Meditation wasn’t prevalent at my public high school. No student I knew practiced, and no teacher I knew discussed it. I don’t remember how I encountered the word. That’s how foreign meditation was to me. 

I found a Life Magazine from 1955 on Buddhism while digging through a dusty thrift shop a few years ago. The cashier charged me $5 for it. It’s a massive magazine with a Buddha on the cover. The image they have of him is solid gold. He looks like an emperor of an Eastern nation. 

The 20-page cover story begins like this: 

“From the island of Ceylon to the islands of Japan, and throughout large sections of the Asian mainland, hundreds of millions of people―perhaps as many as 500 million―believe in a gentle and peaceable religion called Buddhism.”

To have 500 million believers is the kind of influence that seems impossible today. With that many followers on Instagram Buddha would’ve been the most significant influencer of our time.

Influence is a word I knew before meditation. Influence was felt in every room I walked in. What people wore, how they spoke, everything about them was influenced by a person, a place, or a thing. I recognized that very early and as social media introduced the influencer as a position of power, how I thought about influence changed. 

The most influential rapper of my adolescence was Lil Wayne. He was the Kobe Bryant of rap. An obsessive tester of limits that used hard work to defy logic. During Wayne’s run as one of rap’s most consistent emcees, his every verse felt like a game in Staple Center. Win or lose, Wayne, like Kobe, was like the sun, and the game they played revolved around their rising. 

I miss how it felt watching Kobe play basketball. Every time I throw a ball of paper into a trash can, I think of purple, gold, and the number eight. I miss how it felt when Lil Wayne was the biggest rapper alive. I can’t look at a tattooed-face rapper with an alien voice and codeine breath without thinking of Dwayne Carter. I can’t meditate without thinking of Siddartha Gautama. 

I forgot why I started writing this, but let me leave with one final thought: My favorite influencers are people I never forget, even when I’m not looking at an app. 

by Yoh.