Songwriter Leonard Cohen retreated to a mountain zen retreat for five years of seclusion a decade after his exquisite song, “Hallelujah,” was published. He took the Dharma name Jikan, meaning “silence.” Irishman John O’Donohue went the opposite direction from Catholic priest to poet. The blind lieutenant governor of Washington state, Cyrus Habib, recently chose to not run for reelection and instead become a Jesuit priest.
Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, worked at a law firm and then in finance, but hated it. She felt beholden to the money. She quit and ran for Congress, but lost. Soon, after that, she realized her way of giving back was to help young women build their technical prowess and Girls Who Code emerged. Our own Saul Kuperstein left the comfort of his career and life in Puebla, Mexico as a jeweler and accountant to sojourn to Baja to become a shaman.
We’ve talked before about the U-curve of Happiness, and how research shows that people often get happier in their fifties and beyond partly because they start listening more to themselves than to others. They do a “you swerve of happiness,” which begins by curating a life that’s worth living.
Be curious. Be bold. And as Oscar Wilde suggested, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”