The two directions your life can go

Toward something, or away from everything

In the Rapids by Winslow Homer, 1895

If you’ve ever been whitewater rafting, you might remember the safety briefing before you hit the rapids. The lead guide, probably a sun-leathered dude in Chacos named Dave, explains what to do if the raft flips and you end up in the water. Look for me, he tells you. I’ll be pointing in a direction. Always swim that way.

You reach the gnarliest section of rapids, the part you paid for. The raft flips. You’re tossed in the river. The life preserver pops you to the surface, but the whitewater is deafening, and you’re disoriented. You don’t have time to think. All you can do is find your guide standing in one of the other rafts, pointing. He’s pointing toward safety. Usually to the shore, but sometimes away from a danger you cannot even see.

What the guide never does is point in the direction you should avoid. He doesn’t gesture at the rocks and shout, “Not there!” And good thing, because under that kind of duress, your brain can’t compute a negative; it will hear “rocks” and swim toward them. So the guide only ever points towards where you need to go.

In outdoorsmen’s lingo, this is called point positive.

And like many elegant concepts from people who spend their lives in moving water, its simplicity hides an enormous depth.

Point positive has an opposite, and it often explains why we feel stuck in life.

Malcolm Ocean, the writer and systems designer, coined a pair of terms I frequently use in my work: awayness and towardsness. They describe two fundamental motivations that shape our lives. Awayness is wanting to move away from something without having a clear destination. Humans are wired with this impulse, but it has a fatal design flaw.

If all you know is what you don’t want, you can move in literally any direction.

On the river, this is how people drown. Away from the rocks could mean toward the falls, and away from the falls could mean into a current that takes you somewhere worse. Every direction feels equally urgent, but none of them feel useful. So you just get carried by whatever current is strongest.

If you start paying attention to how your friends and loved ones talk about what they want, you’ll find that almost all of it is awayness. You’ll hear things like, I don’t want to do this mindless job anymore. I can’t date one more person with no emotional range. I don’t want to be priced out of the economy and made irrelevant by AI. I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Etcetera.

You will hear people trying, with whatever grace they can muster, to stop hurting. But it’s a trap. What you focus on, you get more of.

Point at the rocks long enough and you’ll swim right into them.

Without a direction, you meet your defaults.

So much of our lives are organized around awayness—around just wanting to get away from feeling something—that we default to whatever we were taught to want.

I have, occupationally speaking, a front row seat to this. Someone comes to me wanting out of their job that looks perfect on paper, their marriage, a company they built from nothing, you name it, and they can talk for an hour about all the reasons why they need to go. It’s all awayness. And without a direction from somewhere deeper than conditioning, the result is dissatisfaction, depression, addiction, and alienation. That’s why they show up in my office in the first place.

So when I ask them okay, but what do you want instead, they often stall, and their body language shifts—a tell that they’re encountering the unknown. And this happens so often, applied to virtually every life decision from career to kids, that I’ve started giving people a cheesy exercise: create two columns, what you want and what you don’t want. For the don’t column, people are poets.

The want column, it turns out, is the whole game.

When I first met one of my mentors, before we’d even gotten through introductions, he asked me:

What is your deepest aspiration in this life?

Besides being a hell of a way to start a relationship, the question moved me so deeply that I started asking it of everyone. And most people will just stare at me for a minute, because nobody typically asks this, and then say something like, I don’t know, that’s a damn good question.¹

Some will go to the surface: retire early, find their person, start an impactful company, or make enough money to go off-grid and exit the rat race. But a surprising number of people, if you give them a moment, will go straight to the big stuff. They want their lives to be vehicles for Love, Peace, Belonging, Truth, or Freedom. The single words you arrive at if you keep asking what’s underneath your top-level motivation, and underneath that one, and so forth.²

And honestly, you probably don’t need to dig that hard to find yours. If you slow down right now, while reading this, you likely already know what you want on a deeper level, at least partially.

Maybe it’s Love. Or for things to feel a bit more Okay. Maybe there’s one thing you’re struggling with, and you can feel its opposite calling you. Whatever comes up, own it. I cannot stress how important it is to own it, because we all have an allergic tendency to shy away from the things we want most.³

Say you want to make a lot of money and retire early—don’t pretend you don’t because it’s not “spiritual” enough. Instead, ask yourself what’s underneath that desire. If you made your money and retired early, how would you feel? Now, see if you can feel that right now, however much of it is available, and sink into it, or let it wash over every part of you. The feeling, without the story attached, will be something fundamental—one of those single words.

Whatever came up here is your towardsness. Let it take you somewhere.

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Just know this: you’ll mistake awayness for towardsness if your motivator is escape.

When I was in the throes of my addiction, my entire life was organized around avoiding the insufferable pain of opiate withdrawal. The cruelest trick of addiction is that it mimics towardsness so convincingly. You have a mission—in my case, I told myself it was peak performance and spiritual transcendence—and you pursue it with incredible urgency. But no matter what you do, the destination ever-elusively recedes. Because the engine is built on escape.⁴

This is why the most dangerous form of awayness is the one that feels like purpose. You can build an entire career on awayness disguised as purpose and never notice. It’s what drives most of productivity culture, and why so many successful people feel empty at the top.

But the most pervasive form of awayness? The voice inside your head, convincing you it’s always helping.

If you read my last essay on breaking addiction to thinking, you know where this goes. You feel something you’d rather not feel, which could be anything—a tightness in the chest, the particular nausea of having said the “wrong” thing to a friend, a wave of jealousy you thought you had outgrown, the creeping sense that you’re behind at life—and instead of staying with it, you retreat into the safety of your head. Maybe distracting yourself by gaming out scenarios for how to get ahead, or building a case for why you were, obviously, right. Often to the point of obsession.

This is awayness dressed in its Sunday best. Of all the addictions I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, overthinking is the one that hides best. It feels productive. But strip it down and it’s just escape. And escape is not a direction.

A bunch of people reached out to me after that essay, saying some version of, This changed my life, and, I’m working on not thinking so much. I love that, and I want to gently offer: that’s only half the equation.

The other half is having something to move toward, rather than defaulting to overthinking.

So when you catch yourself getting pulled into it, you pause and feel what’s in your body. This is attentional training. You’re not trying to get rid of the thoughts or make them a problem. You’re just trying to stop the impulse to immediately escape them, to let them be there while your attention shifts toward what you actually want.

Practice this enough times, and your nervous system rewires. The engine shifts from escape to intention. You begin to open to the intuitive gifts of the Tao, or whatever you want to call it, slowly attuning to it, until it leads your life.

Fair warning: even the practices designed to train your attention and free you from escape can land you on the left side of the diagram. For years, I meditated with an away orientation without realizing it. I was trying to stop being distracted by obsessive thoughts of self-importance, and I got quite good at it—shifting my state of consciousness into ethereal realms, moving subtle energy in my body, or catching a thought and fleeing into presence. Some of that was genuinely skillful.

But underneath, especially when I was tired or uncomfortable or not feeling “dialed,” there was a rejection of my direct experience—the don’t want column applied to my own bodymind. And that’s a hard thing to catch, because negation dressed up as transcendence can look an awful lot like progress.⁵

The solution was pointing myself toward a deeper motivation. Each time before I formally meditate, I invoke bodhichitta, which is basically the Buddhist intention to awaken the heart for the benefit of all beings. Sometimes I will say it as per tradition. I’ll often add my own specifics, too—may I be more patient and loving as a partner and father, fiercer and more truthful in how I lead my groups. But most times it’s more of a vague gesture toward awakeness or radiance or, honestly, something I can’t even describe, just a pull toward freedom of the infinite, and that becomes the attractor. It magnetizes everything, becoming the current that carries practice on and off the cushion. And over time, the structural gravity of my life.

This is point positive, applied to consciousness.

Whatever you can clearly intend, consciousness will bend toward.

If you can imagine something—an outcome, a circumstance, a feeling—on a certain level, it already exists. So if you want to point your life toward Peace, Love, Aliveness, Connection, or Healing—you can just… do that. Trust me, it will guide you. And if that sounds like manifestation, that’s because it is, just not the kind you’re used to hearing about.⁶

Say you point your attention toward Love. Inevitably, you start noticing love in more places, sometimes gaudy and obvious, sometimes subtle. It was always there, the intention just primed you for it. Towardsness, ironically, doesn’t involve constructing anything new. It just changes what you notice. And the more you play with this—and it is play—the more something reaches back.

You discover you can participate in the direction of your life with an ease that would have seemed impossible when you were just reacting to whatever current was strongest.

I used to think the path meant giving things up. Yet the further I go, the more capacity I find to move toward what I want. Because what you actually want from anything is the feeling behind it. Get clear on that, and life tends to meet you halfway.

This is how surrender and agency merge—you go far enough downstream, and you realize you and the current want the same thing. You always did. And there’s your guide, still standing in the raft, zinc-smeared arm extended, pointing. But what he’s pointing at is right where you are.

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If you want some help turning toward what matters rather than getting lost in your head, enrollment is now open for the founding cohort of Break Your Addiction to Overthinking. It’s a four-week live course, and we begin September 8.

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1. Howard Thurman, who was Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual mentor, has another beautiful prompt here: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

2. For a deeper dive on the layers beneath our motivations, especially as AI collapses the distance between wanting and getting, I recommend my friend Daniel Thornson’s essay on desire and AI. He argues that the clarification of desire has always been the central task of human maturation, now more urgent than ever.

3. Rilke, on the courage to want: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”

4. At the deepest level, suffering does not arise from the pain, or the sensation itself, but from the belief that escape from your present inner experience is possible. And as one of my teachers likes to remind me, while “no escape” might sound claustrophobic, it’s actually immensely liberating—because if there’s nowhere else to go, you can finally inhabit where you are.

5. For my dharmanaut readers: if you want a more detailed map of how awayness hijacks meditation practice—including the delightful discovery that your nervous system will block you from knowing what you want so you can never choose wrong—see Evan Erickson’s “Unlearning Default Awayness.” His taxonomy of defensive patterns alone is worth the read.

6. See “A rationalist’s guide to manifestation” by the wonderful Isabel. She makes the case that most of the “magic” in manifestation is just the clarity of desire meeting a willingness to receive, aka the right side of the diagram.