#mastery

They came upon a booth where a woman was selling baskets and belts made of leather. They stopped, smiled, touched the objects, walked on... “But maybe in three hundred years those belts are on display at the Met, as examples of late twentieth-century Midwestern arts and crafts. And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?

“If you know the way broadly you will see it in all things.”