Last year I wrote about the light-heavy rocks at a temple in Kyoto. You made a wish and lifted the rock, and if the rock felt light, it was said your wish would come true. Back then I saw the rocks as a game of expectations—if you were ready for the weight of the rock, it would feel lighter. “If you’re the kind of person who takes on new challenges in life prepared for their heaviness,” I wrote, “then maybe that’s the kind of person that wishes come true for.”

A year later, I realized that something about what I wrote then didn’t sit well with me. How does one know what the right pressure is, what the right amount of preparedness is? How much is too much? Too little? All questions covered and buried, unmarked and grown fallow with the wild grasses of inexperience and fuzzy thinking. And dormant they stayed, until recently, when I read something that brought them to the surface.

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Our office is next door to a meditation center. Though we’ve been next door for almost a year, it wasn’t until recently that I started attending the open sittings held every Tuesday and Thursday night. I guess it’s a kind of ease-of-access syndrome, like having a museum membership you never use or living in a city for twelve years without visiting any of the landmarks.

I’ve never done meditation in a group setting, but I’m increasingly enjoying the experience and how it stays with me into the next day, sometimes longer. The format is a 45-minute sitting, followed by a 20-minute walking meditation, followed by readings chosen by the sitting-group leader and a kind of open forum where everyone can share thoughts or stories about their practice.

This past Thursday, Joseph, one of the center’s co-founders, told us about his experience at Foley Square earlier in the afternoon, when Occupy Wall Street protesters were rallying and getting ready to march to the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Joseph noticed lots of posters and signs, but there was one that stuck with him: a pink paper heart, about three or four inches wide, with ‘100%’ written on it. He approached the person holding the cut-out heart and asked, “what’s the story? What’s that sign all about?”

And she replied, “we need all the help we can get.”

At the office we have adjustable height desks, the ones you can turn into a standing desk with the press of a spring-loaded lever. The guys have used sit/stand desks at previous jobs, and we’re all familiar with articles like this one in the Times touting the benefits of standing versus sitting.

An article like that can start a small-scale revolution, make you rise to your feet—literally—and cast off your Aeron chair to the purgatory for used office furniture known as craigslist. Viva la standing desk! And that’s when you find out standing all the time isn’t much better either, that the real benefit of sit/stand desks is being able to stand some of the time and sit some of the time. The remedy for a sedentary lifestyle is the delta; it’s the moving around.

This is a classic example of something I call the keyframe bias, after the animation term that refers to the frames marking the beginning and end of a smooth transition. Given one keyframe of a tiny plane in the distance and a second of the plane zooming past overhead, we can tell the program to fill in the rest and it would assume the plane’s motion is spread out across the intermediate frames. This kind of logic works great if you’re a movie-making piece of software. It works less great if you’re a decision-making human being.

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I was doing some work at home Wednesday night. I was in the flow, really into it, so much so that I’d lost track of time and forgotten to eat dinner. When I finally came to at around a quarter to eleven, I saw the news: Steve had died.

I read some early reactions, some eulogies and remembrances from friends recounting their first experiences with Apple products, or that time Steve had said something about their own products. This sense of heartfelt solicitude, layered on top of my hunger and fatigue, made me delirious. I felt unprepared, suffocated. I needed to get out of the apartment and replenish on food and fresh air. I shut the lid of my Macbook, grabbed my wallet and iPhone, and put on my shoes to go to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue.

The Fifth Ave store is the first and only place I’ve seen Steve in the flesh. I’d walked by, late in the morning on the day of the grand opening, when there was only a handful of people waiting in line. From across the street, I saw Steve standing on the steps in the entranceway with a couple others. He pointed up at the seams in the glass and he had a smile on his face.

They’re in the process of remodeling the glass cube right now, the cube that Steve himself designed. It’s walled up in plywood, and a message on the gray wooden shell around the facade says, “we’re simplifying the Fifth Avenue cube. By using larger, seamless pieces of glass, we’re using just 15 panes instead of 90.”

On my way there, I shared a subway car with the people that give our sleepless city its nickname. These were people just beginning their day, headed into Manhattan to work the graveyard shift. I noticed every iPhone, every set of white earbuds, and the entire ride I sat trying to figure out why I felt so compelled to go to the glass cube, why I was so affected by the passing of a man I’ve only known from a distance.

It was more than just the products he pioneered, more than their ubiquity in my daily life. There was something in a murky place within my being, some deep humanity that had been rattled. From the tangle of emotions, from all the noise in my head and heart, a single word materialized: Integrity.

Beliefs and actions are like two separate musical tones, each with its own pitch, each repeating at a certain wavelength. Integrity is when the two come together, when beliefs and actions are in total alignment. A certain cosmic vibration occurs — there is resonance.

I believe we can sense this resonance, this integrity, in people and the things they create. We recognize it, often without realizing it, because many of us go through our lives struggling to find it. For most, the waves operate at different frequencies, meeting at rare instances, crossing momentarily before veering off into opposite directions. When we come across true integrity, it puts us at attention. We align toward it, like iron filings toward the poles of a magnet. In certain individuals, that resonance is so strong, at times it can even seem to distort reality.

Don’t waste your time living someone else’s life, Steve said in his Stanford commencement speech six years ago. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” He was telling all of us to turn our attention inward, to find the pitch of our own beliefs. Unless we do, we’re perpetually tuning our actions to the tones of others, doomed to be left wondering why it lacks the same resonance.

In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspiration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new cube, Steve. I’ll stand in the entrance and point at the seams in the glass and smile. I’ll descend the spiral staircase, those springy glass steps at my feet, and try to remember your resonance.

And I’ll listen to the music inside me and work as hard as I’ve ever worked, so that I can find my own.