psychology

Love Anyway

You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal. I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind: Life will break you. Nobody… read article …

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George Saunders on How to Live an Unregretting Life

“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.” …

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The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife

“Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.” …

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The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.” …

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How Emotions Are Made

“Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.” …

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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” …

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Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Embracing Change in Relationships and the Key Pattern for Nourishing Love

“All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms.” …

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The Art of Allowing Change: Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry’s Moving Correspondence with Oliver Sacks about the Blessed Overwhelm of Transformation

There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of consciousness, and the irreducibility of aliveness: Living in a black-and-white chamber, Mary the scientist studies how nature works — from the physics of light to the biology of the eye — but when she exits her monochrome room and encounters color, she experiences something far beyond her knowledge of what color is. It might be impossible, the experiment intimates, to imagine — even with our finest knowledge and… read article …

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Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent. The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss between one consciousness and another in order to understand each other, to map the inner landscape of another’s territory of trust and vulnerability, to teach each other how what we need of love. “Understanding and loving are inseparable,” the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his wonderful field guide to the… read article …

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The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty

“We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay.” …

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Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective

“No guarantees in this life.” …

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What Makes a Compassionate World: Sophie de Grouchy’s Visionary 18th-Century Appeal to Parents and Teachers

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century. I asked her what to do, where the hope lies. Her response was simple, profound. “The most hideous crime… read article …

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Sentimentality and Being Mortal: Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments

How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact — the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and death, to rejection and indifference, to our own return to stardust — is the hardest… read article …

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The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit

“Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.” …

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A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

“Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” …

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Of Wonder, the Courage of Uncertainty, and How to Hear Your Soul: The Best of The Marginalian 2023

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives. In accordance with the annual tradition, here is the best of The Marginalian in hindsight — a Venn diagram of what I most loved writing and what readers most loved reading, spanning from the outermost reaches of the universe where physics probes the nature of reality to the… read article …

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Favorite Books of 2023

To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literature of the present comprises only a tiny fraction of my own reading, here are a handful of books published this year that moved me with their tendrils of timelessness, with their questions and their consolations — selections neither exhaustive nor universal, as subjective as a shade of blue. THE HALF KNOWN LIFE “The mind is its own place, and in it… read article …

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Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, or what we might call soul. And yet the great paradox is that the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self… read article …

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Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.” …

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How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Paradox of Doing the Right Thing

“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.” …

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The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality

“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.” …

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Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” …

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The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unmediated by interpretation. Eight centuries before the birth of photography, Alhazen gave the first clear description of a camera obscura, which… read article …

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bell hooks on Love

“We can never go back… We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago… All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” …

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Octavia Butler on Religion and the Spirituality of Symbiosis

“On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.” …

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