The Upright

Chapter Three · The Night Bus

On Courage, the Unknown, and What a Good Builder Does With Almost Nothing

I want to be precise about what I can honestly tell you.

I was three years old. My twin brother was three. Our eldest brother was seven or eight, and between us were two others, five children in total, spanning perhaps four or five years, the youngest pair of us not yet old enough to form reliable memories of specific events. What I carry from that night is not a sequence of remembered images. It is something more physical than that, a quality, an atmosphere, a particular texture that belongs to the body rather than the mind and that I have spent years learning to name and understand.

The rest I know from what was said and not said over the years that followed. From the particular quality of my mother’s silence on certain subjects. From what I pieced together gradually, the way children do, not through direct telling but through the patient accumulation of fragments, each one confirming and extending a picture that the adult world was simultaneously offering and withholding.

This is her story. The suffering, the decision, the courage, these belong to her, and I will not claim them as mine to narrate with the authority of someone who was present and conscious and choosing. I was a passenger. A very small passenger, in the dark, on a night bus with nowhere to go.

What I can tell you is what it meant to be that passenger. What was built from that night’s foundation. And what the whole arc of it, from the violence that made the departure necessary, through the terror of the departure itself, to the life that was constructed on the other side, teaches about the centred life, the upright life, and what human beings are capable of when they choose the unknown over the known extreme.

She did not leave because she was not afraid. She left because she understood, at some level that fear itself could not reach, that the unknown was safer than what she already knew.

Why People Stay

Before you can understand why my mother left, you have to understand why she stayed as long as she did. Because this is the question that people who have not lived inside that situation tend to ask, with more judgement than they usually intend, when they hear stories like hers. Why did she not leave sooner? Why did anyone stay at all?

The psychology of intimate partner violence has documented the answer to this question with considerable precision over the past three decades, and the answer is more complex, and more human, than the question implies. Staying is not, in most cases, a failure of courage or a failure of self-worth, though both of those may be factors in some situations. It is, in many cases, a rational response to a genuinely threatening set of circumstances, rational in the sense that it reflects an accurate assessment of the available options, even when those options are all bad.

Leaving a violent relationship is, statistically, the most dangerous thing a person in that situation can do. The research on intimate partner homicide consistently identifies the period immediately following separation as the highest risk period for lethal violence. The abuser, whose entire psychological structure is organised around control, experiences the departure of their partner not as the end of the relationship but as the ultimate threat to their power, and responds accordingly. This is not a theoretical risk. It is a documented pattern, repeated across cultures and contexts, that any honest account of why people stay must acknowledge.

There are also the children. The calculation of risk and safety is not made for one person but for several, and the weight of responsibility for those children, for what leaving might expose them to, for what staying might protect them from in the short term, for what the uncertainty of the unknown might cost them, is part of the impossible arithmetic that a person in my mother’s situation is trying to solve, daily, while also managing the immediate demands of survival.

And there is the erosion. Judith Herman’s work on complex trauma describes the systematic psychological effect of sustained coercive control: the gradual, deliberate dismantling of the survivor’s sense of their own reality, their own judgment, their own capacity to act. The person who has been told repeatedly, by the person whose power over their life is greatest, that their perceptions are wrong, their responses are unreasonable, their alternatives are non-existent, that person does not maintain, intact, the same relationship with their own courage and capability that they arrived with. The armour of the abuser has, as one of its functions, the task of convincing the person it is used against that the armour is necessary. That there is no life outside the relationship. That the known, however painful, is the only available world.

My mother had been living inside this for years. The fact that she left at all, that she made the decision at all, from inside that degree of erosion, with five children and no clear plan and nowhere she knew she could go, is not a small thing. It is, in the terms I now have available to describe it, an act of remarkable psychological courage. The courage not of someone who was not afraid, but of someone who acted despite being afraid, because the alternative had finally become untenable.

The Decision

There is a moment, and I believe most people who have made a significant and irreversible change in their lives can identify its equivalent, when the calculation shifts. When the fear of staying, which has always been present but has always been managed and rationalised and deferred, finally outweighs the fear of going. When the known extreme becomes more dangerous than the unknown. When the thing that was familiar stops being a reason to remain.

I do not know exactly what that moment was for my mother. I do not know what was said or done that particular night, the night my father was out, the night she gathered her five children and left. I do not know whether it was a sudden decision or the execution of something she had been preparing for, quietly and alone, for longer than anyone around her knew. That is her story, and it is not mine to tell with more detail than honesty allows.

What I know is the shape of the decision. The structure of it. The principle that it embodied, which is one of the central principles of this book, lived out in its most extreme and most costly form.

The middle way, as Chapter One described it, is not passivity. It is not the avoidance of extreme action. Sometimes, and the Buddha’s own story demonstrates this, the return to centre requires first a departure so radical that it looks, from the outside, like a second extreme. My mother’s decision to take five children into the night, onto a bus, with nowhere to go and nothing to depend on but the possibility that something better existed somewhere beyond the horizon of what she knew, this was not a measured, balanced response. It was an extreme act. A desperate act. And it was, in the deepest sense of the term I have been using throughout this book, a centred one.

Because the centre is not a comfortable position in the middle of nothing. It is the orientation point to which all action returns, the reference from which you can recognise when you have drifted too far in any direction, and toward which you must sometimes travel by a route that looks nothing like a straight line. My mother was living in an extreme that was destroying her and threatening her children. The return to centre required an act so large and so frightening that most people, in her position, could not have made it. She made it. That is the whole story of Chapter Three.

The Night Bus

I have thought about this image more times than I can count over the years. A night bus. The particular quality of a night bus, the fluorescent light, the empty seats, the strange suspended quality of being in transit in the dark, between a place you have left and a place you cannot yet name. Five children. The eldest seven or eight years old. The youngest pair of us, three years old, probably asleep or half-asleep against each other in the way that twins learn to do, because the other has always been present.

My mother, beaten almost destroyed, those are the words that have stayed with me, the words that came through the adult conversations I was not supposed to hear, sitting on that bus with nowhere to go. And choosing to be there. Choosing the cold and the uncertainty and the not-knowing over the alternative that she had finally decided she could no longer survive.

This is the image I return to when the practice of the centred life feels abstract or theoretical. When it seems like a collection of interesting ideas rather than a lived necessity. The night bus brings it back to ground. The centred life is not a philosophical position. It is a decision made in the dark, by a woman who had almost nothing, to trust that something existed on the other side of the fear.

What I know now, that she could not have known then, is that the trust was not misplaced. That the something did exist. That it arrived in the form of a man who knew her, a schoolteacher, a person of sufficient decency to look rather than look away, and who made a phone call that changed everything.

The Shepherd in the Night

The Good Samaritan is one of the oldest stories in the Western tradition, and it has survived because it describes something that remains, across cultures and centuries, both rare and recognisable. The person who stops. Who looks. Who does not cross to the other side of the road and continue on their way. Who decides that the person in front of them is their business, even when every social convention and every self-interested calculation says otherwise.

The man on the night bus was a teacher. He knew my mother, one of my brothers had been in his class, which means he knew enough of our family’s circumstances to recognise what he was looking at when he saw her. He saw a woman beaten almost destroyed, sitting on a night bus at whatever hour it was with five children, and he understood what had happened and what was needed.

What he did was not dramatic. He did not intervene in the violence: that was already over, at least for that night. He did not offer his own home or his own resources, though that would have been remarkable enough. He walked to a phone box, this is the detail I find most moving, every time I think about it, and he made a phone call. He knew someone who knew someone. A friend who was a counsellor, who ran a refuge for battered women. He made a connection between two people who needed to know each other existed, and that connection became the mechanism by which my mother and her five children were, by the end of that night, safe.

I have spent years thinking about what that man represents, and what his act teaches. He did not solve anything in a grand or permanent sense. He did not resolve the underlying conditions that had created the crisis. He did not undo the years of violence or repair the damage that had already been done. He did one thing: he noticed, and he acted on what he noticed, in the modest and specific way that was available to him.

In the Buddhist tradition, this quality, the quality of genuinely seeing another person and responding to their actual need, is one of the expressions of what is called bodhicitta: the awakened heart, the orientation toward the alleviation of suffering wherever it is encountered. It does not require dramatic sacrifice. It requires presence. Attention. The willingness to be inconvenienced by the reality of another person’s situation.

In the Christian tradition, the parable of the Good Samaritan makes the same point with the same economy. The priest passes by. The Levite passes by. The Samaritan, the outsider, the person with least obligation, the one with every social reason to walk on, stops. The question the parable asks is not who deserves help. It is who is capable of giving it. Who has the quality of attention, and the willingness to act on it, that makes them a neighbour in the deepest sense of the word.

The teacher on the night bus was that neighbour. He asked nothing in return. He made a phone call. And the chain of consequence that followed from that single act, the shelter that night, the support in the weeks that followed, the gradual rebuilding of a life, is what the chapter after this one exists to explore. Because what happened next is not a footnote to the crisis. It is the whole point.

What Post-Traumatic Growth Actually Looks Like

The psychological literature on trauma has, historically, concentrated on what trauma damages. The clinical vocabulary of post-traumatic stress disorder, the hypervigilance, the intrusions, the avoidance, the alterations in mood and cognition, describes, with considerable precision, the ways in which extreme adversity leaves its mark on the human system. This vocabulary is important. The damage is real, and naming it accurately is part of addressing it.

But in the 1990s, the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun began documenting something that the damage-focused vocabulary was not capturing: the positive psychological changes that can emerge from the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. They called it post-traumatic growth, and they were careful to distinguish it from the popular notion of resilience, the idea that people simply bounce back from adversity, returning to who they were before it.

Post-traumatic growth is not a return. It is a transformation. It describes the positive change that can occur specifically because the assumptive world, the set of beliefs about safety, meaning, and possibility that a person carries and that functions as the invisible infrastructure of daily life, has been shattered by a crisis too large to be absorbed into the existing framework. The person who survives such a crisis and engages with it honestly does not return to who they were. They construct something new: a self that is more capacious, more honest about vulnerability, more genuinely appreciative of what remains, and sometimes more deeply committed to the things that matter than they could have been before the shattering.

Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five domains in which this growth tends to appear: personal strength, new possibilities, relating to others, appreciation of life, and spiritual or existential change. My mother’s trajectory, as I understand it from the inside, maps onto these domains in ways that I find both illuminating and moving.

The personal strength is the most visible. The woman who arrived at the refuge on that night, beaten, displaced, with five children and nothing to depend on, discovered, in the process of rebuilding from almost nothing, a capacity that the years inside the marriage had not revealed. Not because it was not there, but because the conditions of that marriage had systematically suppressed it. Survivors of coercive control often describe a similar discovery: that the selfhood which was being diminished and managed was not gone, only buried. That when the conditions of the suppression were removed, it returned, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with a force that surprised everyone, including themselves.

The new possibilities are also visible. My mother built a life that the previous chapter of her story had made impossible. She built it gradually, with help, with setbacks, with the ordinary and extraordinary difficulties of raising five boys alone. But she built it. She found herself capable of things, practical, relational, professional, that the constraints of the violent marriage had foreclosed. The departure did not just end something. It opened something.

The Brick House

I want to use the image that has always stayed with me when I think about what my mother created, because I think it is the most honest and the most precise image available.

She built a brick house. Not literally, though there was, eventually, a real home, a stable roof, a place with the ordinary qualities of domesticity that the years of violence had made impossible. I mean the image in its full metaphorical weight: the structure that is built deliberately, from strong materials, with care for what it will be required to bear. The house that will stand when the straw house and the stick house have not.

What she built was not just a physical environment. It was a relational one. She created, from the resources available to her, including her own depleted reserves, the help of the refuge and the people in it, and eventually the slow accumulation of a wider network of support, a home that had the quality she had been denied for years. Stability. Predictability. The ordinary miracle of knowing that tomorrow would look like today, that the rules would not change without warning, that the atmosphere would not shift from warmth to danger without visible cause.

This is what developmental psychology identifies as the secure base, Bowlby’s foundational concept, the quality of early environment that makes healthy development possible. The secure base is not a place of perfect comfort or complete safety. It is a place reliable enough that the child can venture out from it, explore, encounter difficulty, and return, knowing it will still be there. It is the relational infrastructure of trust: the evidence, accumulated slowly through consistent experience, that the world is basically navigable, that other people can basically be relied on, and that the self is basically capable of meeting what life presents.

This is what my mother laid beneath each of her children. Not with a single grand act, not with a dramatic gesture, but with the daily practice of being present, being consistent, being the person who was there in the morning and there in the evening and the same person in both instances. After the years of unpredictability that had preceded it, this consistency was itself an act of profound care. It was the foundation stone she laid in each of us, the one that I carry still, and that has informed everything I have come to understand about what the upright life requires.

Each of us would go on to make our own choices. Some of those choices were cracks in what she had built. Some of them were tests of the foundation that the foundation, in the end, passed. That is the nature of foundations: they do not determine the building, but they make it possible. They hold when the weight comes. And the weight, in any human life, always comes.

The Courage to Embrace the Unknown

I want to return, at the close of this chapter, to the quality that makes this story matter for the central argument of this book. Not courage in the colloquial sense, the dramatic, Hollywood version of courage that consists of fearlessness and decisive action in a moment of crisis. But courage in the more honest and more interesting sense: the capacity to act in the presence of genuine fear, because the thing you are moving toward matters more than the fear of moving toward it.

The psychological literature on courage, which is a more serious and more studied topic than its popular treatment would suggest, distinguishes between physical courage and moral courage, and identifies a third category that is perhaps most relevant here: what might be called existential courage. The willingness to step outside the familiar, to relinquish the known framework and enter the unknown one, to choose the open question over the closed but painful answer.

Viktor Frankl, writing from within the extremity of the Nazi concentration camps, described the discovery that even when everything external is taken from a person, freedom, comfort, certainty, the people they love, one thing remains available: the choice of how to orient oneself toward the circumstances. The freedom to choose one’s response to what cannot be changed. This is not a comfortable teaching. It does not minimise suffering or pretend that circumstances do not matter. It simply insists that within the space of any circumstances, however constrained, there is a human freedom that cannot be entirely removed. The freedom to face the unknown without being destroyed by it.

My mother exercised that freedom on a night bus, in the dark, with five children and nothing certain ahead. She chose the unknown over the known extreme. She embraced the terrifying open question rather than the familiar closed pain. And in doing so, she demonstrated, not theoretically but in the most practical and costly way available to her, the principle that this book has been arguing from its first page.

The centre is not a comfortable position in the middle of nothing. It is the direction you are facing when you make the hardest choice available to you, from the deepest place of honesty available to you, knowing that the outcome is uncertain but that remaining where you are is no longer survivable. It is the orientation of the plumb line: not perfection, not safety, not the absence of fear. Just true.

She was true. In the most fundamental sense of the word, on the most difficult night of her life, she was true. And everything that follows in this book, every chapter of my own formation, every martial lesson, every encounter with the great Lights and their shared teaching, is built on that foundation.

What the Children Carried

There were five of us on that bus, and each of us was a different age, which means each of us was in a different developmental relationship with what was happening. The eldest, at seven or eight years old, had more explicit understanding, had seen more, comprehended more of what the years before that night had actually contained. My twin brother and I, at three, were passengers in a more complete sense: present but without the cognitive architecture to form the kind of conscious memory that the older boys would carry.

What each of us carried from that night, and from the years that shaped it, was different. Not just different in the details but different in kind. The older boys had been closer to the full weight of what the marriage had been. They had absorbed more of it with more developed nervous systems, which means in some respects they registered it more and in some respects they were more equipped to process what they registered. The youngest pair of us had absorbed it more physically, in the body, in the nervous system, in the wordless, pre-linguistic way that early experience installs itself before the mind has the tools to name what it is receiving.

The foundation my mother laid did not affect each of us equally, or in the same way, or with the same outcomes. Some of my brothers built on it well. Some tested it in ways that stressed it considerably. Some found, in their adult lives, that the damage from the years before the departure had gone deeper than the foundation could simply cover: that it required its own, separate work to address. The foundation was not a guarantee. It was a possibility. A beginning point. The chance at something better than what had come before.

Tedeschi and Calhoun, in their foundational work on post-traumatic growth, are careful to note that growth coexists with ongoing distress rather than replacing it. The person who experiences post-traumatic growth does not emerge from the crisis fully healed, free of the damage, returned to who they were before it. They emerge changed, sometimes, in certain domains, positively changed, but carrying the ongoing evidence of the struggle that produced the change. The growth and the wound exist simultaneously, in the same person, for as long as that person lives.

This is the honest version of what my mother gave us. Not the erasure of damage, that was not within her power to give. Not the guarantee of flourishing, that was not hers to guarantee. What she gave was a secure base: the relational infrastructure of consistency and warmth and predictability that makes it possible for a person to venture out into the world knowing there is somewhere to return to. The developmental literature is clear that this is what matters most in the early formation of resilience. Not the absence of difficulty. Not the prevention of all harm. The reliable presence of someone who is there, and the same, and trustworthy, and who demonstrates through the ordinary practice of daily care that the world is basically navigable and the self is basically capable.

She gave us that. Each of us in our own way has spent our adult lives in relationship with what she gave. And I, sitting here writing this, thirty years of martial practice and a terminal diagnosis survived and a series of books that began with the question of what was lost, I am the product, in more ways than I can fully account for, of a woman who made a decision on a night bus and built a temple from the aftermath.

What survived

It did not make fear disappear. I was afraid. Not constantly, not in a way that consumed everything, but in the specific, physical, sometimes overwhelming way that a person is afraid when they have been told that their life may be ending and the timing is not one they chose. The practice did not eliminate the fear. It gave me somewhere to put it. A framework within which fear was a legitimate response to an extreme situation rather than a sign that something had gone wrong.

It did not produce equanimity as a permanent state. There were periods of grief, of anger, of the particular bleakness that descends when the uncertainty is at its most unresolvable. The practice did not prevent these from occurring. It provided the capacity to notice them, to allow them their full presence without being entirely consumed by them, and to return, repeatedly, imperfectly, sometimes only after considerable time had passed, to something more centred.

What it did do, consistently and reliably, was give me a direction. A reference point to return to. When the extremes were at their most extreme, when fear was pulling toward panic, or grief toward despair, or the need to know toward a frantic searching for certainty that could not be found, there was always available, beneath the noise, the question that the practice had been training me to ask: where is the centre? Not where is comfort, or certainty, or resolution. Where is true?

That question, available when nothing else was, is what I mean when I say the centred line held. Not perfectly. Not without cost. But held. And the holding of it was not the achievement of a person with unusual reserves of spiritual fortitude. It was the outcome of a practice that had been built, slowly and imperfectly, over thirty years of daily return to the plumb line. The practice was there when I needed it because I had been doing it long before I needed it. The wall was already built. The question was only whether the foundation would bear the weight.

It did. And twelve years later, I am still building.