Eudaimonia & Wellbeing
Poetry as religion
podcasts.apple.com“At the same time, art cannot be understood in terms of purpose. As the sculptor Charles Ray has said, art is “for absolutely nothing.” To make, or experience, art is to enter a kind of free zone; it slows us down, places us in some epistemological estuary, takes us into the wild. We make art from our flaws, fragilities, perversities, from our need
... See moredistilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the... See more
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
emily dickinson
I’ve come to realise that recognising opportunities for what they are calls for more than just keen observation; it needs a fundamental shift in how you perceive and interact with the world around you. It’s not an easy shift, or a comfortable one. But honestly, any growth demands that we become strangers to our former selves, and any change is a... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • reading the water
This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish... See more
A few weeks ago, the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. His best known work, After Virtue , is an extraordinary book. Despite its considerable impact over the past few decades (it was published in 1981), it still reads as a startlingly original, radical critique of modern society, and of moral philosophy itself.... See more
Practice and Virtue
growth feels uncomfortable because you've outgrown the old ways of being within yourself, and the new ways of being still aren't familiar so they feel unsafe. at the same time, there are parts of your old self that you miss, but also fear of a new chapter because you've never done it before.
i know that once this period of distress is over, good
... See moreZielschmerz n. the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.
