Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present and we see them constantly in their wholeness: attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety.

The limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses.... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts.

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.

What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind.

Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.