“What is happiness but growth in peace.” In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as…
“As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give… Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.” “Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of his music three centuries ago, when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were considered magic, when the fact of…
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you…
“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.” “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,”…
