Nneka Jennifer Ngene

But long-term success often looks more devotional and meticulous, less flamboyant. It looks like being willing to spend 2 weeks on the thing that most people have a 2 hour attention span for

Your intuition about someone’s foundation is your experience of their psychological resilience. If you are around someone who feels wobbly, you might sense that they have a limited capacity to be with you because they’re too worried about themselves. It might feel like you are responsible for keeping them steady.

By internal architecture, what I mean is, when someone talks to me, what I notice first are the supporting beams propping up their words: the cadence and tone and desire behind them. I hear if they are bored, fascinated, wanting validation or connection. I often feel like I can hear how much they like themselves.

When you have no one to emulate, you build in a language of your own. And when there’s no blueprint other than yourself, you don’t just create; you originate .

Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes.

We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.

With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it is never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:

What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrende... See more

“Irony is the song of a bird who has come to love its cage,”