Agency is a wonderful and strange thing. I mean the capacity to choose, to decide, and to act, on your own behalf or for the benefit of someone else; the feeling that you have some degree of control over your life, your work, your circumstances, your reactions; the feeling that you can think for yourself and speak your mind. It’s a big deal, and it’s something that we all need to pursue, and also help others to pursue it for themselves. To be given agency, oh what a precious gift! To take the plunge or not to take the plunge? You choose.

Some choices are banal: today I’m wearing this shirt, not that other one. (But let it be said that what’s banal for me isn’t necessary banal for someone else; there are people for whom choosing the daily shirt is a terror.) I’m having coffee now, and I’ll have tea later. I’m not going to the movies tonight. In any given week I’ll say yes or no to a thousand things, and this is a manifestation of my agency.

Other choices are less banal. (But let it be said . . . you know, people are different from one another.) A job opening; do I apply for it? The consequences of applying or not applying are bigger than the consequences of wearing a red shirt rather than a blue one; the consequences of being accepted or rejected by the new employer are bigger than coffee and tea. I might dither for days, weeks, months, years, or decades regarding some of my more important choices. Agency, as so much else in life, isn’t always straightforward. If you “accept to dither,” the very acceptance is proof that you have agency.

Warning! It’ll look as if I’m suddenly changing the subject!

The other day I went to see a retrospective of Mark Rothko’s work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here in Paris. There were about 120 paintings, covering the entirety of his long and fruitful career. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t familiar with his work, or if you are indifferent to it, or if you love it or hate it. The main thing here is my theory or hypothesis that Rothko, while expressing his agency moment by moment and day by day, was also grabbed by powerful, invisible forces that “made him do things,” that forced him to change and grow, that imposed a sort of forward motion to his life, that “didn’t give him a choice.”

Simplifying it, he started his creative path by painting figurative scenes, people at the subway in New York City, landscapes. Then came war and strife, and the artist in Rothko felt that it was urgent and necessary to present, in his art, something more urgent and more healing than the subway scenes. Rothko was drawn to Surrealism and its involvement with symbols, and figuration became transformed into a sort of more or less mythical storytelling. But over the years the details of the attempted mythical storytelling lost importance, and Rothko felt (or “was made to feel”) that he and his paintings must, must pass through a sort of portal and enter another realm: the territory of the eternal and universal, of the mysterious, of the overwhelming, of the pure and strong and inexplicable. Squares and rectangles of color, subtly interacting one with the other in vast canvasses “without people,” without subway stations, without symbols, without detailed storytelling, but allowing you to tell the most incredible stories to your own deepest self. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know Rothko or don’t like him; I’m just saying that Rothko was absolutely compelled to pass through the portal.

This is the paradox of agency: I have choice and I have no choice; I think I want to pursue plan A, but plan B has stopped me on my tracks and took over my life; I don’t understand where this impulse comes from, but I have to obey it.

These days the cliché says that you must “find your passion” and make it the defining trait of your life and your work, and you also must keeping saying out loud, very loud, and to everyone, what you’re passionate about. I think a bit differently. You don’t find the passion; the passion will find you, and you’ll submit to it willingly or unwillingly. You’ll have to let go of your misapprehensions and misunderstandings regarding who you are and what you have to do. You’ll have to abandon and to give up many things, some of which are very dear to you. It’s a loss; and yet, surrendering is the ultimate victory.

Lao Tzu was sitting on the trusty squeaky rocker in his porch when Confucius happened to come by. “Thou frowneth,” Confucius said. “What ails thee, dear Shih Tzu?”

Lao had heard the joke before, but he had Tao-ed himself into not minding it too much. “I’m going on a thousand-mile journey, Confusion.”

Confucius had heard the joke before, and he really hated it. But he kept it all bottled up. “A thousand-mile journey,” he chuckled. “And this concerns me how, Shih Shih?”

Tzu didn’t mind one Shih, but two? He kept it all bottled up. “I don’t know how to start.”

Confucius took a breath in through his left nostril, and let it out through the right. It was a cold day, and you could see the puffy puffs from his breathing. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” he said with a slight bow and two puffy puffs.

Hearing this bit of commonplace so-called wisdom, Shih Shih—I mean, Lao—couldn’t take it any longer. He sprang into action, unsheathed his invisible sword, and cut Confusion—sorry, I mean Kung Fucious—into 7456 paper butterflies. Confucius vanished, just like in a movie directed by Ang Lee. And Lao Tzu took the first, single step on his thousand-mile journey. Truth be told, he was happy that his old, old, old friend had helped him get off his rocker.

In 1969 I was eleven years old, and I attended middle school in São Paulo, Brazil. The building still stands, although the actual school is no more.

One day I’ll tell you about the joys and horrors of middle school—no, never! I’ll never go back to middle school, never, ever, forever and whatever! But the thing is, we had English class twice a week (with a teacher who may or may not have been named Mildred or Meredith). And our textbook was titled First Things First. It was a beautiful little object, nicely designed with not too much text and some groovy drawings. It made us feel super-sophisticated: learning a foreign language, learning to speak differently, learning to think differently, learning to be someone else. Yay! In only eight years I’d leave Brazil for good and start roaming the world, but I didn’t know that yet.

First Things First, the book and its title, the thoughts and emotions that the book triggered, the dreams and aspirations of the eleven-year-old, they have all stayed with me. If Marcel Proust had Internet, I bet he too would Google a ton of stuff from his childhood. This is a very “English” English textbook: the first page of the first lesson is all about manners, excuse me, pardon, thank you.

There’s a famous apocryphal saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Genghis Khan: “If I have six hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend the first four hours sharpening my ax.” Actually, Genghis is suspected of having stolen George’s ax, but it doesn’t change the gist of it: sharpen first, chop down second. First things first!

When you have a big mess somewhere—the dining room after a party, for instance—you’ll make a first decision: to open the windows and air the room; to collect all the glasses before collecting any plates; or to throw away that chunk of stinky cheese before doing anything else, by Jove! A smart first decision improves working conditions, saves time and effort, and produces much better results.

Your “first reaction” to any one stimulus is supremely important: love or fear, relaxation or contraction, feel good or feel bad. The reaction is embodied. Head, neck, and back; jaw, tongue, and throat; shoulders and arms, pelvis and legs. Toes. And every vein and cartilage, also the hairs on the back of your neck and the goose pimples (which we Brazilians call the goose pimps). The embodiment happens in two ways: gradually and suddenly, both at the same time. Warning: on this paragraph, one or more statements may be jokes. Re-read, please.

Despite being as opposite as Heaven and Earth, Lao Tzu and Confucius do agree on the most important of principles:

Feeling good feels good, and feeling bad feels bad.

Feeling bad scrunches your neck and thickens your blood and lowers your intelligence. Feeling good elevates your soul and warms your heart and zips up your pants. The “zero decision,” before the first decision, is to feel good. Because you really don’t want to sharpen that ax or to chop down that tree when your intelligence is low and your fly is undone.

Feel good first, then sharpen the ax and chop the tree. Feel good first, then throw away the stinky cheese and move house. Feel good first, then take the first step on the thousand-mile journey.