction: “Please God, no.”

Thankfully, he did not start singing.

Instead, he told me that a little about his life. He’d been in business and immigration law for years, but hated every second of it. Not so much the work but “the context,” whatever that meant. Finally, a few months ago, he quit his job. He picked up Uber as a way to make some money while he figures out what’s next.

“Good for you,” I said.

I meant it. Life is way too short to spend eight or ten hours a day doing something you hate. The singing started when he signed up for some app that lets you sing along with other people. I forget what it’s called. I gathered it’s like a social media site for singers, and he’s picked up about 10,000 followers. Which sounded like a lot to me. “Nobody knows,” he told me. His family and friends don’t know that he’s got this secret singing life.

He said it’s hard because they all know him as this one thing but he feels like he’s something different. He said I probably didn’t have to worry about that as an actor. I told him, no, it’s the same for me. People know me as a comedian and it’s hard for me to open myself up sometimes to be something other than that. When I write on this Substack, for example, I sometimes worry that I have to be “funny” when the truth is, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly funny person and most of the time, I have no desire to even try to be funny. That’s a smaller leap from lawyer to singer, but I was trying to connect. I’d long since given up on trying to make polite small talk and get back to my phone.

“Do you meditate?” he wanted to know.

I mean, we were in it now.

“I’ve tried,” I told him, “But it never sticks.”

So then he starts telling me about his journey with meditation, how he’s gotten to a point where he can routinely get to a place where he feels himself “floating above his body.” Then he tells me a couple intense stories about things that have happened to him while meditating. In one, he’s zapped back to his childhood in rural Mexico looking up at the stars with his friends. “It wasn’t like a dream,” he said. He could see, hear, smell. In another, he talked about a guided meditation where he was asked to focus on the word “abundance,” and was brought to a parking lot where he saw an elderly couple walking arm in arm.

This was during one of those every-so-often times when the Powerball reaches a billion dollars. My driver had been hitting a few different spots around town to buy some tickets. It was during his last stop that he saw the couple. The word “abundance” brought him there. “I realized you don’t need a billion dollars to live in abundance,” he said. He’s crying while he’s telling me this and apologizing for crying. I tell him it’s ok.

“I’ve never told anybody that,” he said, wiping the tears and sniffling. Why did he choose to share this meaningful experience with me? I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.

“You got a weird Uber driver today,” he said.

I agree, but I tell him I like weird.

The thing was, I kind of needed him yesterday. In the limited spiritual work I’ve been doing over the last several months, one of the things I hear a lot about are “synchronicities,” those moments when things kind of line up in unexpected but complementary ways. Motifs. This guy was a motif for me, and, I think, me for him. As he told me about his own spiritual journey, he mentioned several signposts that I also had passed. Things we share. I mostly listened because I felt like he needed somebody to talk to, and when our ride was nearing its end, I asked him if he'd ever sung in front of anybody.

“No,” he said.

“I think it’s time to start,” I told him.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it, but it’s hard to put yourself out there. I’m not exactly sure what people get when they perform in front of an audience.”

I told him there’s only one way to find out. Besides, I told him, he’s already got 10,000 followers on his singing app. He’s already singing to people. Now he just needs to take the next step and do it at an open mic or a karaoke night. I think he will. I think he needed somebody to get into his car and listen and give him a nudge.

And I needed somebody to remind me to continue to be open and to listen and to pay attention. Everybody has an amazing story. Everybody can do amazing things. We’re more than we sometimes let ourselves believe we are. Little reminders like the one I got yesterday mean so much if we allow ourselves to be open to them. If you pay attention, the world is filled with abundance.