“My goal is equanimity,” he said. “I’m not pursuing what the world calls success.”

The staff at the homeless shelter where I worked for several years had long worried about him. He sat in the day hall, well tended and polite, reading chemistry textbooks with calm comprehension. At the moment, he was in the middle of a book written by a French philosopher in the 1930s; he was reading it in French.

He had no previous psychiatric history, no drug or alcohol problem. Someone without any overt chaos in his life accepted his state of homelessness without the least effort to modify it. It seemed unnatural.

He tried to explain. “There’s mismanagement between what others expect me to do and what I have done,” he said. “I don’t examine my life too closely. I have closed the doors against re-examination.”

In other words, there was no point in asking further questions. Having no other tools, though, I continued to ask.