A few days ago, my toddler saw a bird with a very long tail. It was a pin-tailed whydah sitting high in a sycamore tree in our local park. A rare sighting in Los Angeles.
There we were, my boy and me enjoying a moment neither of us knew would happen. He talked about the bird when he got home. Much of life happens that way—unexpected and hard to plan for.
It’s a vulnerability I have learned to embrace. We're often taught to look for fulfillment elsewhere. In the next version of ourselves.
The underlying promise is that a better life lies just beyond our reach. But what if we've been looking in the wrong direction? To be truly well, should we be doing and wanting less and paying more attention?
The experts seem to think so. In college, I spent a week trying to live like a Stoic for the student newspaper. The experiment failed, but the idea stuck: some of life's deepest satisfactions emerge when we stop striving for an outcome.
In Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, a character observes: "When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions." I've come to think the same might be true of us.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
