So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and

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What the heck is “happiness” if not a fleeting moment of peace and satisfaction; certainly not an “end state” goal in and of itself. Aim for the concrete! Fullness is easy to measure: How tired are you? How many words did you write today? How many people did you yell hello to?

The happiness that someone like Mark misses is unreal and unhealthy. He needs to learn to want a different type of relative happiness – that is, a state of reasonable contentment, with intermittent joy and pain, which, unlike the myth of a permanent bliss, can potentially be achieved. Switching from one goal to the other will involve a process of... See more

It would be ridiculous, anyway, to have figured so much out at 35. What are you going to do for the next 50 years? Settle deeper and deeper until you’re dead in the ground? It sounds much more interesting to keep being surprised by who you are and what you want.

I’m not arguing that experience doesn’t bring about wisdom, only that wisdom is an... See more

The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience, the more I find I can get into it, and the more I can be present for other people involved in it. This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavor of sadness conveyed by the Japanese

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