Everything I write comes down to one thing: replacing default with intention. Default is what you do without choosing it, repeating what was done before or what others do. Intention is consciously committing to a direction. Each piece approaches it from a different angle, and together they build toward an authentic, happy and meaningful life.

In the previous piece, I explored how recognizing worth in the experience itself can sustain our dedication and perseverance. We also addressed how easily we treat what we are doing as something to get through before we can enjoy life. Here, I want to explore that more broadly: what are we giving priority to in our lives, and does it deserve the time and attention we give it?

Perhaps we tell ourselves that we will feel fulfilled once the project succeeds, the business grows, or we finally become good enough at something. Until then, everything serves the result. The present becomes a means of reaching a future in which we imagine our life will finally feel right.

But what are we giving our time and attention to while we wait? And what would make us recognize that our life deserves that attention now?

La Rambla
On August 17, 2017, close to 5 p.m., the day before my thirtieth birthday, I was on La Rambla in Barcelona with my children. My son was nine and my daughter was six. I was alone with them when the terrorist attack happened.

A white van approached us, zigzagging across the promenade, hitting people in its path. We had to run for our lives to the nearest side street. For a moment, I lost my son in the crowds. I grabbed my daughter and held her in front of my chest so any bullet would hit me first. Time slowed down. We saw the man driving the van and heard loud bangs that sounded like shots being fired but were actually people being hit. The first door we could get through led into a hotel, where I hid my children in a storage closet, convinced shooters were approaching.

After a few hours, I started accepting that we might be safe. Fast forward to being back home: the things I had been worrying about before seemed completely irrelevant. It was almost as though I had been taken far out into the universe, looking down on Earth and my own life. From there, so much of what had occupied my attention seemed trivial. All that urgency, all those things I thought I had to worry about, they were all made-up concepts. They dissolved as it became clear they had no place in my life.

People hearing the story would often get angry at “those disgusting terrorists.” I never felt anger toward the perpetrators. I found myself thinking about what their lives might have been like, and how a lack of acceptance or love could have contributed to them reaching that point of being lost. It saddened me.

In the weeks after, someone not close to me at all came up to ask whether I could also see the experience as a gift. Please never say that to a deeply traumatized person who has just feared for their children’s lives. But despite the tactlessness, in hindsight I see what they meant.

An experience like this can change the basis on which we decide what matters. Things we had accepted as important can suddenly lose their significance, leaving us to question what deserves our attention and what makes our life meaningful.

Suffering can also set a process of awakening in motion. The beliefs, expectations, and ideas about ourselves through which we have understood life can begin to lose their authority. We become aware of how much they have been determining our experience, and begin to recognize that there is more to who we are. An experience like this can push us to see beyond those ideas, recognize what actually matters, and become aware of the essence of life and ourselves.

For a long time, I did not connect my own developing awareness to the suffering I had experienced. Looking back, I can see how those experiences helped set that process in motion. Their effect was not something I couldn’t have fully recognized at the time, as it need to develop.

Psychologists study one part of this through meaning-making: how we understand difficult experiences in relation to our beliefs, values, and sense of purpose. Sometimes that involves reconsidering those beliefs and finding a different understanding to live by.

What happened gave me a clarity I had not had before. Living according to that clarity took much longer. Recognizing what is meaningful and arranging your life around it are not necessarily things that happen at the same time.

When I was able to return to work, the demands and habits of ordinary life did start taking over again. I defaulted to what I knew. But the lesson wasn’t lost. I could still recognize what had become clear to me, while getting caught up in things that seemed urgent once more. It took healing, learning, and time to translate that understanding into how I lived.

Purpose and resilience
Thinking about what helps us continue after an experience like that brings me back to purpose: having something meaningful to live by when life becomes difficult or uncertain.

As we explored in the piece on purpose, research suggests that having a sense of purpose can support resilience. In the laboratory study discussed there, adults with a stronger sense of purpose showed better emotional recovery after viewing distressing images. Researchers assessed this through their automatic blink response to sudden sounds.

Another study, using data from 3,664 adults, found that childhood emotional abuse and neglect had a weaker association with depressive symptoms among people with a stronger sense of purpose.

These findings support understanding purpose as a resource for resilience. They also bring us back to what it means to live our path. If meaning lies in a direction we can express through how we live now, we still have something to give ourselves to when life does not unfold as we expected. Our purpose can continue to guide us as we respond to what has happened and recognize what is possible now.

The default of waiting until we get there
It is easy to organize life around the next achievement. Finish school. Get the job. Get promoted. Get married. Start a family. Whatever. There can be good reasons to work toward each of those things. They give us opportunities and can change our circumstances in important ways.

The difficulty begins when we make arriving a condition for feeling satisfied with being here. As if life would not be worthwhile if these things wouldn’t happen. We postpone rest until everything is finished, or overlook an experience because it does not seem to bring us closer to the goal. Even something we love can become a task we need to complete before we allow ourselves to enjoy it.

This is another way default takes over. We become used to asking whether we are getting somewhere, without noticing how we are living while we try.

The happiness we expect from a result
Research on affective forecasting explores how we predict our future feelings. In one early study, assistant professors imagined how happy they would be after receiving or being denied tenure. Researchers compared those predictions with reports from other academics who had already experienced those outcomes. The difference in reported happiness between the groups with favorable and unfavorable outcomes was smaller than the forecasters expected.

The finding gives us a reason to question how much lasting happiness we expect one result to provide. We can become so occupied with what we believe an achievement will change that we give it responsibility for our whole experience of life.

Then, when we reach it, another goal may already be waiting. If we continue placing fulfillment just beyond the next result, we can spend years pursuing a feeling we never allow ourselves to experience where we are.

Giving your attention to the practice
Where we direct our attention also affects what we do. In a study by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor, students spent several days imagining either the process of preparing for an exam, the outcome of getting a good grade, or both. Imagining the study process helped students plan and study, and the process group performed better than the group imagining only the desired grade.

That is useful to know, but better results are not the whole reason to give our attention to the process. Otherwise, we would still be valuing the doing mainly for what it might eventually produce. There is a more fundamental point here. Your life is happening while you study, practice, create, and contribute. The future you are working toward will also be experienced as a present moment. There is no other time in which you will live it.

That is why the process cannot simply be a waiting period before the meaningful part begins.

Think of learning to play an instrument. You may wish to perform one day, but your life is taking place while you learn to hear, practice a difficult passage, or discover how to express something through the music. Finding meaning and satisfaction in that practice is all living your path is.

And if the only connection you feel to what you are doing is the promise of a future result, that deserves attention too. It may be time to reconsider the way you are approaching it, or whether it is still your direction.

What became clear to me after La Rambla was how little importance some of my worries deserved, despite how much attention I had been giving them or how much they had even consumed me at times. Returning to ordinary life showed me how easily that understanding could be overtaken by defaulting to familiar demands. Seeing what matters does not automatically change how we live. We need to keep choosing accordingly.

That is another side to why the journey deserves our attention. What we experience, who we spend time with, and what we give ourselves to deserve consideration in their own right. A future result cannot be the only reason we accept the way we are living now.

Gilbert et al. (1998)
Hartanto et al. (2020)
Park (2010)
Pham & Taylor (1999)
Schaefer et al. (2013)
Tolle (1997)