Brainpickings

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Maria Popova Don’t try to wash your tired hands clean from the bloodshed of your private wars. Just unclench the fist that has come to feel like home and let the story slip between your trembling fingers into the river of time, silver and indifferent. You may have to kneel for days        or decades in a pool of silence blue and lonely as a heron but it will be there, the small green stone lying at the bottom lustrous with a pea

“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.” When answering the Orion questionnaire, a question stopped me up short by contracting an incomprehensible expanse of complexity into a binary: Are you the same person you were as a child? It is fundamentally a question about change — its possibility and its paradoxes, our yearning for it and our ambivalence toward it. Here I am, living on a different landmass from the one I was

You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the next moment, too — the desperate wish for an undo button you know cannot be had, no matter your protestations and prostrations. It is a seductive dream, to have an unregetting life, but it is also a dangerous dream, for it dooms us to the living nightmare of perfection, that punitive negatio

It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The anci

“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.” One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had. It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact

“The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” “To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high,” the Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf wrote in his timeless, increasingly timely reflection on how to disagree. It is in times as divisive as ours and as sundered by conflic

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going,” the artist Ann Hamilton wrote a generation later in her magnificent meditation o

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only fo

The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its healthy and potent form, protest is both a natural stage of grief and a motive force for new beginnings, we live in a culture that chronically mistakes outcry for protest, a culture

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spirituall

“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention &#821

In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859–January 4, 1941) aimed his uncommon mind at “the threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation” in what became Matter and Memory (public library

“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” Half a century before Walt Whitman considered what makes life worth living when a paralytic stroke boughed him to the ground of being, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) placed that question at the beating heart of The Last Man (free ebook | public library) — the 1826 novel she wrote in the bleakest period of her life: after the death

“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.” “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she reflected on the relationship between nature and human nature. But what we call place — that unal

“It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.” “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolf wrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded into the River Ouse near her house, and, unwilling to endure what she had barely survived in the past, slid beneath the smooth surface of life. One midsummer morning seven dec

“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.” It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the noise swells to a bellowing bass line, until it drowns out the symphony of life. It can last for days or months or entire seasons of being. It visited Keats frequently in his short life, leaving him with a mind empty of ideas and hands heavy as lead

I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be given two unrelated words and tasked with twining them into a poem. Summers end. Worlds tilt away from each other, drift apart, resume their orbit, transformed. This

This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s shores in Humboldt’s lifetime, the cats and rats that descended from their ships began decimating the native population of black robins — sparrow-sized birds with yellow-soled feet that had

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This essay and poem are now part of the Universe in Verse book. In 1865 — a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily Dickinson composed her stunning pre-ecological poem about how life-forms come into being — the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined the word entropy to describe the undoing of being. The thermodynamic collapse of physical systems into incr

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother’s voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving. They are the necessary losses that make us who we are, our training ground for m