I love watching the birds in our backyard. Because of the woods behind our house, we get a huge variety of them. Just this moment, just for fun, I made a list of the birds we’ve seen just this week. Before my pencil stopped moving, I’d come up with 14 varieties. They’re all so different. Robins hop through the grass, looking for worms and small bugs. Nuthatches hang off the feeder at weird angles. Some are almost oblivious to people coming in and out of the house. Others fly away when you reach up to scratch your head.

I often wonder how much of their activity is instinctual: nesting, feeding, foraging, mating. And then I wonder about our own behavior, and how much of it is instinctual. This is fascinating to think about because there are certainly behaviors that you engage in without ever thinking about them. You do the same thing the same way all the time. But were we born with those tendencies? Not likely. No one came out of the womb with an uncontrollable genetic urge to floss before going to bed.

You could go a little crazy sorting it all out, and it wouldn’t be healthy to try. But it is a fascinating exercise to reflect on those things that make us uniquely who we are, not just the particular traits we acquired from our parents and grandparents, but as human beings. (And a further thought in the same vein: What does it mean to be made in the image of God? A HUGE question, but alas one we’ll hold off on for another day!)

But here too, remember, I’m talking about instincts, not those habits or activities that we fall into “automatically”—learned behaviors that have become (almost) instinctual for us. There is a difference, and I want to talk today about one that I think most people think of as something they’re just not “wired” for.

This morning I picked up a book by Ruth Haley Barton called Invitation to Solitude and Silence. The foreword is written by Dallas Willard who quotes the mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said familiarly that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room.” And in order to avoid that solitude, we go to great lengths to distract ourselves. Everyone, I believe, knows this to be true of themselves on some level.

What I want to get at, though, is Willard’s next observation: “Pascal also observes that we have ‘another secret instinct, a remnant of the greatness of our original nature, which teaches that happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up.’”

Hmm. A secret instinct for quiet and solitude. And at one and the same time we find ourselves clamoring incessantly for distraction from it! What’s up with that? What could there be that would be so fearful and intimidating? Is it something in us that we’re afraid to see—some inadequacy, or sin, or fault, or weakness? Or, worse yet, could it be nothing? Are we afraid there’s really nothing there, and so we run as fast as we can in any other direction we can?

I don’t have any idea why it is that you run, but you do. We all do. What if we stopped running? Is it possible, or even merely conceivable, that the life you’ve always wanted is right there for the taking, like an apple hanging from a tree?

Deep inside I think we know that life would never be the same. And even if that life were infinitely better than life as we know it today, the fact that it’s also immeasurably different is also incredibly frightening. The best, most godly people I know are better and more godly because they’ve gone to that place. Because, even when they go through the course of their everyday activities and engage in the various casual and committed relationships, they carry that peace, that confidence, that presence with them that, even if all the clamor and distractions faded completely away they would still exist, they would still have life and meaning and purpose that transcends the noisy life most people are trapped in.

Instincts are born into us. Viruses are caught. You were made for the kind of life that Jesus holds out to you. It’s possible for us to live as carriers of life into the world, carriers of a more vital and powerful virus than Zika or malaria or the Bird Flu. As Jesus said in the gospel of John, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

They yearning for that restful life is, as Willard notes, “a remnant of the greatness of our original nature.” We can only find it by stopping, never by searching (because in the end we’re not searching, we’re fleeing). Only when we stop can it (He) find us.

Do you know someone, a carrier, of that Jesus kind of life? Someone who can or has awakened the “secret instinct” in you (or at least the desire for it)? Seek them out this week. Call them. Make an appointment with them. Find a way, any way, to get close to them and get personal. Get close enough to catch what they have and find the thing your soul craves.