Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

right-side spiral sparks curiosity and makes us want to create things.

When the left hemisphere whips us into miserably embracing the negativity bias and the hall of mirrors, we’re primed to believe that our perceptions are factually correct. By contrast, when we use our right hemispheres to assemble an internal experience, we know this is a choice.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is more like being haunted. It pulls our attention inward to worrisome thoughts and fantasies, away from our actual physical situation in the present. Its vague sense of doom presses down on us without suggesting any constructive action. And unlike healthy fear, anxiety never relents. It may not only persist but also inc

Do you have the will and courage to shape all your actions according to what emerges from your inherent originality rather than from anything you’ve ever been taught?

Can you accept that abandoning anxiety may cause you to think and act in ways that are compassionate and creative but unusual, ways that the people around you might find incomprehensible?

I began to play with something I called “the art of calm,” because it was all about using creativity to calm my anxiety.

Here is the true miracle of life: when it is awake, it heals.

This is why Gandhi said, “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.”

granite. To us, with our left-hemisphere focus on grabbable stuff, fluid things appear less powerful than rigid ones. But “water falling, day by day, wears the hardest rock away.” That which adapts and includes will win over that which rejects and excludes. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will