February 2005, Central Park. I was watching a saffron panel above my head lift and fall in the wind, without knowing it would become one of the most useful Buddhist reminders I would ever carry with me.
I was early in my career, in New York visiting a friend on rotation at a law firm, and I had gone to Central Park mostly because I had read the installation was temporary and I didn’t want to miss it.
Twenty-Six Years for Sixteen Days
Christo and Jeanne-Claude fought for twenty-six years to install The Gates. Seven thousand five hundred and three saffron panels on orange steel frames, lining twenty-three miles of pathway through Central Park. The installation stood for sixteen days, then it came down, the steel was recycled, and the park went back to being the park.
A few things fascinated me and made the installation feel so particular: the artists refused to drill into the ground. Not a single anchor. Not a single hole. Fifteen thousand steel base plates, each weighing between six hundred and eight hundred pounds, held the gates upright by weight alone.
The fabric hung from the crossbar at the top and was allowed to fall freely toward the ground. Wind moved through it. Weather moved through it. Millions of people moved through it.
Nothing fought the environment. Nothing tried to resist what was moving through it.
That was what I could not stop watching.
What Moves Through You
Years later, in a remote ashram in East Germany that I had hiked to while quietly afraid of surrendering to something cult-like, I remembered the gates while learning more about Buddhist teachings.
Listening to the phrase, “You are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions,” I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to become more like one of those gates. To provide a frame and an opening, but no resistance to whatever strange emotion, thought, or feeling decided to pass through.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to become a little more gate-like.
It has helped me tremendously, both personally and professionally.
I remember a case where I scrubbed into a repeatedly failing microsurgical anastomosis on previously radiated tissue.
The anastomosis had failed multiple times. It was the fourth attempt. Radiated tissue does not behave like healthy tissue. At times, it feels like suturing butter. I had been fighting the tissue with every trick in the book, as if technique could force biology.
What I noticed during the fourth attempt was that I had been gripping. Not the instruments. The outcome I had decided needed to happen.
That grip had been burning through everything: my read of the field, my feel for the tension, the quality of my judgment. It was more force and resistance against reality than anything else.
The image of the gates came back to me, and I loosened up. My grip on what I had decided must happen loosened as well.
Nothing changed, but I stopped fighting it.
And the anastomosis held.
High performers are told to control their inner state. Stay calm. Stay focused. Do not let your emotions affect the work.
As so often happens, it sounds reasonable. And nobody tells you how to actually do it.
Your surroundings do not change just because you decide they should. Emotions like fear arrive whether you invited them or not. Doubt arrives. Fatigue. Hunger. The flashback of something personal you thought you had parked at the door.
In short, the weather comes in regardless.
The question is never whether the weather arrives. The question is what you do when it does.
A rigid panel fights the wind. It splinters. It burns energy trying to hold. A saffron veil lets the wind pass through and remains standing.
The Buddhist formulation underneath this is simple: attachment is the root of suffering. Not the presence of difficult mental states, but the grip we take on them. The clutching. The resistance. The insistence that what is arriving should not be arriving.
That is where the splintering happens.
Not in the weather, but in the fight against it.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude probably did not set out to build a meditation tool. But I’m glad that by trying to make something beautiful that New York could walk through in winter, they did.
The Gate Principle
I started calling this The Gate Principle in my own work, because I needed a name for what I was trying to install in myself, and later to explain to others.
A gate only works because part of it refuses to move and part of it agrees to.
A frame that does not move. Your values, your clinical standards, your commitments, the decisions you made before the case started. These are fixed before the wind arrives. In the OR, this is the preoperative plan. In leadership, these are the decision rules you operate by. You do not negotiate with the frame during the storm. If it becomes negotiable during the storm, it was never truly the frame.
A veil that does move. Thoughts, emotions, sensations, intrusive self-talk, the entire internal weather system. These are attached only at the top, to the frame, and allowed to fall freely. The veil moves so the structure can remain intact.
A refusal to drill into the ground. We constantly try to anchor ourselves into permanence. We try to make the impermanent permanent. But no frame stays the same forever. You are free to change and update it whenever necessary or meaningful, according to what is important to you, not someone else. In that sense, the frame becomes self-anchored rather than ground-anchored, because it rests through its own weight.
The gate does not resist the wind.
The gate does not chase it either.
And letting the wind pass through is not softness. It is the only way to keep the structure intact.
The surgeons I trust most work this way. So do the leaders I learn from. The frame is non-negotiable: the standards, the preparation, the decision rules. What moves through them during the work, they let move through.
The Install
Name your frame first.
What are your three or four non-negotiables? The things that stand regardless of your internal weather? If you cannot name them, you do not have a frame. You have preference disguised as principle.
Write them down.
These are your steel.
Then notice where you are drilling into the ground. Where are you relying on external validation, fixation, or permanence? Each of those is an anchor you are trying to sink into concrete, and each one makes your framework dependent and ultimately inflexible.
Pull those anchors.
Then let the fabric hang and watch life move through it.
To more in life,
Nicco
PS: Forward this to someone in your life who has been trying to weld down their weather. And reply with one anchor you’re pulling this week.
