After decades of stumbling, wandering, and occasionally finding my way, the path behind me has become easier to recognize. At the time, it rarely felt like a path at all—more like a series of wrong turns, lucky accidents, and lessons I was slow to learn. Looking back, though, I can see a direction. This essay is my attempt to describe it, in the hope that it offers a context for my writing and perhaps a companionable thought or two for your own journey.
Interdependence
I’ve learned that I thrive through close relationships. At first, that seemed to conflict with the spiritual traditions that warn against attachment. Over time I discovered they are talking about something different. Buddhism and Taoism encourage love and compassion while cautioning against clinging to people or possessions as the source of our identity or security.
For years I explored spiritual traditions that suited my independent nature. I found myself drawn to teachings that ask for understanding rather than belief. Buddhism and Taoism, with their emphasis on impermanence and interdependence, became lasting influences.
The more I understood interdependence, the more obvious it became that my life depends on countless others—from the people who grow my food to those who offer friendship, skill, care, and support. Gratitude follows naturally. Kindness doesn’t feel like self-sacrifice but simply the healthiest response to reality. Of course, kindness also needs boundaries. Becoming a doormat helps no one.
Fear and anger have their place. Fear sharpens awareness when danger is real. Anger can protect us or motivate needed action. Left unchecked, though, both cloud judgment and become emotional toxins.
Living at the edge of a Panamanian rainforest has reinforced that lesson. The jungle is beautiful, but it rewards awareness. Human relationships are much the same. They offer our greatest joys and, sometimes, our deepest wounds. We humans can harm one another in ways no other animal can—not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically.
Living with both compassion and caution requires attention. Whenever I’ve drifted through life on autopilot, I’ve usually paid for it later.
Science continues to reveal how deeply connected everything is. Beneath what we notice lies an intricate web of causes and conditions shaping every moment. Our senses reveal only a fraction of reality, while advances in computing, physics, and systems science continue to uncover patterns once invisible.
What fascinates me is that many Eastern traditions arrived at remarkably similar insights centuries ago through careful observation, meditation, and contemplation rather than technology. Different paths but often pointing toward the same landscape.
Impermanence
Impermanence is easier to understand because we live it every day. Our bodies change continuously. We age. Our eyesight fades, our hearing softens, our knees begin negotiating instead of cooperating. Everything we love changes as well.
Accepting this doesn’t make loss painless, but it makes life more honest. When we stop expecting permanence from an impermanent world, we suffer less from surprise.
Both Buddhism and Taoism suggest that wisdom comes not from belief but from recognizing reality as it is. Their teachings are invitations to observe and reflect, not commandments to obey.
I can’t claim to understand the Tao, the animating force connecting all, in any mystical sense. But I know what it feels like when life becomes less of a struggle. There are moments when striving quiets down and I feel less compelled to control every outcome. Instead of forcing life forward, I seem to move with it.
That doesn’t mean giving up or just drifting. My injured knees still appreciate exercise, and problems still need solving. It simply means choosing carefully where effort belongs. The Serenity Prayer captures it well: accepting what cannot be changed, changing what can, and learning the difference.
Family, friends, and even the familiar objects around me help shape the world I experience. Yet interdependence reminds me that I don’t have to earn my place in it. Connection isn’t something I achieve. It’s something I wake up to.
As I’ve grown older, my friendships have become less about security and more about affection. I value them deeply while knowing that separation and loss are inevitable.
Relationships need attention, generosity, and time. Awareness of their impermanence makes me appreciate them more, not less. Grief, when it comes, is simply love continuing after someone is gone. Remembering with gratitude honors both those we’ve lost and the life still before us.
The challenge, at least for me, has never been deciding whether to care. Caring comes naturally. The challenge is caring deeply while remembering that nothing stays the same—not relationships, not health, not certainty, not even the stories we tell ourselves.
I’ve learned that affection doesn’t weaken when it’s held lightly. In fact, it seems to grow stronger. Gratitude has become more reliable than certainty, and kindness more useful than being right.
So this is the path I keep trying to follow: stay awake, pay attention, laugh when I can, forgive when I can’t, and remember that we’re all walking each other home in some way.
For years I imagined I was searching for the path. Now I suspect the path was quietly following me all along, bending—whenever I gave it the chance—toward kindness.