If it weren’t for the two broken swimming pools, I might never have discovered Rev. Kusala, Urban Dharma, and an important part of who I am.

First, the pool at the YMCA went mysteriously and suddenly out of commission. My friend Crickett called the day before Thanksgiving to tell me the news. In fact, when the phone rang, I’d just been putting together my swim gear.

 “No one knows what’s wrong or how long it’ll take to repair,” she reported.

A month or so later, the water had been drained out, with just a tiny spit of it at the bottom, and a rope hung over the door to it to keep people out of the glass-enclosed area. The prognosis was dire, said the staff; it seemed beyond repair, and much money needed to be raised to replace it. It was a sad and eerie sight. I cheered myself by imagining the fun of having a party in the bottom to celebrate its years of happy service.

Then, I trundled down to my backup pool, the one behind my apartment building. The reason I’d chosen this place to live was its proximity to two pools. Swimming had become an essential part of my life when my life had fallen apart seven years earlier; what might have seemed like an indulgence before that, now was a necessity. 

It was chilly out, but I decided to brave the weather because I needed my swim. I’d practiced gentle hatha yoga for years now, too, but I had become accustomed to the more rigorous workout of my laps. Sure, there were many other ways to get my heart rate up, but none came with the peaceful quiet that I found myself craving. Running wasn’t for me. Jumping around in aerobics classes wasn’t for me. Treadmills at the gym definitely weren’t for me. I loved to walk, but finding a quiet place where I could walk without interruption of traffic meant getting in the car and hassling with traffic, which seemed as ridiculous as rushing manically to yoga.

It was in the absence of the swim that I realized what was most important about it. It was the very thing that drove some people crazy: The quiet, repetitive calm of doing laps, where no one could interrupt me. The rhythmic, meditative breathing. Because of my swimming, I had been meditating for at least an hour each day for seven years now and not even realized it. No wonder I was missing it.

And now, a development that seemed too ill-timed to be true: a sign on the gate that announced the backyard pool, too, was out of commission, “Until further notice,” it announced, vaguely, cryptically.

I grumbled my way back to the Y. I hated “doing machines” there. But I needed the rigor of the exercise.

A few days later, after a week or more without the swim, I noticed how hard it was for me to focus. How crotchety I was feeling. I really needed that peaceful, focused time, but I wasn’t sure how to get it. In devoutly Buddhist Bhutan, where I’d spent a lot of time over the last few years, I’d gone to a weekly sitting with a monk and always enjoyed that experience—the quiet, the community, the act of a roomful of people breathing together. It had a similar effect to walking along the ocean, which was miles away from where I lived. Where would I find the same experience here in Los Angeles without driving miles on a crowded highway?

As I’d taken to doing when I needed the answer for everything, I went online. I can’t remember what search words I used, but I did discard a lot of sites and podcasts that didn’t feel quite right. 

Soon after, I found just what I was looking for: Urban Dharma. Within minutes, I was listening to Rev. Kusala, “coming to you live from Downtown Los Angeles.” My neighborhood! I delighted in the fact that despite the enormous, wonderful resources available from around the world right at my fingertips, the inspiration I found online was from not only the very city where I lived, but the actual neighborhood where I lived, too. And yet, of course this was true. These strange bits of life coincidences always seemed to happen.

I listened some more and some more. How close could he be to me, I wondered? Koreatown, said Rev. Kusala. I kept listening, voraciously consuming Kusala’s interviews with other monks who lived just miles from my home, his musings to high-school students in religion classes around Southern California, even a video a friend had produced for him. I was entranced with his personal story of how he came to Buddhism and his funny stories about pop culture and the Buddhist precepts. The only thing certain about life is that it will change. I’d learned that lesson again with the swimming pool issue; how silly I was to think it would just never be different. And yet, goodness had come out of the downed pools, underscoring the interconnectedness of everything: there I was, soaking up the Dharma, learning to meditate, without the chlorine or the swimming pool. 

My birthday came, and I celebrated, ironically, with a sinister twist, in Death Valley; I was turning forty-five after all, and had to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. The drive across the valley alone in my tiny convertible was transcendent—miles of openness and just the occasional other car. Rain began to spit from the sky, and I kept driving with the top down. I imagined all the way to my destination what it would have been like to cross this terrain on a horse, like so many did years ago in search of a better life, in search of gold. I knew by now that another place and vast riches weren’t the goal, but I knew I’d been on a quest. Later, I sat on the back porch of the beautiful inn where I’d treated myself to a short stay, listening to Rev. Kusala, and swimming happily in a fully functional, perfectly warm pool filled with water from hot springs deep within the Valley. The solitude of the surrounding gigantic unspoiled wilderness provided the backdrop for my happiest birthday in memory, and it underscored how swimming and meditating were a crucial part of the rest of my life. When I returned, I finally was ready. I sleuthed out Rev. Kusala in person at the zendo in Koreatown on a Wednesday night and settled right in.  He never seems surprised by newcomers, since he was one himself long ago, but he does always seem happy that people are listening. That they come in is a byproduct of beaming out his philosophy to the world.

It was in this way, slowly and very fast, too, like all awakenings, that I learned how important Buddhism was becoming to me. And it stuck, even after the return of the swimming pool in the backyard. The one at the Y never got back in service, but it doesn’t bother me so much anymore.

Lisa Napoli has served as a reporter and host for the public radio show Marketplace and as an Internet correspondent and columnist for MSNBC. She is the author of Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned on My Accidental Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth.