themarginalian.org

Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

themarginalian.org

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.

jefftweedy

Tom Sawyer (Rush cover)

We should be suspicious of the people that don't have something that sustains them, and that they've fallen in love with. And Rush was absolutely something that gave people courage.

fs.blog

Truth Over Feelings: Inside Opendoor’s Turnaround

Most turnaround stories are told years later, by the winner, after the ending is already known. That's why they always sound clean and polished. This one doesn't have an ending yet, and it's anything but clean and polished.

themarginalian.org

Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak

When you are delighted with anything, be delighted as with a thing which is not one of those which cannot be taken away, but as something of such a kind, as an earthen pot is, or a glass cup, that, when it has been broken, you may remember what it was and may not be troubled… What you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year.

themarginalian.org

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature's own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.

themarginalian.org

The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration

Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality. The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane.

themarginalian.org

How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

themarginalian.org

Do Not Spare Yourself

To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.

longreads.com

No Return

Two years later, when Thomas's name was in the news, Walkner came back to the post and answered his question: "Why did we turn around just before the summit? Because turning back when conditions become too dangerous is what distinguishes good and experienced alpinists."

honest-broker.com

12 YouTube Videos I'm Enjoying Right Now

Fabrizio grew up in poverty in Huánuco, Peru, and moved to the US at age fifteen, where he worked the lowest level jobs—busboy in a Mexican restaurant, door-to-door sales, etc. He eventually found himself in Nashville, and is now ready to make his mark on the country music scene.

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

The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without.

themarginalian.org

Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

jefftweedy

Another Man's Done Gone

A belief that joy is defiant, and essential, in any kind of situation where you're actively resisting destructive powers.

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Mary HK Choi

I can't imagine how life changing this was for chronic vertigo sufferers. It's astonishing how effective it is given how simple the steps are and it really goes to show what a difference a person can make by flouting convention and how brave people have to be at certain points in their life.

themarginalian.org

Kurt Vonnegut’s Life-Advice to His Children

You're learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident. Those years weren't lost. They simply weren't the way I'd planned them.

themarginalian.org

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

themarginalian.org

Life Is a Story That Begins in the Middle: Bayo Akomolafe on the Rewilding Power of Obstacles

Obstacles are the universe's hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control. The moment an obstacle bisects the trajectory of intent, it creates a natural midpoint that is both an end and a beginning, but also something else entirely, for it lives on a different plane from the strict linearity of the will as cause and its intended effect.

themarginalian.org

The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up

They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom. There is no greater freedom than the self-permission to be entirely ourselves, an entirety we must go on embracing as it goes on expanding, goes on revealing its edges and its shadows.