when advertised for sale, they are always worn in situations of extreme timelessness—climbing a rock face, flying a plane, sitting with your son—as if by their purchase we will be absolved of time and no longer besieged by its swift, uncaring passage.

We look for nourishment and protection in those first moments but also, ultimately, underneath it all, though we do not know it, for something that is actually preparing us one day for leaving that same loving protection, for an enabling force helping us to stand on our own two feet.

The essential understanding is that although work can so easily become a prison, if we follow that essential light which feels at times as if it was born with us and accompanies us on our way, there can be a way out of those shades of the prison house that begin to close upon the growing boy or girl.

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

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.

Like marriage and relationship, work is a constant invisible question, sometimes nagging, sometimes cajoling, sometimes emboldening me; at its best beckoning me to follow a particular star to which I belong.

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

There is that first marriage, the one we usually mean, to another; that second marriage, which can so often seem like a burden, to a work or vocation; and that third and most likely hidden marriage to a core conversation inside ourselves. We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong

The first marriage stands alone in the human imagination as one of the great primary commitments of an individual life. But it is also a metaphor for all the other commitments we must make, and its spoken vows are a representation of all the unspoken promises we make, especially with those other two, equally untamable marriages, with our work and