Convictions Can Be as Dangerous as Lies

The School of Life post this week is on conviction. It is something we become “good” at as we age… i.e., we become certain when very little is certain.

Think about it and consider knocking off your sharp edges before life does it for you. That said, there is one conviction worth developing: you are stronger than you think–and you will tolerate more than you expect you can.

Toodles for now, Hug, Vicki

Jeff Matlow/By Title Only had a great newsletter this week. It not only presents a perspective but gives you a few tools to use moving forward. Enjoy hunkering down for a few minutes to think about how you handle some of these issues. Hope your 4^th was safe and you are wearing a hat in this summer sun. Be well. Summer Hug!

~Vicki

The Power of Personalized Perspective

by Jeff Matlow

A professor is standing in front of a classroom. He grabs a blank piece of paper and draws a dot in the middle.

He holds the paper up to the class and asks them what they see.

Some students talk about the position of the dot on the paper, others mention the size of the dot. But they all agree: they see a black dot.

After the responses, the professor speaks to them:

The following was a midweek revisit of an earlier Marginalian column (once called Brain Pickings). Enjoy! 

Love,

Vicki

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing). 

“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age.

Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are. De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

– Susan Sontag

From Dense Discovery

Edition #268 – June 11, 2023

Vacation won’t make things better. Changing jobs won’t make things better. Getting the recognition you deserve won’t make things better. Drugs won’t make things better.

The only thing that will make things better is your relationship with yourself.

~Farnham Street