Life & Wisdom Quote by William Stafford

Stafford takes a vice we’ve been trained to despise - distraction - and treats it as a kind of moral instrument. The line opens with a familiar self-help warning (“the more you let yourself be distracted...”), then pivots: distraction doesn’t merely derail you from purpose; it reveals you. “The more you are the person that you are” sounds redundant on purpose, a sly insistence that identity isn’t a static core you can protect from interference. It’s made in the moments you supposedly shouldn’t be having.

The subtext is a quiet argument with American productivity religion. “Where you are going” stands in for the career arc, the plan, the narrative you can summarize at parties. Stafford suggests that the detours - the stray conversation, the weather you stop to watch, the book you pick up “by accident” - are not failures of discipline but disclosures of desire. The phrase “let yourself” matters: he’s not praising compulsive doomscrolling so much as a chosen loosening of the grip, an openness to being interrupted.

His final reversal does the real work. Getting lost implies panic, scarcity, punishment. Getting found implies discovery, almost grace. That’s classic Stafford: plain diction that smuggles in a spiritual claim without preaching. Contextually, it fits a poet formed by pacifism and attentiveness, someone suspicious of coercive scripts. The quote doesn’t romanticize aimlessness; it reframes orientation. The point isn’t that goals are fake. It’s that the self you’re chasing might be waiting off-route, in the very distractions you’ve been taught to erase.