Anyone who has lain awake at night knows that sleep cannot be chased. The harder we reach for it, the further it seems. We can prepare the ground— dim the room, still the body, set the day’s worries down—but the last step is not ours to take. Sleep comes only once we stop trying to seize it. Reaching for it is what keeps it away.

We tend to think that calm and ambition pull in opposite directions—that the contemplative life sits on one side and the competitive life on the other, and that to find peace, a person must step back from the contest. There is something to this. A striving mind is rarely a quiet one.

But step back, and something curious happens. The habit of comparing oneself with others, of measuring where one stands, of keeping a quiet account of it—that habit does not stay behind. It follows. It is subtle enough to slip into the very retreats and disciplines we take up to be free of it.

A person gives up the race and then takes quiet pride in having done so. He resolves to want less, and begins, without noticing, to keep score of his own detachment. The practices we adopt to quiet the self can become one more place for the self to keep its tally.

Stepping back, it turns out, is no guarantee of breaking free. One can carry the whole machinery into the forest.

This is worth pausing on, because it changes the question. If withdrawal is no escape, then the question was never really whether one acts in the world or renounces it. A person may hold a demanding office and be wholly at peace within it. Another may give up everything and stay restless to the end.

The outward arrangement settles nothing. What matters is the inner posture from which one acts—and that cannot be seen from outside.

The Bhagavad Gita, spoken not in a hermitage but on a battlefield, makes just this its teaching. It does not tell Arjuna to lay down his arms and walk away. It tells him to act—to do the work that is his to do—while loosening his grip on what the work will bring him. Not to stop acting, but to stop clinging to the fruit of it.

So the same act, done by two people, or by the same person on two different days, can be two quite different things. One does the work to be seen doing it, be counted and add to a private store of recognition. The other does the same work because it is there to be done, and lets it go.

From the outside, the two look identical. No one watching can tell them apart. The difference shows itself in only one place— within the person who is acting.

And so the question turns inward, where it belongs. There are two postures, and we can set them side by side. In one, a person acts and keeps score of position, of recognition, of how he stands beside others, of whether his moment will come. In the other, a person acts and releases the outcome—aspiring still, serving still, doing what is his to do, and leaving what follows to whatever decides such things. The two can look the same from the street. They do not feel the same from within.

But here is the part we most often get wrong. We treat the disquiet as a problem to be solved—as though, if only we understood clearly enough that the effort is ours and the outcome is not, the unease would dissolve. It does not. A person can know this completely, could have watched a whole life bear it out, and still feel the old tightening when another one races ahead of him, still feel the unspoken question of whether his own turn will come. Knowing better does not make it go away.

This is not a failure of understanding. The unease comes from a part of us far older than our reasoning. Long before we learnt to weigh evidence and draw conclusions, something in us was already watching the field—for a rival, a lost place, or who got there first. The mind that has made its peace and the part that compares and competes run on separate tracks, and the first was never going to silence the second.

Seeing this changes the question. The aim was never to be rid of the disquiet. That was always the wrong aim, and chasing it is the equivalent of reaching for sleep that drives sleep away. The aim is only to notice it when it comes, let it rise and settle, and not to be carried away by it.

Someone who felt none of it at all would more likely have gone numb than gone free. That it still rises, and that one can watch it rise rather than be swept along—that small gap between the stirring and being moved is almost the whole of what there is to gain. It was never going to arrive as an absence of the disquiet itself.

So perhaps that is where each of us is left. Not with an answer to be reached once and kept, nor with a disquiet to be conquered, but with the two states of mind—competition and calmness—recognized in ourselves and being at peace with that. Not which life looks calmer from the outside, but whether one is aware of the disquiet, accepts it, and then chooses to move past and beyond it.

The author is chief economic advisor, Government of India

Anyone who has lain awake at night knows that sleep cannot be chased. The harder we reach for it, the further it seems. We can prepare the ground— dim the room, still the body, set the day’s worries down—but the last step is not ours to take. Sleep comes only once we stop trying to seize it. Reaching for it is what keeps it away.

We tend to think that calm and ambition pull in opposite directions—that the contemplative life sits on one side and the competitive life on the other, and that to find peace, a person must step back from the contest. There is something to this. A striving mind is rarely a quiet one.

But step back, and something curious happens. The habit of comparing oneself with others, of measuring where one stands, of keeping a quiet account of it—that habit does not stay behind. It follows. It is subtle enough to slip into the very retreats and disciplines we take up to be free of it.

A person gives up the race and then takes quiet pride in having done so. He resolves to want less, and begins, without noticing, to keep score of his own detachment. The practices we adopt to quiet the self can become one more place for the self to keep its tally.

Stepping back, it turns out, is no guarantee of breaking free. One can carry the whole machinery into the forest.

This is worth pausing on, because it changes the question. If withdrawal is no escape, then the question was never really whether one acts in the world or renounces it. A person may hold a demanding office and be wholly at peace within it. Another may give up everything and stay restless to the end.

The outward arrangement settles nothing. What matters is the inner posture from which one acts—and that cannot be seen from outside.

The Bhagavad Gita, spoken not in a hermitage but on a battlefield, makes just this its teaching. It does not tell Arjuna to lay down his arms and walk away. It tells him to act—to do the work that is his to do—while loosening his grip on what the work will bring him. Not to stop acting, but to stop clinging to the fruit of it.

So the same act, done by two people, or by the same person on two different days, can be two quite different things. One does the work to be seen doing it, be counted and add to a private store of recognition. The other does the same work because it is there to be done, and lets it go.

From the outside, the two look identical. No one watching can tell them apart. The difference shows itself in only one place— within the person who is acting.

And so the question turns inward, where it belongs. There are two postures, and we can set them side by side. In one, a person acts and keeps score of position, of recognition, of how he stands beside others, of whether his moment will come. In the other, a person acts and releases the outcome—aspiring still, serving still, doing what is his to do, and leaving what follows to whatever decides such things. The two can look the same from the street. They do not feel the same from within.

But here is the part we most often get wrong. We treat the disquiet as a problem to be solved—as though, if only we understood clearly enough that the effort is ours and the outcome is not, the unease would dissolve. It does not. A person can know this completely, could have watched a whole life bear it out, and still feel the old tightening when another one races ahead of him, still feel the unspoken question of whether his own turn will come. Knowing better does not make it go away.

This is not a failure of understanding. The unease comes from a part of us far older than our reasoning. Long before we learnt to weigh evidence and draw conclusions, something in us was already watching the field—for a rival, a lost place, or who got there first. The mind that has made its peace and the part that compares and competes run on separate tracks, and the first was never going to silence the second.

Seeing this changes the question. The aim was never to be rid of the disquiet. That was always the wrong aim, and chasing it is the equivalent of reaching for sleep that drives sleep away. The aim is only to notice it when it comes, let it rise and settle, and not to be carried away by it.

Someone who felt none of it at all would more likely have gone numb than gone free. That it still rises, and that one can watch it rise rather than be swept along—that small gap between the stirring and being moved is almost the whole of what there is to gain. It was never going to arrive as an absence of the disquiet itself.

So perhaps that is where each of us is left. Not with an answer to be reached once and kept, nor with a disquiet to be conquered, but with the two states of mind—competition and calmness—recognized in ourselves and being at peace with that. Not which life looks calmer from the outside, but whether one is aware of the disquiet, accepts it, and then chooses to move past and beyond it.

The author is chief economic advisor, Government of India