From Strength to Strength

retrograde,

Personally, I have gone in the other direction instead by compiling a “reverse bucket list” to make the ideas in this chapter practical and workable in my life. Each year on my birthday, I list my worldly wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t

wanting spiritual depth is not a weakness, it is a new source of strength—strength needed to jump to the crystallized intelligence curve.

It makes no sense in modern life to use our energies to have five cars, five bathrooms, or even five shirts, but we just . . . want them. Neuroscientists tell us why.[13] Dopamine—the neurotransmitter of pleasure behind nearly all addictive behaviors—is excreted in response to thoughts about buying new things, winning money, acquiring more power or

And that means not trying fruitlessly to get ahead on a speeding treadmill by falling over and over again for marketing gimmicks. It means turning the treadmill off by managing our wants. In the words of the Spanish Catholic saint Josemaría Escrivá, “He has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself.”[19]

Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.

Even money, which people swear they like simply for what it will buy, becomes largely positional beyond a relatively low level. As

It was a moment of intense satisfaction. But here’s the interesting thing: Unlike most of the junk on my old bucket list, that satisfaction endured. That memory still brings me joy—more so than many of my life’s earthly “accomplishments”—not because it was the culmination of a large goal, but because it was a small and serendipitous thrill. It was

Over the next several days, the truth emerged to Siddhartha—that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this re