Free A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder

and their speed limits. You conquered roads by driving safely over them. You lost points for speeding and for making or receiving texts and phone calls while you drove. The game hadn’t been released to the public, but he and half a dozen friends were running trial versions, competing ardently. He said the game was mainly designed for teenage drivers, to beguile them away from bad driving habits. He thought he himself might benefit. Over the past thirty years he had accumulated some seventy moving violations. He still got a ticket now and then.
    For years, Paul had been practicing Buddhist meditation. He meditated on weekdays when he could, and always on weekends. Sometimes he meditated in the car. One evening in the late fall, caught out at rush hour, surrounded by unhappiness—tired, bored, and angry faces, blaring horns—he smiled toward his windshield and quoted Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice, that one should calm oneself in traffic by imagining the smiling eyes of Buddha in the red brake lights ahead. “This is awesome,” Paul said. “That I get to
not
hit the car in front of me. I have a safe buffer. I need to be so many feet from him. It feels good. Then there’s the stoplight. I’m not moving, so I can look around. I look for grass and flowers and light and sometimes people. I don’t think most people look at grass. I
really
enjoy it. I think you enjoy something if you practice doing it. And that’s what mindfulness is all about.”
    He lectured on entrepreneurship, each performance a potential recruiting session, at the Rhode Island School of Design and Northeastern University, Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He presided over Tuesday Night Dinner, TND, held at his house and open to any of his siblings who cared to come, and always to an elderly former engineer, a widower who lived alone next door. There was party planning. Paul maintained a Google document where he recorded the details of his big summer party, Shake the Lake—a tent, abundant drink and food, including in some years a pig roast, a gigantic slip ’n’ slide (a sort of sledding hill greased with soap and water, especially alluring to children and inebriated adults), a variety of bands and vocalists, and every year a new special feature (last year hula-hoop lessons from two young women in short skirts). Many days, he went to five or six meetings at different sites: to advise a struggling programmer at Partners In Health; to have lunch with his famous friend Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who had developed the software behind the World Wide Web and, rather than try to gain from it, had given it to the world. There was always email, a legitimate message arriving every five minutes on average. He visited venture capitalists with an eminent doctor friend in tow. The doctor had an idea to create a Kayak-like search engine for medical services—to create an online “health marketplace.” At one meeting Paul remarked, “I’ll pick the CTO, or, under some scenarios,
be
the CTO.”
    He was also trying to start two new philanthropic projects. Partners In Tech would support the work of Partners In Health: “It could be everything from someone’s building a clinic, to providing Skype and Internet and mobile phones for community health workers in Haiti.” He called, emailed, and visited fellow entrepreneurs, asking them to contribute—to no avail so far.
    He started his most ambitious civic project in late December, not long after Kayak’s sale was announced. It began when he heard the news of the slaughter of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut. Afterward, he listened on the radio to the National Rifle Association’s official response. It was the usual defense of a dangerous technology; no blame ever attaches to things, just to people. More guns in the schools was the NRA’s solution.
    The next day, Paul sat at his desk in Concord, muttering with a reddened face about the dead schoolkids, about the NRA and America’s