Rumination and effort are both retreats from the present
The things Steven values most tend to be the effortless ones. Not forced, not gritted through, just easy. He calls this the art of not trying: a practiced letting-go where the felt need to always be achieving something falls away. Nothing gets "achieved" in any permanent sense anyway. Things get done, and then they pass, the way everything passes.
Rumination runs the same wrong direction from the opposite side. It feels like thinking, like taking something seriously, but it's actually the opposite of living. Rumination pulls you out of what's actually happening and into something unlived and untrue: a version of events that only exists in your head, replayed and edited until you're stuck inside it. That's negative imagination, not reflection.
Put the two together and the same pattern is running under both. Effort and rumination each feel like more engagement, more seriousness, more life. They aren't. They're both ways of leaving the present for a version of it that doesn't exist, whether that version is an achievement you're straining toward or a scene you keep re-litigating in your head. Actual living happens in the register where things arise, get done or don't, and fall away without needing to be gripped.
Trying harder and thinking harder about the past can both look like engagement while functioning as an exit from the present.
Source claim: Rumination and forced striving both function as retreats from the present moment, not deeper forms of living it.