Maria Popova's Blog, page 44

How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

“In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).”

Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are th...

Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our Most Destructive Emotion

“Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.”

There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself. “Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despoti...

The Broadest Portal to Joy

“Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually.”

All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.

All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.

This...

Youth and Age: Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming

A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great.”

The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong t...

The Remedy for Creative Block and Existential Stuckness

“Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender… Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free.”

To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem, a garden — is not to will something new into being but to surrender to the most ancient and alive part of ourselves — the stratum of spirit vibrating with every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read, every love we have ev...

Coleridge on the Paradox of Friendship and Romantic Love

On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature.

All relationships are asymmetrical. But there are some asymmetries that fray the fabric of the relationship and maim both people involved — none more so than those of a deep friendship where one person feels the tug of romantic love and the other does not, cannot. The challenge, then, is how to preserve the sanctity of friendship from being crushed beneath the weight of unequal expectations.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21...

May Sarton on Grieving a Pet

“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.”

There is an ineffable comfort that our non-human companions bless upon our lives — those beings whose daily task it is to “bite every sorrow until it fled” — and with their loss comes an ineffable species of grief.

Two centuries after the young Lord Byron tried to put it into words in his soulful elegy for his beloved dog, the poet and novelist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) captured it in stirring prose...

Lichens and the Meaning of Life

“We are lichens on a grand scale.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the great naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a century later as he considered the meaning of life. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”

Because of th...

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection

“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”

Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great ...

From Cells to Souls: The Poetic Science of How the Brain Became

The making of our densely networked crucible of thought and tenderness.

It seems inconceivable — that everything we know, everything we love, everything that ever was and ever will be, banged into being from the singularity, and out of that near-nothingness arose mitochondria and music and “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” all of it conspiring in the wonder of consciousness — the universe’s way of comprehending itself.

Down here on...