On buses in the Andes, people talked, shouted, laughed, slept, and whistled, and radios played. Here, people sat in a pall of silence, as if they knew some terrible, numbing truth.

“Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” said the poet William Wordsworth.

As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field o

It’s also for people who have lived a long time with indeterminate unease, inwardly taking up residence at a fork in the road, following neither the more nor the less traveled path. Sure, life shakes us down and sweeps us along. It’s hard to shirk the currents of our nature and culture, and we find ourselves in lives that more or less make outward

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT HOW I found a path when I didn’t even know I was looking for one. For a long time I didn’t know where I wanted to be; I just knew I wasn’t there.

If what we’re looking for lies outside of imagination or calculation, we can’t know what it is until it hits us.

Another is that sometimes we make more progress when we give up. Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say: to retreat in order to leap better.

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. D. H. LAWRENCE

But what if the day when things counted was not far off, but here, now, and the closest we would get to a result was what we were seeing before us. This was the result. Perhaps in a sense there were no results—this whole universe was just doing what it did. It wasn’t interested in results, only process.