One Apple A Day #1135
In the book Drive by Daniel Pink, there’s a beautiful chapter about mastery, one of the three vital nutrients of intrinsic motivation.
In this chapter, Pink lies down the three laws of mastery. One, in particular, struck a chord in me.
The third law states that mastery is an asymptote. Using Pink words, “You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully.”
Mastery then is unattainable.
And I feel more and more that this truth applies in particular to the mastery of life. I will never fully master life. Sometimes I feel I’m getting really close, but there’s always a gap, another step.
Life mastery is a journey, not a destination.
It’s a lifelong journey of becoming. And it’s part of the infinite journey of becoming of the universe, one with no beginning and no end.
I need to read again this amazing little story by Andy Weir titled The Egg. You can read it here.
And I also want to share a heart-melting poem by David Whyte. You can read it on his Facebook page. I just share here the last sentences, as they always make me shiver.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.