From the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to …? That’s what we do to ourselves—or try to—when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.

You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself off from it.

But you have one advantage here: You can reattach yourself … He [God] has allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he’s allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.”

And always the same question: How do you experience that whole? So many different ways: meditation, prayer, a walk in the desert. And sometimes, by letting go of the big things, which lets you notice the small ones.

My beloved student, Petriana Dantika Monize, passed away a week ago while I was in Israel. I’d visited with her the week before I left, not suspecting it would be my last time seeing her. A beautiful memorial was conducted for her at the zendo, and I listened on Zoom as so many people, especially family members, talked with emotional eloquence about this remarkable being. But nothing stayed with me like the words uttered by her niece: “She loved the little parts of all of us.”

I was in Israel for some 11 days, and the big things can sometimes drive you crazy: Lebanon, Iraq, Bibi, Trump, elections, Palestinians, Jews, Israelis. I relaxed by watching World Cup soccer matches broadcast from this Northern Hemisphere to the television screen in my sister’s living room. That was just going blank, barely paying attention.

What is it to love the little parts of us?

On yesterday’s 12:30 am train from Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv Airport, a 6-month-old baby girl stares at me with wide, dark eyes, a fringe of hair curling above her forehead. The Arab mother is watchful, her father delighted. They’re going to Greece for 4 days. Her feet are bare in her mother’s lap because it’s a warm evening, though nothing like the 105 degrees in the Dead Sea several days ago. It will be hot in Greece, they inform me, never taking their eyes off the little girl.

It’s her first plane trip, they seem way more excited than she is, and it occurs to me that this is the family’s seed. It will bloom, she will grow up, they will have more children, and this 2-hour flight to Greece is just the beginning of a big odyssey.

Before boarding the train, I negotiate my way from my sister’s car across the busy street to the train station with a backpack and valise. The escalators take me down down down, deep underground (I’ve been told that this new train station was built to survive even a nuclear attack). Right by the entrance I look to the right and there sits a thin, bearded man with the black gabardine suit of the ultra-orthodox Jews, wearing black shoes and hat in the warm evening—and a tiny yellow balloon over his nose.

“It’s tilted,” I tell him. I’m too weighed down to give him money.

He nods slowly, as if to say: Of course it’s tilted. What isn’t?

Before that, I run into my sister’s next-door neighbor, an elderly woman, in the apartment building’s hallway. “Parlez francais?” she demands. In that same warm evening she wears stockings and pumps with sensible heels, a knee-length skirt and a button-down jacket over her blouse. Also, a gold choker around her throat.

“English is better,“ I tell her.

She glares at me and says that she must call her children because she urgently needs to leave but can’t open her telephone. I start explaining that my own mobile is closed while I’m abroad—I rely on WhatsApp—till I notice her Indian caregiver rolling her eyes from the doorway, as if to say: You and I are sane; she’s not.

So no, I won’t give you big news about where I’ve traveled these 11 days because, like Dantika, it’s the little parts that I love. Get rid of the big ones—the threatening headlines, the luring advertisements, splashy promises of new technologies, the assertions of politicians and the accusations of perfidy by those who run against them, the posturing and magical tricks that pretend to be leadership. Give me the small parts and I will love them.

At the airport, in the very early hours, the Muslim grandmother is covered in black from head to toe as she happily carries a bag of McDonald’s burgers for her family two tables away. She hasn’t passed my table when she’s followed by the tall man with straight blonde hair waving down to his waist. It seems as if every single human, from little child to the very elderly, is pulling a small, colorful piece of carry-on luggage (they call it trolleys here).

Since the world’s currency has changed from the American dollar to individual attention, with vampire-like governments and corporations vying for every single iota they can suck out of us, the headlines become bigger, the advertisements splashier. The handsome face of Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer star (looking remarkably like Tom Cruise), stares down at us from the round wall of the big food and shopping complex in an ad for a bright red futuristic car.

I look at the cleaning cart pushed quietly by a dark-skinned, mustachioed man, mops and brooms dangling from the side, wandering around the tables as if he’s lost. Is he Arab? An Ethiopian Jew? A Sri Lankan (I saw many working in the dining room and kitchen of our Dead Sea hotel).

When you stop following the big parts, you begin to recognize yourself, masses of us going through the tiny business of our lives, waiting to board the early morning planes, or else serving those us  pulling trolleys or, seated at a table, examining what we bought in the enormous duty-free store. When we follow the big parts, we miss the life force, the vibration under the relentless conversation, the calling out after children, and the confiding asides of couples. We see the clothes and the colors, hear a million languages, and miss the air in between, the presence throbbing in silence.

Do you have to get old to finally pay attention? Do you have to be close to death to see what has always been so obvious?

Here comes the man with his cleaning cart again. It’s 3:45 in the morning, a difficult shift. I think I know why Dantika loved the little parts in all of us. Right this morning, I love them, too: boys slapping hands over World Cup scores, a young Japanese woman wearing a red sweater and searching anxiously for her passport—look closely and see how none of us are really who we think we are, regardless of the desperation we invest to persuade ourselves otherwise.

It’s not our money that brought us into this world, it’s not our stuff we packed so carefully. If we don’t even belong to ourselves, how can we say that the handbag belongs to me, or the purple carry-on, or even the missing passport?

A weary woman waits to board her flight to New York, loving the little parts of everyone around her, drifting, as Fernando Pessoa once wrote, but never straying.