themarginalian.org

Seneca on True and False Friendship

He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. A man will be attracted by some reward offered in exchange for his friendship, if he be attracted by aught in friendship other than friendship itself.

wired.com

Want to Get Off Your Phone? Mina Kimes Suggests Having a Baby

"I think that's been the most helpful thing," says the ESPN journalist. "So there you go, Zoomers. There's a reason to have children."

themarginalian.org

Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The journalist tasked with reinventing ‘60 Minutes’ & the baseball exec who can’t win enough

There's a Japanese notion called "the red thread of fate" that says we're all connected by an invisible string to people whose lives we're meant to touch. Whether or not you believe that literally, I love the idea that our lives are constantly intersecting in ways we'll never entirely understand.

readtheprofile.com

My Annual Birthday Check-In: 13 Lessons From my 35th Year of Life

We spend so much time preparing ourselves for disappointment that we rarely consider the opposite skill: how to receive success, happiness, love, or abundance without immediately bracing for its disappearance. When life becomes better than we imagined, we sometimes stop trusting that it will last & we start waiting for the other shoe to drop. We become so afraid of losing the thing we love that we don't even enjoy having it.

themarginalian.org

The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother's voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving.

honest-broker.com

How to Make a Marriage Proposal

It gradually became clear to me that we would either need to break up or get married. And I had no intention of breaking up with Tara.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with James McBride

We spend enormous amounts of time listening to people tell us how to get rich, get fit, build companies, and improve our lives. Far fewer people listen to those who have actually lived one. Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from conversations with people in their eighties and nineties.

themarginalian.org

How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jonny Gannon

Ironically, the 'Ugly American' in the novel is not the arrogant, culturally tone-deaf official the phrase has come to mean, but a man named Homer Atkins — a practical engineer who earns trust by living among local people, understanding their needs, and solving problems with humility rather than bureaucracy. The book's enduring message is that lasting influence comes from building durable relationships and developing local knowledge.

themarginalian.org

Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.

themarginalian.org

Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Unable to ask for what we really need — because it is too vulnerable-making and demands too much trust — we end up playing for strokes that are invariably compromises on what we most hunger for, simulacra of the deepest satisfaction: real intimacy.

themarginalian.org

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself…

themarginalian.org

How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback

To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood.

themarginalian.org

The 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive

Time is not a resource we have for cashing in. True timefulness … is to live in awareness of the dynamic and unpredictable array of times that co-exist within one life, as well as the intersubjective nature of time between all individuals. To live it well, we may need to break the temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relational and contingent upon each other in specific and localised ways.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo

It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.

themarginalian.org

Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline's new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

longreads.com

The Healing Power of Watching the Boys of ‘Jackass’ Do Incredibly Stupid Things

I just know that anything worth having is worth hurting for: male friendship, a really funny video, a legacy and so on.

themarginalian.org

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship

When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.

longreads.com

On Description

There was another shape formed by these descriptions. It was what my life would have looked like if things had gone according to plan, and how this current situation, far from anywhere I'd ever lived or imagined, may or may not have differed from that normal, which might also inform whether or not I was doing OK, in some process of recovery, and, therefore, whether or not my father needed to worry.

themarginalian.org

True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again

Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.

theconvivialsociety

Friendship Suffices

"If there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is."

themarginalian.org

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships.

longreads.com

A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits

Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don't.

themarginalian.org

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I've grown older I've learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.

longreads.com

The Feeding

She wanted to forget having been sick, while I was in the next room, sobbing like she was already gone.

themarginalian.org

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

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

longreads.com

How Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives

Though the woman died almost 20 years ago, Paul said, the curse remains in effect.

themarginalian.org

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others' shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

noahpinion.blog

Dating advice for men

A lot of men — maybe even most men — get emotionally attached to our sex partners. There are well-known natural mechanisms for this. For those guys, going through one woman after another, again and again, for years and years, is just making and breaking those attachments again and again. That's not fun, that's self-punishment.