Natalie Audelo

Everything I’ve learned about life and love, I’ve learned through grief. Pregnant and widowed at 28 sideswiped the life I was building, the life I’d thought I’d have. What’s that saying: Make plans and watch God laugh? It’s from the old Yiddish adage “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” meaning, Man plans and God laughs.

The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.

I’m just a person with creative energy! And I’m beginning to really like that about myself.

There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

Why do we always remember our childhood friends? Why do so many people look back on college with fondness? Why are so many married couples nostalgic for those hardscrabble early years, with the crappy jobs and tiny apartment and borrowed baby clothes? It’s because, while those environments were materially constrained (we had fewer choices), they yi... See more

Love demands a complete inner transformation — for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self.