Most of us spent our childhoods bouncing back and forth between our own wants and the demands of various authority figures. In many ways, it seemed like some kind of game that we woke up in the middle of, and that required us to figure out the rules as we went along. Gradually, through a lot of trial and error, we learned how to win the game, at least once in a while.

Then, around age eighteen, we began to intoxicate ourselves with the idea that we were in control of our lives. We had a plan in our head and we decided things, believing if we made the right choices, they would take us closer to our goals. So off we went, rolling the dice and moving around the board. And that seemed to work well, at least from one move to the next. But what we didn’t notice…