Thought provoking
The classic therapist-produced view of mental health sees it as inside you — in your psyche, in your mind. However, mental health is not inside you. Mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to other people and to the future. The sense of wellbeing that infuses you (if you get the balance right) is not... See more
Mondays of Meaning
https://www.betterquestions.co/gett/?ref=better-questions-newsletter
Getting Lucky
4 Dec 2024 — 5 min read
Photo by Jakob Cotton / Unsplash
... See moreLuck isn’t a constant, it increases with surface area: be in the right places, have lots of conversations, put yourself out there, ask for what you want and be optimistic and positive.
Anam Cara and the Essence of True Friendship: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Beautiful Ancient Celtic Notion of Soul-Friend
Maria Popova • What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities
The Red Hand Files Issue #306
“This Is Good”
In front of large audience of people “considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas,” as he put it, the economist Tyler Cowen asked Camille Paglia to offer a piece of advice based on her many years of soldiering through adversity, rejection, and failure before eventually emerging in her mid-40s as a successful and
... See moreIn his 2012 essay, “More people should write,” writer and programmer James Somers described this process as creating a mental bucket for an idea, thereby unleashing a magnetic force between that idea and the world:
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.
Once you’ve discovered the right mental buckets, or containers, for your creative work, it’s time to maximize the potential for unexpected connections. But to surface those connections, you also need the right tools.