From Strength to Strength

and later in my “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic.

“Kid, there’s only one mistake you can make during a falling tide,” he said. “What’s that?” I asked. “Not having your line in the water.” I have remembered that day many times while writing this book. There is a falling tide to life, the transition from fluid to crystallized intelligence. This is an intensely productive and fertile period. It is wh

he was asked in an interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about a plane crash that killed Colbert’s father and two of his brothers when he was ten years old. Cooper had heard Colbert say previously that he had learned to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” He asked Colbert to clarify this extraordinary statement. “It’s a gift to exist,

“Is this work deeply interesting to me?” is a helpful litmus test of whether a new activity is your new marshmallow.

I will be processing my Caminos for years to come. They helped me understand much of the change and turbulence in my own life and positioned me for a vanaprastha that is fruitful. Despite my best efforts here to describe them, they are fundamentally an ineffable experience, and a highly personal one as well. “It’s your road and yours alone,” wrote

his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”[24]

You can finally relax

The forced separation from ordinary ambitions temporarily rightsizes one’s life. The Dalai Lama has often reminded me that I am “one of seven billion.” By this, he does not mean that I am insignificant or just like everyone else. Rather, he is encouraging me to zoom out from my narrow, earthbound perspective on my life, my work, my relationships, m

Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.