Maria Popova puts out a weekly newsletter of thought provoking articles called Brain Pickings, "a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why." It is fantastic reading, and here are just a few juicy snippets from this week's interesting stories.
In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips
on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
"Phillips...examines the paradoxical relationship between frustration and
satisfaction, exploring how our unlived lives illuminate the priorities,
values, and desires undergirding the lives we do live....[He writes,] "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life
worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much
of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the
lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some
reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the
experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the
absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and
sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives – even if this
often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available –
because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us.
Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with
our wanting.""
Simone Weil on Attention and Grace
"...another enchantress of the human spirit – the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943), a mind of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a sort of modern saint whom Albert Camus
described as "the only great spirit of our times" – wrote beautifully
of attention as contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest
rewards of our humanity...[She writes,] "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If
we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by
little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.""
The Rabbit Box: Unusual Vintage Children's Book for Grownups
Celebrates the Mystery of Life and the Magic of Falling in Love
"In 1970, poet, playwright, and former priest Joseph Pintauro teamed up with artist Norman Laliberté on a marvelous limited-edition boxed set titled
The Rainbow Box, containing four children's books for grownups, each dedicated to a season and full of playful and poignant fragmentary meditations on love, loss, war, peace, loneliness, communion – in other words, the emotional kaleidoscope of life itself. Dedicated to spring was
The Rabbit Box (public library)– a most unusual lens on themes both of the time (the dawn of the environmental movement, the anti-war movement) and timeless (love, peace, the meaning of the human experience), equal parts strange and spectacular. What emerges is a poem, a love letter, an elegy for Mother Earth, an incantation against war, and above all a vibrant invitation to aliveness."
