4 ideas
In autumn 1973 Matthiessen walked roughly 250 miles with the biologist George Schaller to Shey Gompa beneath Crystal Mountain in Dolpo, to observe the blue sheep rut and hoping to see a snow leopard. They found fresh tracks, scrapes and scat, which showed leopards were nearby and likely watching, yet Matthiessen never saw one. When Schaller stayed on and Matthiessen left, he recorded no confirmed sighting.
This answer takes an absence that would count as failure under goal-directed striving and treats it as release from striving. If the purpose of the search was the attention it required, then not finding the leopard does not reduce the value of the search. It can even reveal that clinging to the result was the obstacle.
Matthiessen does not put his wife's death from cancer into a separate chapter. He lets the memories break into the daily entries about porters, weather and trail conditions. The structure suggests that mourning is not a stage completed before returning to life. It moves alongside ordinary tasks and surfaces through them without warning.
The book sets Schaller's scientific method beside Matthiessen's Zen practice. Schaller counts sheep, logs behavior and suspends interpretation, while Matthiessen sits and watches. Both require sustained, patient attention to what is actually present rather than what one hopes to find. The contrast shows that rigorous observation is a spiritual discipline as much as an empirical one. It also shows how differently the two men carry grief, ambition and impatience under the same demand.