Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.

Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.

I’ve been a big fan of Maria Popova for many years now and I’ve been receiving her eNewsletter for what seems ages.

Almost every one is insightful and inspirational, educational and at times even entertaining.

In one of her latest ones she shares 16 lessons she’s learned over the years and I’ve no doubt you’ll learn a few things about life and love, happiness and more …

via Maria Popova

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. 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 “How are you?” 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.

Once a week, I dispatched my ledger of curiosity — 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.

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.

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’t 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 — it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance. I calculated that if I replaced two meals a day with canned tuna and oatmeal — the white label brand from the local grocery store in West Philly — 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.

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, carrying into a far vaster digital universe a spare selection of the writings I publish on the website throughout the week.

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. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance — the anthropocentric term for which is luck — 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 — 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.)

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, which was always a form of composing myself. Starting at year seven, I began a sort of public diary of learnings — 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.

And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” 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’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself…

… keep reading the full & original article HERE