enantiadromia. The word names an underlying dynamic of time and space, that once a season has been recognized and announced, it is already beginning to leave and turn into the next.

In my early teens, I had looked around at the strange world of adults and saw with a kind of horror that almost all of them seemed to be preoccupied with the details of life in such a way that they had lost sight of the greater picture. Adults seemed to have forgotten basic elemental and joyful relationships with clouds or horizons or grass that

The interesting thing about a work life is that it is very much like a workday. Most of the hard work is done by simply turning up, facing the task at hand and moving forward, inch by inch, foot by foot, until we look around, admittedly after a much greater time than we expected, but surprised to see it has all been done.

It is writing the next word. This task elicits no sympathy from the gnarled steelworkers of this world, but put a brawny, no-nonsense, iron-fisted steelworker in a closed room with a blank page for an hour and you will soon have him donning his mask and very happily getting back to perspiring in front of hot buckets of molten steel again.

Fall in love with your own questions so that you can commensurately be disappointed by them at a later date.

The first step toward the self is the step of discerning what questions are our own, and what questions we have been bullied into by others seemingly taller, more adult or more educated than we are. A good few years ago, I spent

We can choose a work on a mere strategic, financial basis, but then we should not expect profound future happiness as a result.

Following this path through increasing levels of seriousness, we reach a certain threshold where our freedom to choose seems to disappear and is replaced by an understanding that we were made for the world in a very particular way and that this way of being is at bottom nonnegotiable.

But to start the difficult path to what we want, we also have to be serious about what we want.