"The story is told of the factory that had a problem of employee theft. Valuable items were being stolen every day. So they hired a security firm to search every employee as he left at the end of the day. Most of the workers willingly went along with emptying their pockets and having their lunch boxes checked. But one man would go through the gate every day at closing time with a wheelbarrow full of trash, and the exasperated security guard would have to spend a half-hour, when everyone else was on the way home, digging through the food wrappers, cigarette butts, and Styrofoam cups to see if anything valuable was being smuggled out. He never found anything. Finally, one day, the guard could no longer stand it. He said to the man, 'Look, I know you're up to something but every day I check every last bit of trash in the wheelbarrow and I never find anything worth stealing. It's driving me crazy. Tell me what you're up to and I promise not to report you.' The man shrugged and said, 'It's simple. I'm stealing wheelbarrows.'
"We totally misunderstand what it means to be alive when we think of our lives as time we can use in search of rewards and pleasure. Frantically and in growing frustration, we search through our days, our years, looking for the reward, for the success that will make our lives worthwhile, like the security guard looking through the trash in the wheelbarrow for something of value and all the while missing the obvious answer.
"When you have learned how to live, life itself is the reward.
