How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the gre...