Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian

 One of the joys of my week is the twice-a-week email I get called the Marginalian. It is always a fun read and I highly recommend it to all. Her latest post is called 16 life-learnings. I have left out the best parts, so to read the rest of this wonderful essay, go to her site

Several years in, I thought it would be a good exercise to reflect on what I was learning about life in the course of composing. Starting at year seven, I began a sort of public diary of learnings And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning

1.                Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

2.                Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone.

3.                Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words.

4.                Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom.

5.                As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them.

6.                Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, and our ability to perform this or that.

7.                “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy

8.                Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion.

9.                Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on?

10.           Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modelling its opposite.

11.           A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12.           Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13.           In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.

14.           Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

1.    Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

2.    Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

3.    Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

4.    Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

5.    I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15.           Outgrow yourself.

16.           Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern.