“For your loves to turn into contribution, pay attention only to the specific activities you love, not the outcomes of those activities. Pay attention to what you are going to be doing, rather than why. “What,” in the end, always trumps the “why.”

Ask yourself: In this role, what precisely will I be paid to do?

Ask yourself: What will a regular week in this new role look like?

Ask yourself: What will I be doing at 9 a.m. on a normal Wednesday morning, or 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon?

Another scholar of Greek myth, Karl Kerényi, made a remark in one of his books that helps me understand myth. He was discussing the goddess Artemis and noted that she is the atmosphere you sense when you are deep in nature. Think about going on a hike, moving farther and farther from the civilized world. You sense a pristine purity. That sensation is the essence of the mythic goddess Artemis. You have met her and been close to her. Now when you read about her or imagine her to be at work in you, you know with your senses who she is, and in a way who you are. She is that smell of fresh air, that unspoiled look of nature, and the special feeling of not being in the busy and noisy world or with other people. She is that whole realm of natural purity working through you. She is your natural self, or better, the spirit exuding your natural being.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

TWELVE: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

“People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I

am...I’m a cancer survivor. This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of

remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world

safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?

2.6. Setting the Standards

It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis. . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place is an extinguished piece of coal nest to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.

• Epictetus