We tend to live like malfunctioning windshield wipers. Frenetic motion. Sudden collapse. Frenetic motion again.

One week we are downloading habit trackers, ordering supplements with names like Alpha Brain Thunder Powder, and telling ourselves that this is the month we finally become the kind of person who answers emails within 24 hours. We wake at dawn. We stretch. We hydrate aggressively. We make ambitious, sprawling lists in multiple notebooks.

Then comes the recoil. We dive under the duvet. And we stay.

Push.Collapse.Push.Collapse.

I know this rhythm well because for much of my life I have confused striving with virtue. Somewhere along the line, many of us absorbed the idea that if we were not straining, we were failing. Rest became suspicious. Ease suspect.

Recently, on my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, where my cohost Emily John Garcés and I explore words without direct English equivalents, we discussed the Sanskrit word viriya with head teacher at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, Katherine Senshin Griffith.

Viriya is often translated as effort, right effort, persistence, or diligence, but Katherine doesn’t feel any of these quite capture viriya. Katherine prefers “diligent enthusiasm.”

The Buddhist........

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