“How big is the top of Mount Everest?”
“About the size of a small kitchen table,” he responded.
“That is amazing,” I said, “You know, when you cross the Sahara Desert, there is no way of knowing where the desert ends. There is no peak, no border, no sign that says, ‘You are Now leaving the Sahara Desert – Have a nice Day!’”
— From Steve Donahue’s Shifting Sands

Not only do metaphors run our life, but we also reveal our minds through the metaphors we use in day‑to‑day communication. Metaphors can liberate us and imprison us at the same time. As a child pilgrim to Sabarimala, and later through books like Eknath Easwaran’s Climbing the Blue Mountain and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, mountains became etched in my imagination as metaphors of summit — spiritual or human endeavor.

All of it changed in a moment.

Almost twelve years ago, I landed at Lekhwair airport on the edge of the Empty Quarter — Rub’ al Khali, a sand desert of 650,000 square kilometers. One evening, under a full moon, we drove out near the borders of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. The jeep stopped, and we stepped into the vastness. The reddish‑orange dunes glistened in moonlight, the horizon shimmered with mixed colors, the sky was alive with shy stars and a brazen full moon. In that silence, the universe stood still. We dissolved into it. That moment rewrote my metaphors: from mountains and summits to deserts and horizons.

The desert taught me what the wheel could not. What works on Everest is useless in the Sahara. In the desert, you follow a compass, not a map. You lower your gaze, because the horizon never gets closer. You stop pushing, and instead deflate your ego. You learn when to duck. These lessons from Shifting Sands became my compass for transformation—whether with my children, my coachees, my colleagues, or my Sangha.

And yet, the wheel still beckons. The self‑help world offers diagrams: concentric wheels with spokes radiating from the center. Each spoke is given a name—career, wealth, health, family, spirituality, leisure—each one a promise of fulfillment if only we can keep it strong. And then come the circles, one after another, like ripples spreading outward in time. The first circle might be +5 years, the next +10, then +20, until the wheel stretches all the way to the imagined horizon of our life. At every point where a spoke meets a circle, we are asked to write down a goal: what we will achieve in our career by 40, what wealth we will accumulate by 50, what family milestones we will reach by 60. The wheel becomes a calendar of ambition, a map of decades yet to come. It looks neat on paper, almost scientific in its symmetry, as if happiness could be engineered by filling in the blanks.

But here is the deeper question: while some of these goals—being healthy, nurturing relationships, continuing to learn—are valid, do they really merit gradations? Why postpone them into the future instead of bringing them into the present moment? Health is not a target at 50, it is a practice today. Relationships are not milestones to be ticked off, they are lived in each conversation, each act of care. Even learning, when turned into a fixed goal, becomes like chasing a product rather than inhabiting a process. What remains in the wheel, then, are mostly the immaterial material goals: the kind of house, the size of the bank balance, the type of car. And these, as we know, are the most fragile spokes of all.

Arthur Brooks, the famous author of From Strength to Strength, discovered the flaw in this promise. On his fiftieth birthday, he found the bucket list he had written at forty. Every ambition was checked off. Every spoke of his wheel was polished. Every circle of time had been dutifully crossed. And yet he was less happy than before. The wheel was balanced, but it still spun. The destination he had imagined was not waiting for him at the end of the road. Out of this realization came his practice of the “reverse bucket list.” Instead of asking, What do I still want? he asked, What can I let go of? He wrote down his desires, and then crossed them out. Each line struck through was a small liberation, a loosening of the wheel’s grip.

In my own life, as part of a program in 2014, I too was told to do this wheel. I dutifully filled in the spokes, charted the map, imagined the future. And after some years—ten years later—many of those plans did not work out for me. But still I found that one’s happiness does not depend on it. So it was the reverse of Arthur Brooks. He achieved everything and found it empty; I watched many of my ambitions fall away, and still found life whole.

What I discovered is that while we do need essentials to live on—a roof, food, clothes, and some books, music, and so on—those needs can be met without charting out distant goals that kill our present living for the sake of a never‑arriving tomorrow.

And when I moved to the Zendo in 2024, I was still apprehensive. The old habit of worrying about the future lingered. But my Zen master, Fr. AMA Samy, told me gently not to worry so much about what lies ahead. This world has enough for our genuine needs, he said, and even the vast universe cannot satiate our wants. That teaching landed like a stone dropped into a still pond. The ripples continue.

Two stories, two directions, one truth: happiness is not at the rim of the wheel, nor at the summit of the mountain, but at the still center, or in the shifting sands beneath our feet. Whether the spokes fall away by circumstance, or whether we cross them out by choice, the discovery is the same. The essentials are already here. The music is already playing. The book is already open. The breath is already flowing.

Zen calls this letting be. The Tao says, He who knows he has enough is rich. Shakespeare reminds us that all the world’s a stage, but he also hints that the play is already unfolding, whether or not we rehearse our lines. And the Buddha shows us the wheel of samsara, and the still point beyond its turning.

To step off the wheel, to leave the summit, to walk into the desert, is not to abandon life, but to enter it more fully. To live not for the endless “somedays,” but for the enoughness of now.

And when I look back from where I am at this point in time — with the great misty mountains rising on the left side of my room, which is both my living quarters and my working office, with a water wall flowing on the right, and the Zendo hall above — I wonder: would I ever have imagined this ten years ago, while dutifully filling in that wheel exercise to design my future?

The answer is clear. No wheel, no summit, no plan could have charted this. And yet here it is: the life that unfolded, unplanned, ungraded, enough.

Yesterday, as I stepped out of the Zendo after giving my very first introduction to Zen and meditation for a sesshin — entrusted to me by Fr. AMA — I found myself thinking neither about the past (yesterday) nor about the future (tomorrow). There was only the cool air of the hills, the silence of the hall behind me, and the steady rhythm of my own breath. No wheel to fill, no summit to reach, no desert horizon to chase. Just this step, this moment, this enoughness.