{"id":222541,"date":"2022-10-24T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=222541"},"modified":"2022-10-23T06:08:22","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T05:08:22","slug":"16-life-learnings-from-16-years-of-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/10\/16-life-learnings-from-16-years-of-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

23 Oct 2022 – The Marginalian<\/em> was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a>. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart from my native Bulgaria, still baffled by the foreignness of fitted sheets, brunch, and \u201cHow are you?\u201d as a greeting rather than a question. I was also living through my first episode of severe depression and weaving, without knowing it, my own lifeline to survival out of what remains the best material I know: wonder.<\/p>\n

Once a week, I dispatched my ledger of curiosity \u2014 a brief digest of interesting, inspiring, or plainly wondrous things I had encountered on the internet, at the library, or in the city, from exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese woodblocks to a fascinating new neuroscience study to arresting graffiti on the side of a warehouse.<\/p>\n

It was sweet, at first, when my friends kept asking to add their girlfriends or parents to the list, who in turn asked to add their own friends, until it exceeded the time I had for such administration.<\/p>\n

I had the obvious idea to make a website of it, so that anyone who wanted to read could just visit it without any demands on my time. The only trouble was that I didn\u2019t know how to make a website. (Blogging platforms as we now know them were not a thing, and even the rudimentary options that existed required some HTML proficiency.) We have a way of not always knowing whether the hard way is the easiest way or vice versa. In addition to my full college course load and the four jobs I was working to pay for it, I decided to take a night class and learn to code \u2014 it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance. I calculated that if I replaced two meals a day with canned tuna and oatmeal \u2014 the white label brand from the local grocery store in West Philly \u2014 in a few weeks I could pay for the coding class. And so I did. A crude website was born, ugly as a newborn aardvark.<\/p>\n

Eventually, when email newsletter delivery services became available and affordable to my bootstrapped budget, the website got a newsletter, coming full circle. To this day, it goes out weekly<\/a>, carrying into a far vaster digital universe a spare selection of the writings I publish on the website throughout the week.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In those early years, working my banal day jobs hostage to my visa and the demands of my metabolism, not once did it occur to me that this labor of love would become both the pulse-beat of my life and the sole source of my livelihood<\/a>. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance \u2014 the anthropocentric term for which is luck \u2014 the seven friends somehow became several million readers without much effort on my behalf beyond the daily habit of showing up for the blank page. (There is, of course, nothing singular or surprising about this \u2014 Earth carves canyons into rock with nothing more than a steadfast stream. Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself.)<\/p>\n

Several years in, I thought it would be a good exercise to reflect on what I was learning about life in the course of composing The Marginalian<\/em>, which was always a form of composing myself. Starting at year seven<\/a>, I began a sort of public diary of learnings \u2014 never revising those of the previous years, only adding some newly gleaned understanding with each completed orbit, the way our present selves are always a Russian nesting doll containing and growing out of the irrevisible selves we have been.<\/p>\n

And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Art by Debbie Millman for The Marginalian<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.<\/strong> Cultivate that capacity for \u201cnegative capability.\u201d<\/a> We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our \u201copinions\u201d based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It\u2019s enormously disorienting to simply say, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d But it\u2019s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right \u2014 even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.<\/p>\n

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone.<\/strong> As Paul Graham observed<\/a>, \u201cprestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you\u2019d like to like.\u201d Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don\u2019t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night \u2014 and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.<\/p>\n

3. Be generous.<\/strong> Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It\u2019s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life\u2019s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.<\/p>\n

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.<\/strong> Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming<\/a>, even to boredom<\/a>. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing<\/a>, the entire flow of the creative process<\/a> is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac<\/a>, sleep also affects our every waking moment<\/a>, dictates our social rhythm<\/a>, and even mediates our negative moods<\/a>. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?<\/p>\n

5.<\/strong> As Maya Angelou<\/a> famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you<\/em> are, don\u2019t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity<\/strong>, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.<\/p>\n

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.<\/strong> Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living \u2014 for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it<\/a>, \u201chow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

7. \u201cExpect anything worthwhile to take a long time.\u201d<\/strong> This is borrowed<\/a> from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman<\/a>, for it\u2019s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that \u2014 a myth \u2014 as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning<\/a>. The flower doesn\u2019t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we\u2019re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming<\/em>. But that\u2019s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one\u2019s character and destiny.<\/p>\n

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.<\/strong> Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences<\/a>, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit \u2014 it\u2019s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.<\/p>\n

9. Don\u2019t be afraid to be an idealist.<\/strong> There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture \u2014 which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands \u2014 give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted<\/a> half a century ago that the role of the writer is \u201cto lift people up, not lower them down\u201d \u2014 a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial \u2014 in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.<\/p>\n

10. Don\u2019t just resist cynicism \u2014 fight it actively.<\/strong> Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt<\/a>, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason<\/a> and necessary counterpart to hope<\/a>, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis \u2014 in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit<\/a>, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.<\/p>\n

11.<\/strong> A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi<\/a>: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality<\/strong>. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable \u2014 incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.<\/p>\n

12.<\/strong> Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring<\/em><\/a> (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.<\/strong> The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another\u2019s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.<\/p>\n

14. Choose joy.<\/strong> Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim \u201cyes to life, in spite of everything!\u201d<\/a> \u2014 and what an everything he lived through \u2014 then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus \u2014 an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, \u201cthe little joys\u201d<\/a>; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.<\/p>\n

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.<\/p>\n

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.<\/p>\n

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.<\/p>\n

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.<\/p>\n

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield\u2019s splendid poem \u201cThe Weighing\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

So few grains of happiness
\nmeasured against all the dark
\nand still the scales balance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.<\/p>\n

15. Outgrow yourself<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

16. Unself<\/a>.<\/strong> Nothing is more tedious than self-concern \u2014 the antipode of wonder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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