The Things You Cannot Pursue

Some of the things we want most in life cannot be reached by going after them.

Sleep arrives only when we stop trying to fall asleep. Humility belongs to people who are not performing it. Spontaneity dies the moment it is planned. Charisma, flow, presence, ease, even much of what we call happiness-these are what the philosopher Jon Elster called essentially byproduct states. Pursue them directly and they vanish. Walk past them, intent on something else, and they appear at your side.

The Things You Cannot Pursue is a careful, contemplative book about that hidden architecture of human life. In four acts, it traces the paradox across the rooms where almost everyone has felt it-the bedroom at three in the morning, the dinner party, the first date, the empty page, the kitchen at the end of a long day-and asks why the world should be built this way at all.

Drawing on Aristotle and the Zen masters, on Sartre and Viktor Frankl, on Simone Weil and Rainer Maria Rilke, on cognitive scientists from Daniel Wegner to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the book gathers what philosophy, contemplative tradition, and modern psychology have learned about a single recurring shape: that certain qualities of being arise only as side effects of attention given outward. Then it walks the framework through ordinary life-work, love, parenting, illness, grief, aging, ambition.

This is not a self-help book. It does not offer techniques. Techniques are part of the trap. What it offers is a vocabulary for a class of human experience that has been hiding in plain sight, and a way of standing differently in the rooms of an ordinary life.

For readers of Pico Iyer, David Whyte, Oliver Burkeman, Maria Popova, Iain McGilchrist, and anyone who has ever lain awake at three in the morning trying to fall asleep.

A book to read slowly, in an evening or two, and return to across the years.