We are pointing here to a truth that is difficult to put into words; like love, attention is a gift that flows both ways. When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.

We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us.

By learning to pay attention to what’s happening in front of us, we gain more than the sensations of life; we also increase our ability to act. We’re not thinking about what’s already happened, about what might happen, about what we have to do later; we are alert to the moment, which is where any action must take place. If our intention is to connect with other people, being present is what makes that possible.

Thousands of stories from the Harvard Study show us that the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.