Wonderful piece, Maria. Allow me to expand the conversation, and work some synchronicity into it. A few weeks ago I read the obituary of the actor Alan Arkin. I felt pulled to read it and felt emotional while doing so. I saw in it that he had written a book, "Out Of My Mind," and looked it up on Amazon ("In Out of My Mind, Arkin speaks openly about the existential crisis which brought him from analysis to the serious study of Eastern Philosophy and several teachers who helped him revise his views on almost everything. In this sort-of-memoir, the eighty-six-year-old actor tells of the adventures, which, as a direct result of decades of meditation, shook his conception of reality and brought him to a new, exciting, and expanded view of what is out there, and the endless, mind-boggling adventure into what is possible-not just for himself but for all the rest of us.") and felt pulled to order it. It was out of stock and it just arrived Thursday. Usually, books end up in my ever-growing unread book pile. I felt pulled to read it and read the entire 100 not long pages in one sitting.

One of the stories he tells is that he took up tennis. He had a friend who was a very good player who continuously wiped the court with him. Then one day, Arkin decided he was going to stop competing with himself and his friend. He writes:

"Finally, one Saturday morning, just before Marc's arrival and in complete despair I said to myself, 'The hell with it. I can't conquer this. I give up. I'm a complete failure. I'm just going to allow myself to be his whipped dog.' And I visualized myself as a dog lying on his back, paws up in the air in complete surrender. 'I'm just going to let him beat the hell out of me. In fact, I'm going to help him. My only effort will be to try to hit the ball back to him in a good enough spot so he can then destroy me. I'll just try to get it back to him as a gift so he can smash it, or slice it or place it halfway across the court and beat the hell out of me completely. Let him just kill me.'"

That day, with his new attitude, Arkin wiped the court with the very advanced player for 45 minutes and then Arkin's back went out. His body couldn't keep up that level of play.

Anyhoo, the point that Arkin makes is he started applying a similar attitude whenever possible across his life. "My effort, rather than one of conquering, is to say to myself not 'What do I want here? What can I get out of this?' but instead, 'What is needed here? What does this event require?' It's a powerful, potent way to live within an event; it makes me feel comfortable and useful and tends to make friends of others involved rather than competitors. I wish I could do it all the time."

So, Maria, connecting Arkin's story to your essay and my earlier comment ("I think where you're going with this is that the slower animals travel total greater distances in their lifetimes, and perhaps you're going to apply this to personal/spiritual growth of a person"), I see that Arkin decided it's better to be a tortoise than a hare.

Yes, this comment is serving as part of an outline for an essay I will write about the book. Publishing this comment to my profile plus your story is being Gregmargorithmed.