Shankar Vedantam

How can we get our lives so that who I am, what I do, all of these things are aligned?

I want to talk about another component to designing a meaningful life, and that's the concept of flow.

We've talked about this concept on the show before, but can you describe what psychologists mean by the term?

What is simple flow, Dave?

And how is this contrasted with the world of transactional thinking that we are so often engaged in?

And of course, in contrast with the transactional world, in a flow state, you're not only thinking about the end goal.

You're not thinking about this destination disease that you talked about earlier, where you're always asking, what is this going to be in the future?

You're actually in the present.

In some ways, I'm hearing echoes of this idea in what meditation can be like, Dave.

You know, people talk about meditation.

Of course, you can sit cross-legged and in a quiet room with your eyes closed.

But people also talk about how you can have walking meditation or talking meditation or, in your case, chopping an onion meditation, where you bring your full self to the work that you're doing.

You're fully present.

And in some ways, that's not different than sitting cross-legged in a quiet room with your eyes closed.

We talked in the last episode about this curse of always living in the future and how many of us in some ways live so much in the future that when we finally reach the end of our lives, we discover that we have never lived in the present.

I'm wondering if you have taken this idea to heart yourself, Dave.

Have you actually tried to embrace the present, to embrace the becoming that you yourself always are?

The concept of radical acceptance is radical.

The reason so many of us get defensive about our situation or beat ourselves up over our failures is because acceptance can be really painful.

It's awful to realize we are not as far along in our careers as we would like to be.