18 Life-Learnings From 18 Years of the Marginalian

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parenthe