Seneca said a good way to know whether something is worth pursuing is whether it has an endpoint.
Unnatural pursuits have no endpoint. Fame, excessive wealth, power, praise—it’s hard to know what’s enough.
With natural pursuits, the goal is to finish what is in front of you right now. This newsletter. This mile. This meal. This phone call. These dishes. This conversation.
When I go for a run, if I don’t force my mind to stay present, it naturally goes to the future, to all the things I still have to do that day. It zaps my energy. Same with writing. If I start thinking about the next paragraph, the sentence I’m writing goes slack. It always does when my attention is not fully in it.
Because the problem with thinking into the future is that the future does not exist.
C.S. Lewis said that we’re biologically inclined to point our passions and pursuits toward the future. Because of this, “nearly all vices are rooted in the future.” Fear, greed, lust, worry—they all exist in the future, built on the anticipation of some outcome.
The present is the only place where goodness is found. And…
The Present Is Full of Good Fortune
In 1994, Anthony Russo, a captain in the Colombo crime family, was convicted of racketeering and violent crimes connected to the murders of two members of a rival faction. In 1999, a federal judge gave Russo a life sentence. Because it was federal, he’d have no chance for parole. He would die in prison.
In 2018, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill called the First Step Act was signed into law. This act changed federal compassionate release procedures and allowed incarcerated people to ask courts directly for sentence reductions. After serving 29 years in prison, Russo applied for compassionate release. It would be up to Judge Frederic Block to decide his fate. Should he free him? (“What would you do?” he asks the reader in his fascinating book A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It.)
For most of the decades Russo spent behind bars, there was no First Step Act. There was no realistic reason good behavior might someday help free him. And yet, Russo kept working on what was in front of him. He earned his GED, completed more than 40 educational courses, maintained a steady work assignment, and went 21 years without a single disciplinary infraction—a hard thing to do in a place with so many arbitrary rules. Prison staff described him as a ‘model inmate,’ ‘considerate, respectful, hard-working,’ and deserving of ‘a second chance.’ One supervisor wrote, ‘Mr. Russo has consistently shown a desire to not only better himself and the people around him but to improve his environment and community to the best of his abilities.’
Judge Block would eventually call his rehabilitation “extraordinary,” and though he denied most bids for early release, he granted Russo’s. In 2022, at the age of 70, Russo walked free.
Block cited numerous reasons for his decision, but the one that tipped the scales in Russo’s favor was how hard he had worked to become a better person despite having no hope for freedom.
Whatever Russo imagined about the future, the record he built was made out of things immediately in front of him. This class. This job. This day. This choice. His future had been closed off, but his present remained wide open.
After nearly 30 years of creating his own good fortune, he had stacked up a debt that luck would eventually have to pay.
Cultivate Your Own Garden
In Voltaire’s Candide, Candide and Cacambo, weary from their travels, stumbled upon the village of Eldorado, a literal utopia. Its people lived in harmony. There were no courts, no prisons, no religious disputes—only peace. Jewels of extraordinary worth—what the locals called “pebbles”—scattered the roads. Yet to the people who lived in Eldorado, the jewels were as unremarkable as dirt; wealth was shared, not hoarded.
At first, Candide enjoyed the serenity of Eldorado and the pleasant yet unfamiliar feeling of contentment.
But soon restlessness crept in.
A force began to work on Candide, not unlike the devil on your shoulder C.S. Lewis wrote about—the voice that creeps in when you’re absorbed in the present. Why don’t you get a bite to eat? It suggests. You protest: not now, I’m in the middle of something important. Yes, the voice agrees. Much too important to do on an empty stomach.
Thomas Merton called it by its oldest name: hurry.
“Hurry,” he wrote, “ruins saints as well as artists.”
Hurry is always trying to get us to be something else, to go somewhere else, to do something else. Hurry wants the payoff. Hurry is concerned with the future.
Hurry began to rattle Candide out of his stillness.
He thought of Cunégonde. Had he not set out on this journey to find her? Was she not suffering somewhere, waiting for him? His love for her, undimmed by time or reason, now burned all the brighter against the stillness of Eldorado. He convinced himself that this, above all, was why he must leave.
But there was more to it than that.
The wealth that meant nothing to the Eldoradians filled Candide with a new hunger. The “pebbles” he had accumulated might not be worth much here, but in the outside world, he would be a rich man. He envisioned himself returning to Europe, pockets brimming with gold, dazzling the world with tales of his journey. How pleasant it was to be on the move, Candide said to his friend, Cacambo. To be noticed back home, to brag about one’s travels. Why stay put when there is so much power and glory to seize?
With that, Candide and Cacambo sought Eldorado’s king to ask permission to leave.
The wise ruler, having seen too many men before mistake gold for happiness, counseled, “When one is tolerably well off somewhere, one ought to remain there.”
The advice fell on deaf ears. The ruler granted their request and the pair set out. As Voltaire writes, “our two happy wanderers resolved to be happy no longer.”
It takes Candide the rest of the book to understand the king’s warning. The pursuit of “the best of all possible worlds” brings misery, disappointment, and no shortage of scammers. The pursuit of absolute perfection is futile. The pursuit of practical goodness and happiness is not.
Eventually, Candide stops pursuing the impossible and buys a small farm. After all his wandering, he finally takes root and decides to cultivate his own garden.
That is the endpoint.
Happiness and goodness were always right in front of him, just as they are always right in front of us.
This mile. This conversation. This meal. This person. This patch of earth.
This moment.
It’s where all good things, and good fortune, live.