Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of my life in America. My first thirty years I spent in Germany. In smaller, scattered stretches, I lived in France and Italy for study, work and fun.

Twenty years is a long time to orient myself in American culture and language, but they can still feel like magma, ever moving, evolving, never quite solid under my feet. I’ll never be as American as my U.S.-born daughter; she is now seventeen.

As everyone else’s, my identity is confusing, rich, and ambiguous. When I was little, I clung to my home and my mother’s side. I spoke late—at least that’s how the story goes— and later found myself drawn into my interiority and the silent wonder of books. There’s a bit of irony when I say this: language and the spoken word made my world. It is hard to overstate the influence and consequence they have had on my life.

I think and express myself, in varying degrees, in four languages. I belong to all four and completely to none. Each language ties to a different version of me in the way it is shaping, inventing, imagining, revealing, and hiding me. I speak each language with a kind of permanent imperfection (besides German, I guess), but it is language itself that has brought so much possibility and aliveness into my life.

Each language I speak is a beloved, a different place of affection, reflection, sensibility and understanding. What am I to make of this deep attachment and sentimental-intellectual involvement in these languages?

Deutsch
German is my mother tongue. In my heart and my mind, it still rings the most clearly and will remain my forever lullaby. My roots are in the hilly countryside around Cologne where I grew up, played in a sand box and rode my small yellow bike, later climbed 130 worn steps to school daily and spent the first good stretch of my work career. It’s where I still have family and longstanding friends I typically return to once a year.

German was the nurturing soil for my consciousness and my original encodings. It may forever remain the main underlying structure my thinking and meaning-making grows from, the base line for my sense of safety and what I may still fear or be ashamed of. My German may be what remains in old age, depending on if I get there and how things go. Linguists and other’s lived experience suggest that we tend to lose languages learned later first, and our mother tongue last.

My German is precise; it feels vaguely warm and deeply familiar. It must be my most embodied language as I can feel it in my body. Language is a verbal track, to be sure, but there is an intimately felt sense of it too, perhaps comparable to what is evoked by music or poetry. When I hear “Tannenduft, Nebel, Laub” (pine scent, mist, foliage), I feel the coloring and weight of fall in my chest and can smell the woods where I hiked with my parents when I was a kid, the kind of atmosphere that lives on in one’s heart. Images, symbols, and patterns formed in my German may still shape a lot of my daytime thoughts and nighttime dreams.

English
English is my best-mastered, albeit forever imperfect, second language. It now surrounds me in my everyday life and constitutes the language for most of what I read and write. The latter developed over time, like a slow weaning off from German, helped by immersion and the discipline of improving my skills, as well as the growing opportunities I see to meet other English-speaking writers and readers.

English is my street-smart shape shifter, I can be quite nimble in it. It has always charmed me with its agility and openness for improvisation, tolerance, and a certain coolness and hipness, probably first absorbed during my coming-of-age around America‘s music and brands in the nineties.

American English has taught me more than any other how deeply language is also tied to geography. First at age seven, and then again and again, I had the opportunity to visit and travel across parts of the United States. I remember long stretches of road and open space, my growing sense for the land’s distance and the incredible diversity of its terrains and people. Maybe this is how language stretches too, trying to accommodate differences. I will forever carry an appreciation for the ease and willingness with which people spoke to me and welcomed me in.

I only recently realized something else about English1: its Anglo-Saxon backbone, in contrast to its other main strand that originates in French and Latin, can be strikingly close to German in rhythm, syntax, and the way it hits my mind and body. An example for this: when you place a passage from the King James Bible and compare it to the literal German translation, can you see and sense the similarities?

And God said,
let there be light:
and there was light.
—Gen. 1:3

Und Gott sagte,
lass’ dort Licht sein,
und dort ward Licht.
—Gen. 1:3

Français
My grandmother had an intellectual knack for French, even though she knew only few words of it. I can still hear her tongue roll off words like trottoir or porte-monnaie in deliberate elegance during conversation.2 Only much later did I learn how much she was dreaming of seeing Paris once in her lifetime, together with her husband (my grandfather). But times were different; they never went.

I sometimes like to think she’d be proud of her (in)direct influence on me. There was no question I’d pick up French as my second foreign language in grade seven, and to go to France later to study (and party) there. This might sound silly, but it holds meaning for me to be free and wild on her behalf too.

French is a queen, and there’s no stopping her. She’s royal and some kind of higher standard, she is a mouthful and fast. I am in love with her imagination and elegant complication, and her ways of dressing up ideas. Here’s Simone de Beauvoir, for example, who wrote: On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. - One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. How much more naturally and efficiently flowing this appears to me in French.3

Unfortunately, due to a lack of practice, I’ve already lost a good chunk of what I’ve once mastered in French. My heart and mind will hold on to her though. Merci, ma reine. De rien, she goes.

Italiano
Stepping into the attico atop the city roofs of Genova was likely the moment I fell in love with the language and lifestyle of Italy. Terracotta light trickled through the shutters, washing the wooden floors with what looked like stripes of honey. I was twenty-two years old and had traveled all night on the train from Cologne to see my then Italian boyfriend. He and I had met in France earlier that year—and had been speaking French to each other—and now his family was welcoming me into their home and their hearts, while my skin was still tingling from the train’s metal clatter. I stayed for a few weeks and returned for the two summers that followed.

Learning Italian became an organically growing thing, for once freed from any typical school setting; I learned it while cooking pasta or when I talked with Milly (the boyfriend’s mother) about Italian movies or the books that I found all over their house. Milly was in her early forties at the time, a relaxed and free-spirited woman, and in certain ways different from my mom. She captivated me with her laugh and natural warmth, and how she made me feel immediately accepted.

My mastery of Italian falls short compared to English and French, but I can feel it in my gut; it animates my hands and moves my soul. It has become rare to find the opportunity to speak Italian, but when it happens, I still catch myself wondering: isn’t Italian, or in fact all foreign language speaking, a kind of miracle?

All this is part of what I mean when I say that language(s) made me. They helped me grow associations, understanding, and connections—not only to new people and parts of the world, but also to new shades and facets of me.

The Canadian author Nancy Huston, who has lived in France for many years, wrote in her book Losing North4 about her own experience between different languages and cultures:

I really like Huston’s imagery of the glittery and slippery net of language trying to capture a life, and what it all means to us. What else can language be than frustratingly imperfect, especially when spoken in (and with) non-native tongues? In my case, I can explore the boundaries, perhaps even the mainland, of Italian, French and English, but their deeply layered interiors still escape me. But what a personal loss it would be if I didn’t possess what they have given me: in possibility, joy and aliveness, and in opening doors to so many amazing people I now have in my life. All in all irreplaceable—also by AI, by the way, as these are matters of the heart.

I want to thank my wonderful writing friends, namely — and: !!!

The clock is the key machine of the modern industrial age, ruling over our daily lives’ most precious resource: life time. Time is always ticking, terminator-style, ruthlessly counting us all the way down to our eventual demise. Once in a while though, we sense this dimension of time that is different from the one we read on clocks. Like a secret pulse, this kind of time persists, dormant somewhere inside us. Then – a certain taste, surprising scent or special light at dusk can do this – linear time duration collapses, and we are back! In the past! Like folded pages pressed together, the past gets reopened inside of us, ready to be felt again.

In the seven volumes of his vast oeuvre “In Search of Lost Time”, French novelist Marcel Proust was very much after this secret sense of time. He explored the continuity of life that hides beneath the surface of linear time and memory and described his (or his protagonists’) once-lived-moments in brilliant eloquence and sensory richness. Proust believed there was a hidden dimension of lived and felt time that lay dormant inside of us until it was re-awakened by sensory triggers. Proust called this “time regained” (temps retrouvé), a time that is felt and escapes the chronologically measured time of clocks. He believed in a non-continuous self, meaning that a constellation of different selves persist across time, preserved in the layers of our lived experience and our individual sensory-emotional imprints. Time reshapes who we become, but a trigger can suddenly summon an earlier version of self.1

For the common reader, like me, “the Madeleine moment” may be the most famous literary example of Proust’s concept of time. His narrator Marcel is a somewhat disillusioned but highly perceptive adult man caught in the routines of clock time and the conventions of his sociocultural environment. One day, when he dips a Madeleine, a French type of buttery cake, into his linden tea and tastes it, he is suddenly and involuntarily also the small boy again who spends his childhood holidays and summers at his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. The abbreviated version of this scene is this:

“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday morning at Combray… my aunt Léonie used to give me… Immediately the grey house… rose up like a stage to attach itself to the little pavilion opening to the garden.”

To me, reading Proust can feel like an exquisite guided meditation on attention, memory and time, allowing me to inhabit his world of heightened perception. His writing is so precise in its phenomenology that it might even ignite sparks in our own buried memory archive. That’s at least what happened to me. Inspired by Proust, I created my own Madeleine moment – hoping he wouldn’t mind.

In the following, I experimented with using parts of Proust’s original text passages around the Madeleine scene2 – these parts are shown in italics – and mixing them with my own words around some childhood memories from when I was five and six years old; these portions are shown in regular type. At that time, I lived with my parents and sisters in a small German village called Mühleip, where I could just walk to school and otherwise roam around on roller skates or my little bike.

Here’s my “literary remix”:

For many years, already, everything about Mühleip that was not our small neighborhood, the bakery near my school selling sour candy or my little yellow bike, had ceased to exist for me, when one day fast forward in the winter of 2024 – I now lived in faraway Minnesota – a friend, enjoying an evening in my outdoor sauna with me, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little cannabis. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind… Just a few minutes later, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come to me from–this powerful and sweet nostalgia come from? I sensed that it was connected to the effect of this medicine, plus the deliciously familiar and smoky smell of the birch wood burning in the black sauna stove nearby…

Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the cannabis, but in me… and I turn to my mind. It is up to my mind to find the truth… and suddenly the memory appeared.

I move further through this Proustian creative portal and continue my time travel:

The heat and incense of the wood that touch my nose and skin bring back distinct memories from these childhood days in Mühleip, maybe because my family, first led by my grandfather and then two of his sons, ran a sauna fabrication business nearby. Time transcends, stretching beyond its ordinary nature. I see young versions – much like visions – of various people who had been important to me inside the microcosm of our lives back then. I first smile and then start to cry, for so many of them have already passed, some of them quite tragically. What does it signify? How am I to grasp it?

My childhood home erupts from the fog of my forgetting. There it is, sitting quite gloriously alongside our small graveled road called “To the Tiny Castle” (Zum Schlößchen). The sand-grey house with its unassuming but curious windows opens to the green grass of an expansive yard, in spitting distance from the church on the hill. All the village’s roads, at least in my newly accessed young child’s mind, lead to my school. I can smell the freshness and warmth of our summers and see the fiery red of the wild poppies in the fields nearby.

The visual and olfactory clues of this moment bring back another specific memory: we also had a sauna way back then, and I am now laying on my back on the floor when I am five. I suddenly sense the energy and the life glowing around the heads of both my mother and father in the sauna next to me. I can feel the cooler air pooling in the space where I lay, near my parents and the sauna’s radiating electric stove. It all suddenly feels cohesive and continuous. Can I do magic?

I switch scenes and am now outside, in front of that house. It’s the height of summer. I can feel my naked little feet as I try not to sink into the sharp gravel stones of our rural road. I kneel down and see the dark stones’ mysterious shimmer in the golden sun. At once I’m back in the day when I had fallen off my bike on that same gravel – now I can even feel a bit of that familiar childhood embarrassment again – right in front of our village priest. The church is nearby, and he was out on a walk, and from where I’m lying I can see his enormous black shoes appearing from beneath his swaying Sunday robe. My little yellow bike – oh, how much affection I had for it then. On my sauna bench, I sit still for another moment. I now remember how my bike had an orange siren mounted on its tiny handlebar. I can see it clearly, with its black lever, can even faintly hear the three sounds it could make, so useful for a kid roaming outdoors. My father had brought it back from one of his business travels, as a special gift just for me. From faraway America, with its shiny and mysterious intrigue.

And just like that, for a few suspended moments in time, I find myself in love and awe with my senses and the memories they summon. This is my secret sense of time. It guides me back to fragments of my life’s stunning and tender beauty, melancholy, and drama. A living connection between two points in time, rising from what feels like an internal ocean of timelessness.

I once read that many of us internally feel no older than around our mid-thirties. We age outwardly of course, inevitably, but our earlier selves do not just vanish. Among the textures of our sensations and memories, we carry a kind of personal continuity, something that radiates from the past into the present. This also reminds me of what Substack writer Deborah Shapiro described as “being-in-time-over-the-course-of-time.”

The memories that surfaced in the hot sauna on that wintry night two years ago may seem small, considering I was back in my world of impressions from when I was five. Yet somewhere in me, even back then, wasn’t there already a kind of timeless awareness – true to self – that these moments somehow mattered and were worth keeping? Because after all, they were immense.

This essay took a few approaches and iterations, and I am thankful for the support of a number of people who helped along the way: , and the whole Write Hearted community. And, lastly who might be glad that I (finally) arrived at a published version of the original writing idea that I brought to her doorstep.

If I had to describe my favorite feeling it would be that of pure joy. Such joy feels effortless and expansive. It radiates from the heart and makes you want to burst. At least for me, joy is luminous and somehow lush with yellow, very similar to how Virginia Woolf once described it: “The day waves yellow with all its crops.”

When I write about this type of effortless joy, I’ve already learned how easily it is lost or seems out of reach. Real joy is a feeling as complete as it is complex, demanding our surrender to the moment as it is and no holding back.

Real joy is hard.

As I do with many of my questions, I asked my books: What is joy, and why is it so elusive?

In the following, I created an imaginary dialogue between four authors whose writings have helped me to synthesize insights around joy and my own experience. While this is completely fictional, the dialogue builds around actual or paraphrased ideas from these thinkers. This creative form of writing felt surprisingly meaningful to me and helped me to reorient myself on my path of leaning into joy. It is the updated version of an essay I published in 2024.

I am settling into my living room chair, the fire’s warmth wrapped around me. The room takes on a dreamlike possibility. Green ginger tea is steaming. I glance around my book-walled space and blink—there they are! Four thinkers (seem to be) sitting nearby, their expressions thoughtful and curious, their poses relaxed. After some joyful banter, they turn to me, smiling and nodding encouragingly. May I present:

: Journalist and author; his books The Antidote and Four Thousand Weeks (and other works) have influenced how I think about joy and time

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024): Psychologist, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences; author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and other works

: Poet and philosopher; I love how his Consolations and Consolations II (and other works) explore the underlying meaning of everyday words

William James (1842-1910): Philosopher and psychologist who is considered as the “father of American psychology”; author of Pragmatism and other works

Me: I thank you all for coming. Shall we begin?

James: Yes, to start please tell me: how would you describe the texture of joy?

Me: Joy doesn’t feel the same every time. Often, it is like liquid light that warms me from the inside. There’s a fullness to joy when I connect with my own nature, or when I’m with people who I share a familiarity or even a bunch of history with. At other times, my joy is sharper and more crystalline. A sudden, piercing awareness of beauty, like the quick glint of sunlight that shimmers through the leaves as I walk my dog in early summer. A texture of light that suddenly catches my breath.

Joy likes to come in flashes. For example in moments when I laugh so hard my stomach hurts or when I dance with friends to an age-old Bowie song we grew up with. It’s the warmth of skin against skin or when I gallop on our horse Chip. But then there’s also the expansive brightness of joy on days I can spend in closeness with my daughter or in silence with my books.

But such luminous moments eventually fade, often as quickly as they came. Like light turning to shade. Why is that?

Burkeman: Yes, isn’t it strange how joy, something so light and freeing, can carry its own surprising weight? There is this vulnerability to joy, a bright delicateness, and some part of us knows how easily it can disappear. I’m thinking of this story you shared with me. In 2010, you flew from Minneapolis to meet your father and sister in New York, incidentally on the very day the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland which grounded intercontinental flights for a week. They arrived on the last flight that made it across the Atlantic that day. The cherry trees across the city were at the height of their fleeting bloom. The three of you wandered the city streets until you came upon a restaurant with a tucked-away garden, a place that felt fallen out of time for a few magical hours. Petals of the rosy cherry blossoms were softly landing on you–

Me: I will never forget that afternoon…

Burkeman: I can believe it. In The Antidote, I write about the paradox of happiness. Joy asks us to open ourselves, to be willing to feel deeply. But in doing so, we expose ourselves to the fear of loss. Fully allowing joy means acknowledging its impermanence. That it can be gone in the next breath, terrifyingly. I write:

Me: I remember times in my life when I felt guarded as if I was holding myself back. During and after a painful separation, for example, I felt like a part of me was sealed off, as if I had trained my heart to remain closed and guarded, while hoping to be safe. Living fully and joyfully felt like…risking too much.

Burkeman: Joy requires courage. It asks from us to open ourselves, and that openness makes us feel exposed. Hannah Arendt once said that the trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. Real joy doesn’t offer guarantees. Change and loss are inevitable parts of life. It sounds cliché and yet remains forever true: All we can ever have is the fullness and beauty of the present moment. And that’s maybe also how I’d define joy: our love for the moment.

In our human craving for predictability, we want to control and hold on to joy. Only that it doesn’t work that way. In the same way that we can’t collect and treasure sunlight in a jar…

Whyte: That’s where the challenge lies, quite exactly. Joy asks us to live with an open heart and an open hand, letting it come and go as it pleases. Living fully means a continual surrender, a kind of courageous openness. I write in Consolations:

Joy is a delicate balance, a giving and taking with the world around us. When I am in “the presence of a mountain, a beautiful sky, or a well-loved familiar face,” it’s in the joy of privilege and glorious experience that we say:

Me: How beautiful. Joy makes me vulnerable but also strong and makes me feel closer to what is my more steady core of nature. There was a part of me that longed to shed the roles and self-limiting beliefs that served as my protective layers for so long. They have shielded me, yes, but also kept me from fully maturing and knowing myself.

A number of my beliefs used to be quite rigid. I had to learn how to create some distance and a more mature consciousness to start to look at a belief as just one of many possible perspectives. I often observed my world through the self-chosen lens of being ‘lesser than’ or ‘not perfect enough. Criticism would hurt me, sometimes even eat me up. I placed way more weight on negative experiences or emotions than positive ones. A rather narrow and self-constraining story, and an active way of locking myself out of my own talents, and the soft and intuitive resilience that can come out of sensitivity.

Kahneman: May I add to this exchange. This is a very human tendency. Our minds are wired with a natural bias toward the negative. I wrote about this in Thinking Fast and Slow. I distinguished between the ‘remembering self’ and the ‘experiencing self.’ The remembering self may like to hold onto memories around suffering and struggle, as if choosing pain over joy. A survival instinct after all. Our minds evolved to memorize threats in order to keep us safe.

Me: So I was holding onto negative memories as a safety net? A shield against being caught off guard? A biased and habituated stance of self-protection, mistaken for truth and realism.

Kahneman: Exactly. And your experiencing self—the part of you that lives moment to moment—had a hard time being naturally open to joy, because your remembering self kept hovering, kept nudging you to stay cautious.

Burkeman: It’s so easy to complicate things by overthinking happiness. We set these rigid expectations about what joy should look like, and when reality falls short, we panic, blame others or shut down in order to shield ourselves. But joy needs space to naturally expand instead of a controlling expectation of perfection. Where we let go and allow ourselves to simply be.

Me: Your writing felt liberating to me in the way it helped me to look at some things differently. It allowed myself the room for my joy and aliveness to develop more naturally. To trust that relinquishing control was okay and all I ever could do anyway.

Burkeman: Precisely. Joy is much about showing up to the flow of life with a flexible mindset. Life is inadvertently ambiguous and has ups and downs. Life refuses to fit neatly into our stories.

James: We can all be captives of our own limiting stories. I had a crisis of despair around the age of twenty-eight. I was convinced that my lack of direction revealed some deep flaw in me, a proof that I would never amount to anything. My family was full of intellectual brilliance and accomplishment; by comparison, I felt trapped in my mind, the path before me shapeless. I was paralyzed by the belief that my character was fixed and all I would or could ever be.

I only later began to realize that I could actually rethink my beliefs. I embraced pragmatism because I realized life never could and never would unfold in predictable ways. Freedom comes when we realize that we can step outside of our stories. Even the ones that feel carved into us.

Me: I never knew how much you struggled as a young man until I recently read about this. And yet you became the revered father of American Psychology by offering one of the first comprehensive maps of the human mind. You explored how what we attend to becomes our life. So why do we cling to familiar, safe stories even if they limit us?

James: We hold onto our notions of past and future as if they were solid truths, instead of leftover fragments – or replantable seeds for new growth – of our imagination. From a pragmatic point of view, let me say this plainly: almost nothing people say is true or truly fixed.

Me: Wow, let me say that again: almost nothing people say is true. That’s huge. Not even our own beliefs about ourselves. Not even…the world around us. I wrote down these quotes from your famous Harvard Lectures:

Whyte: Bravo. You know, the real courage for joy is to surrender to it and let it change us. When we face our own inner resistance, we come face-to-face with the parts of ourselves that we have hidden. We dare to look at our shadows that we’ve tried so hard to keep at bay.

Me: I see what you mean. Instead of avoiding, narrating, prodding, I can let go and pay more attention to just what is in the moment. I let the moment break my heart open, without defenses.

Our small improbable group in my living room falls silent. Without defenses; without defenses, our internal voices recant. I get up and find my phone in the kitchen, pick it up and load a three-minute clip I had recently come across and loved. It shows the electrifying musician Jacob Collier in action and how he weaves a room full of musicians and listeners into communal joy and harmony. I feel compelled to show it to my four visitors in my living room. When I start the video, James Williams looks the most astonished:

Burkeman: Incredible. This is so moving. You know, in a way joy is practical. In this moment of watching this together, we are present and feeling the music and what it moves in us and in relation to other people around us. This is the courage and surrender to joy “in action”. Each time we have the courage to embrace the moment fully, our heart grows a little. It grows in clarity, authenticity, and hopefully in viscerally felt aliveness.

Me: I feel delighted. Thank you all so much. Who would like more tea?

Recently, during a conversation with our writing community at , a fellow writer observed that such work helps demonstrate how “fiction is true.” The phrase stopped us both. It captured something we’d each been exploring separately, and it sparked a question we wanted to answer together: In what ways does fiction feel true? What follows is our collaborative attempt to answer that question, each from our own perspective.

Literature helps us recognize ourselves. Fictional worlds, when crafted with care and psychological honesty, become mirrors in which we discover not only the writer’s wisdom, but our own. We enter a parallel, psychological space where certain human truths can play out.

So, is fiction “true”?

After John Steinbeck died, his wife published in Journal of a Novel the many letters he wrote to his editor Pat while he was composing East of Eden in 1951. In one of them, thinking of their two sons who were four and six years old at the time, Steinbeck wrote:

“And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all–the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable–how neither can exist without the other.”1

For Steinbeck, East of Eden was the place he carved out to be wholly honest, and the book in which he came closest to writing what he had long prayed was in him. His protagonists return many times to the Salinas Valley. Though Salinas is a real place–Steinbeck was born and raised there–he elevates it to a symbol that the reader can recognize: how good and evil grow side by side, and how each of us carries an interiority shaped by our many selves and the places we come from.

I didn’t grow up in Salinas, far from it. I grew up in Germany and (much) later remade my life in the American Midwest. And yet I recognized myself in the two figures who maybe carry Steinbeck’s lesson most clearly. Cal Trask, who is pulled between wanting to be good and believing he can’t, and Abra Bacon, who slowly grows into her agency, choosing a different life than the one first laid out for her. In them, and in Steinbeck’s sweeping story arcs, I found a new way of looking at my own contradictions. Accessing this tension in the doubleness of old and new patterns and identities, was likely also what Steinbeck wanted his sons to understand: even complicated, contradictory halves complete each other.

Facing ourselves directly, without the veil of story, is harder than we’d like to believe.

Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls teaching a course to advanced college students on the psychodynamics of love. In the first half, they discussed the theory—projection, transference, shadow. The students understood the ideas inside and out, could turn them over like familiar objects. But in the second half, Hollis asked these same students to apply the concepts to their own current relationships. In his words, “it was like the curtain came down… They could understand the ideas, but they could not bear to look at themselves with that kind of scrutiny.”2

Why is it so much easier to see the faults of others than to face our own? The resistance lives somewhere tender. We fear that if we look too closely, we might find that we are not as innocent as we’d hoped. And if we are not innocent, perhaps we are not worthy of love.

Fiction offers a side door. Jesus did not moralize the crowds who came seeking wisdom. He spoke in parables, inviting his followers to find themselves in the lives of others. Great literature works the same way, and neuroscience is beginning to illuminate why.

When we read, we don’t just process words. We build a living simulation. Neuroscientists call this a “situation model,” a mental world that tracks who is present, where they stand, what they reach for, what they want. As the story shifts, the brain updates its internal stage, lighting up regions associated with each change.

In 2009, researchers placed readers in brain scanners and watched what happened as they moved through short narratives.3 What they found was striking. Reading is deeply embodied.

When a character grasps an object, the reader’s brain activates the same motor circuits we use to grasp real objects. When a character crosses a room, regions responsible for spatial navigation flicker to life.

And perhaps most remarkably, when multiple dimensions of a story shift at once, the anterior cingulate cortex surges with activity, signaling the brain to update its simulation and brace for what comes next. In other words, reading exercises the brain’s capacity for revision—practicing, again and again, how to let go of one model of reality and build another.

This is how fiction slips past the ego’s sentries. In the safety of a story, we can rehearse being wrong. We inhabit another’s life from the inside, learning from their missteps before we’ve had time to raise our defenses.

Consider Willy Loman, the road-weary protagonist of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willy cannot bear the possibility that he is simply ordinary. So his life becomes an elaborate performance to shield him from the truth. Inflated stories. Impossible demands on his sons. A slow poisoning of everything he loves. In the end, even his death is a delusion.

Death of a Salesman premiered at the Morosco Theatre in New York City on February 10, 1949. As the final curtain fell, grown men in business suits sat weeping. In Willy Loman’s unraveling, they recognized something they had spent lifetimes refusing to see in themselves: the quiet terror of not being enough. Confronted directly, they would have turned away. But Willy had become a mirror they could bear to look into.

This is the power of fiction.

There is something about the distance a text can create between itself and us. When we are too close to our own lives–the many events, people, things–everything seems to dissolve into an ocean of time that overwhelms our ability to understand. There’s no distance from which to see clearly; it all feels too fluid, too immediate to transform into meaningful perspective. Yet when we swing too far in the opposite direction, we lose emotional contact and observe our lives as if they belonged to someone else. Fiction creates a sort of middle distance, a place where we can lose just enough sight of ourselves but are still tethered to something unknown and familiar.

Karl Ove Knausgaard has written about this tension often, especially in Inadvertent:

“We open ourselves to another voice, which we turn into ourself, for when we read, what we feel are our own feelings, our own fears and enthusiasms, sorrow and joy, and when we reflect the reflections are our own, performed by our own self, but only as apprehended by the other, annexed by the other.”4

Literature becomes both a hiding place and a place to become visible. Fiction can’t “save” us, but it may return us to our lives a little less defended and more capable of living out our own courageous visions. And is this not a kind of imaginative self-revision?

In a recent Paris Review interview, French writer Hélène Cixous described this paradoxical blurriness between invention and reality when she was asked how much of her fiction was autobiographical. Her response:

“When one writes, one doesn’t ask oneself, Is it fictional? Is it autobiographical? No. All writing that is strong, alive, is autobiographical. At the same time, everything is invented. Everything Proust wrote has passed through what reality whispered to him.”5

In drafting different lives, we rehearse new potential aspects of our becoming. Fiction helps to loosen our certainty and pierces through the cotton wool of our habits and blind spots. We open up more to the world, and to new stories we can tell about ourselves.

We all need unseen hands that teach us how to become authentic and capable of living. Some of these hands belong to what we read or what we see in art. Some belong to our own neurobiology, which doesn’t sharply distinguish between lived experience and imagined experience.

Either way, fiction helps us feel into our truth.

We had so much fun writing this piece together! If you enjoyed it and are new to either of our writings, please consider subscribing to or . We thank for her keen editing eye, and everyone at Write Hearted for their ongoing support.

So we return to the question: Is fiction true? We’d love to hear from you. Do you find yourself in stories, or do you read to escape yourself? Have certain characters hit home in ways you didn’t expect, and maybe revealed something you couldn’t have seen otherwise? What truths has fiction shown you?

Tell us in the comments.

I am counting on you to make my life meaningful, says no-one at the altar when entering marriage. What we also don’t confess to a new romantic partner is how we may be counting on them to please read our minds and fulfill the deficits in our lives.

But an egocentric approach to love is exactly what we often adopt, unconsciously, during the early glow of a new relationship. “Our egocentric culture revolves around the fantasy of the Magical Other, nourished through our pop music, mainstream cinema, advertising, ‘true romance’ novels, in prince and princess fantasies,” writes psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin in his book Soulcraft.1

I, for one, fell for exactly this fantasy when I was young (or even when not so young anymore). Maybe you have too. How wrapped up I was in the exhilarating dance of fresh young love – because what is more beautiful. No story seduced me more than the one in which someone else would hold and complete me. Two people moving as one.

We are in love! Can’t you see such exciting conditions? There is desire, union, fascination, and sexual ecstasy, all wrapped up in the overarching promise of wholeness, delivered by a special somebody, the Magical Other.

To a relationship, we bring so much hope, so much need, and – although typically first ignored – so much capacity for disappointment.

II. The dance’s enchantment and enmeshment

The new romantic dance intoxicates. We are drunk with enmeshment and the energy of being seen. We believe in the way the Other makes us shine, all destined to be. Hardly anything can stop us here, we may even, officially or not, swear that this love shall last until death do us part. Save me! Complete me! Make it right for me! are our new Eden’s battle cries. Unspoken. Our heavy agendas in disguise.

This innocence is, per se, not the problem though. Our still immature beliefs about what love is (or we need it to be) are rather normal, especially when we are young. No, the problem is, and again well expressed by Plotkin, the rarity of what should come next developmentally. More specifically, he advises:

…a more mature way of engaging a lover that has a deeper, more spiritual, sustainable, and yes, even sexier set of possibilities, an approach to romance that encourages and supports soulful development.2

But before we ever reach this more evolved way of loving, we may first pass through far more turbulent terrain. What seeps into the dance, at this stage, is a reality of possession. The veil of perfection begins to lift, and what we suddenly start to see are obstacles and dramatic stakes our ego cannot bear.

And so we revolt. We destroy. We smash the mirrors.

The root of the problem at this stage of the dance is that two lovers get wrapped up too tightly with each other and within themselves. They have not gained the necessary distance and space in which they could recognize how their anger and sadness, now turned into weapons against the Other, tell the story of their own projections.

Sadly missed completely is how what they project is in reality what they’ve rejected and stunted in themselves.

III. The dance’s escalation into rupture and internal rift

The fantasy of the Magical Other does not want to die easily. Stopping the music now seems unimaginable. But there is a fundamental truth so hard to bear: romance can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

Instead, we are caught in misunderstandings and our own sensibilities – no small opponent. When Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther two and a half centuries ago, he created the epitome of a tragic figure in the young man Werther. Werther finds himself hopelessly in love with Charlotte, a woman engaged (and later married) to another man. He feels trapped in what must be the “error of the other.” Writes Goethe:3

Good sensible people often withdraw from one another because of secret differences, each becoming absorbed by what he feels is right and by the error of the other. Conditions then grow more and more complicated and exasperating, until it becomes impossible to undo the knot at the crucial moment on which everything depends.

Werther’s torment of internal chaos, and contemporary culture in 18th century Romanticism even found the term Werther’s fever for it, leads him to the most dramatic outcome: he takes his own life over his sorrows. Delving into such extreme human emotion and internality in a character was still new at that time, and readers couldn’t get enough. After the book’s publication, Goethe’s star rose quickly. Unfortunately, and unintended by Goethe, a frenzied trend was sparked too: A number of young men committed suicide out of despair over their impossible love for a married woman; some even died with the book in hand.

Fortunately, such tragic worst case of desperate love is rare. My essay wants to make a larger point. Without new-found perspective and inner work, too often a relationship ends in rupture and bitterness. There is no easy salvation.

Here, the disillusionment is complete. The lovers either leave the dance or start to see what love may have been trying to teach them all along.

IV. After disillusionment: we finally enjoy the dance for the dance, either with a partner or alone

When you’re young,” said C’s wife, “you really believe that two people can make some type of dream together; but you try it, and you get older, and all you come to realise that all there is is you, finally.4

Australian writer Helen Garner wrote down these sparse lines in her personal diaries. A casual, passing comment surely, but important enough for her to take note.

Consider the mature insight: The very thing we wanted to find in the Other for fulfillment can only be found in ourselves.

Once we dare to look in the mirror and start enjoying the dance for its own sake, we finally realize that growing up is up to us. There is no Magical Other who can make us feel whole for us.

Real, realistic love is only possible between two whole people, two individuals who have faced their own loneliness first, and can meet each other freely and without a selfish urge to escape what is our existential fear. The first belonging must be to ourselves. Without such inner rooting, every relationship becomes an attempt to be saved rather than to flourish and support each other’s growth. This new distance and new perspective are needed to protect love from collapsing into need.

“Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence,” wrote Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving5. When we turn away from ego and toward our soulful center, what we find has always been there. The hopes of when we were children. The bright joys of living. All our untapped talent.

V. Where the dream dies, a new dance may begin

When the old ego dreams die, a new kind of dance can begin, amid the grace of a second spring. Finally, we are ready for the Real Other, in exchange and conversation with the real me. Already Rumi tried to teach us that the mysterious secret about love is seeing the beauty of our own soul through the eyes of somebody else:

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind I was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

This kind of soulful romance rests on what James Hollis, psychologist and Jungian scholar, referred to as a radical conversation, in which two partners want their relationship to serve their individuation and growth rather than their limiting projections:

“Not you plus me, but we who are more than ourselves with each other.”6

By releasing the fantasy of the Magical Other, we make room for the real wonder in romance that is built on the imagination described so well by in her essay The Imagination of the Other:

Imagining the Other takes work. It demands patience, and worse, humility… the willingness to be wrong, to guess clumsily, to keep revising the image you’ve built… To love not the fixed portrait but the shimmering apparition that shifts every time you look again.

The fantastical dance is over, replaced by what is so much more satisfyingly real and liberating. We find what our soul has wanted us to see all along, namely our own emotional blockages, blind spots, wounds, and limitations.

This is the dance of our lifetime. Realizing our own wholeness and unlived potential, in loving exchange and in relation with another.

But we have to do the work.

In gratitude to my writing friends for their precious support and editing help.

Writing is a way of recalling. Not too long ago, I sat back in the saddle on my daughter’s horse for the first time in many years, doing all the once familiar movements again. A whole world was brought back: the intuitive attuning to the horse’s movements, the rising smell of warm fur and leather, even the same familiar flicker of apprehension in my chest. It is curious what we don’t forget. Somewhere, all experiences and ages are still contained in us, and with the right reminders, they may rush back to us.

Seen this way, creative work is a form of recovering ourselves. As if driven by some magic impulse, we draw from our obsessions and the myriads of past impressions. Creativity pulls us into distinct expression. What we create, on canvas, page, or other ways, is intimate work and often specific to a few of our recurring questions and themes.

I’ve long been fascinated with understanding artistic purpose and how it feeds the creative process. In 2025, three exceptional writers/creators found their way to me–Sally Mann, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Annie Dillard–highlighting in distinct (and overlapping) ways what drives them creatively and how they walk the lines between their art, life, and memory.

Sally Mann: Art Work – On the Creative Life, New York, 2025

Make enough work to curate recollections from your life. Make enough work so we know what it’s supposed to look like,

writes Sally Mann in Art Work–On the Creative Life. In this recently published book, Mann, considered one of the most iconic female American photographers, pulls away the curtain onto the history and details of the creative process she developed over her long artistic career.1

When she was a busy mother of three children, living in rural Virginia, she learned how being creative is as much about constraint and concentration as her own personal history, her own stories, and ultimately her soul:

All of my creative work is based on a few sensations, experiences, visions, and ideas that were imprinted (...) in our past [and that] will have carved a trace in our soul. And no matter how distant or tenuous that trace, it will ultimately reemerge, enlarged to easy legibility and unignorable; the tyranny of memoria.

Mann describes her creative process as closely tied to personal recalling and curation. Drawing from a vast ephemeral storage of visual images that she collected over the years, either in her imagination or curated on messy mood boards, she allowed her inspiration to be guided and channeled into her own artistic concepts and inspirations:

And then, there’s a different kind of list. This is an unwritten list of remembered images, magpied up and stored in what I think of as my visual memory… [It] is composed of images–photographs, paintings–I have stored away as references with the hope that they will appear when I need them, like when I am composing a picture under the dark cloth. But my ineffectual system of retrieval from the mind’s musty archives has forced me to employ the simplest form of mnemonic device–images on paper. A close look at my bulletin board from the late 1980s reveals the unabashed evidence.

To the greedy and curious reader like me, it’s incredible to find so much specificity in her book around how she took original inspirations from collected images and translated them into the scenes and shots that made her work famous. Based on a few circled images on her board, she felt inspired to “imitate, inadvertently or deliberately, but probably invariably, the works of others.” In that way, we can follow her creative impulse and eye!

A necessary and central part of her work, Mann advises, is producing a fair (or even large) amount of “bad” work from which the best work can eventually rise (I wrote more about this idea and process in my essay “The shiny wreck of the perfect idea”) by way of following a few core themes and topics she’s felt attracted to in her life and work.

While I’m not a professional photographer, I was surprised and stoked to find some of my own creative process reflected in hers. How much frustration and elation are folded into artistic aspirations, and what it takes to keep up a disciplined practice alongside the chaos and richness of family life.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: My Struggle (Book 1), New York, 2012

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

What Sally Mann expresses with imagery in her photographic work, Knausgaard does with hypnotic prose. Imagine a modern Proust: amid an ocean of quotidian experience that Knausgaard braids into a 3,500 page-long fictionalized autobiography (split into a total of six books, and I am quoting here from book one) about his life and his Norwegian upbringing in the seventies and eighties.2

The attraction I’ve felt for this book from page one isn’t immediately easy to explain. My Struggle doesn’t shine by the most elegant prose, is at times repetitive (you’ll encounter endless coffee cups, cigarettes, and occasional cliche) and not even all true to his life’s “historic” details, as Knausgaard has often confirmed in interviews. But what it does is even better: the reader experiences a life. Driven by a few core memories and the thoughts and beliefs that he considered to be (and remain) true, Knausgaard has an intensity of focus and emotional authenticity that made me relate to what Zadie Smith said about this book: “You live his life with him. You don’t simply ‘identify’ with the character, effectively you ‘become’ him.”

This life is full of contradictions and flaws, and Knausgaard approaches them with the precision of realism found in “the ordinary”. There is what we easily recognize from our own lives: the “enemies”, the shame, the love and the joys, plus the unavoidable emotional scars from the thousands of micro-impressions and misunderstandings of a sensitive child growing up. A pivotal experience in his life happens when his father, at that point ravaged by acute alcoholism, dies from a heart attack at the age of 56.

This is the material a life is made of, and it is the same material we draw from when we write and create. Only seemingly mundane and small. In reality, it is immense.

I see [my father] as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

His “meteorology of the mind” becomes intricately palpable, for example when he writes about how his shame shaped his sensory perception:

After the item was over there was the sound of my father’s voice, and laughter. The shame that suffused my body was so strong that I was unable to think. My innards seemed to blanch. The force of the sudden shame was the sole feeling from my childhood that could measure in intensity against that of terror, next to sudden fury, of course, and common all three was the sense that I myself was being erased. All that mattered was precisely that feeling. So as I turned and went back to my room, I noticed nothing… I lay down on my bed, and switched off the light, and when the darkness closed itself around me, I took such a deep breath that it quivered, while the muscles in my stomach tightened and forced out whimpering noises that were so loud I had to direct them into a soft, and soon very wet, pillow.

The whimpering and the wet pillow–maybe, or surely, they were ours too. Whatever can be considered as “truth”, always subjective and personal, Knausgaard tries to dig it up from somewhere deep and lets us take part in its heavy (and at times hilarious!) gravity.

Knausgaard, by writing from the bias of his personal fears and enthusiasms, demonstrates–and in this way really not unsimilar to Sally Mann’s work–how good art has the power to restage what wants to return to us. In his devotion to detail, I recognized something about my own creative instinct: that the treasure of memory and what causes joy and pain is ultimately all I have, and writing is an important way to find intuitive access to it.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, New York, 1989

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

This is what writes Pulitzer prize-winning American author Annie Dillard writes in her only book on writing, now one of my 2025 favorites. The Writing Life, published 35 years ago, is her passionate case to read and write what speaks to your own nature and weirdness, and what is already present in one’s mind’s eye, waiting to be structured and chiseled into meaningful creations. Words, in her case.

Like Mann and Knausgaard, she alludes to the importance of the personal recollections and materials that we already carry inside of us and like to return to, “as to unfinished business, for they are [the writer’s] life’s work.” Similar to Mann and Knausgaard, she gestures at the importance of being attentive to everyday, ordinary moments, “the by-product of [our] days’ triviality,” as to where we may want to look and dig:

This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Although, it might well be audible to some. Dillard, a voracious reader since the age of five (footnote about her reading habits, see LitHub article and quote), draws from many other creatives in her book to support her view of how vital it is to work along the nerve of one’s sensitivity, for example delivering this stunning quote by Thoreau:

Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life… Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.

***

This sensitive space draws us into creation and is where we can process, celebrate, admit, and find ourselves. Back to the original question from the beginning, and what these three books helped me think about this year: isn’t it curious what we don’t forget?

I can still imagine intricate details from the arenas I used to ride in when I was young. The smell of the tan footing, its texture and softness when I landed on it after jumping off the back of our cantering horse during hundreds of vaulting lessons (equestrian acrobatic gymnastics). The occasional cat crossing the dirt, or catching the eye of the occasional spectator. My childhood friend Ingrid was always there somewhere, and the boy I had a crush on and who first kissed me in the dark. The atmosphere and spooky elation of moments like this. It’s all still there, somewhere. A whole world. Why not write from that place.

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"There are places I'll remember all my life, though some have changed–some forever, not for the better. Some have gone, and some remain. – The Beatles (In my Life)

“I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure,” is what the struggling writer in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince confesses in a confrontation with his literary rival. “I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

I haven’t written a book, but I know this feeling. Probably every writer does. The distance between the original pristine idea and what actually makes it onto the page can feel like a defeating humiliation. But that wreck, that shimmering debris field of what once seemed perfect, is also what the actual writing is. The writing that makes us grow.

Countless writers, or artists in general, have demonstrated that great art requires a lot of stamina and courage. It starts with an idea that seems perfect at first. But once followed to its more unknown edges, the original idea starts to feel soft and brittle, impossible to survive in its original form, at least if we want to arrive at what feels true and tender and worth of being carried into the world.

“Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth,” Iris Murdoch once described in the Paris Review.1 We start early drafts while intoxicated with endless possibility, only to end with the shipwreck of a much more limiting reality. The Sirens of the high seas2 want to test us, want to obliterate our egoistic illusions of safe construction and control. But when we persist and get washed ashore, the work that remains is often simpler and truer. Maybe the way of making sense of the Siren’s irresistible song is through our own creative imagination that is uncorrupted by fear.3

But such imagination often requires us to wait. It may take months or even years to write our best work. Inspiration and perspective accumulates. Experience enters, and it takes time to recognize what’s relevant and what eternal thing wants to be assembled or excavated. One piece of imagination leads to another. Two scrappy notes, taken at different times and contexts, may suddenly connect.

Take Rilke as an illustrious example. He began his Duino Elegies in 1912 after an almost mystical experience at Duino Castle in Italy, but didn’t finish them for another ten years, mainly due to writer’s block and “an inspiration-stifling depression” he suffered during and after World War I. Then, finally, after working through his many inner tensions of how to square both the darkness and the joys of human existence, they poured out of him in a feverish burst in 1922 and alongside his famous Sonnets to Orpheus.4 In his Letters to a Young Poet he had already advised his young pen pal Kappus that “Patience is everything!”, to allow feelings and impressions to develop internally and “wait with deep humility and patience” for more understanding.

It took Melville three years to write Moby-Dick (well…I’d call that record speed), a time span he needed to outgrow the adventure-tale formulas of his earlier career and face the philosophical depths of his own novel. He reread Shakespeare, studied biblical cadences, and let the material work on him until the book could become the storm that it is.5

This time of waiting is often a kind of slow fermentation and can be both frustrating and precious. In my own writing, I’ve learned to trust my attention and how it often reliably guides me toward the direction and nuance of what I’m trying to express. I’m my own magnetic center; I often attract insights either from reading or from real-life encounters that I suddenly recognize as valuable for my work in progress. This creative processing unfolded, in small, for this essay as well. I started out with what seemed like a perfect idea, imagined its initial outline quite clearly, yet a collection of rough notes and first drafts later, I was feeling unsure if I could make its content structure strong and cohesive enough, plus I was still missing the “just right” cover image that I like to aesthetically align my pieces with. Further inspiration arrived with Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life and, posted a few days ago, a Substack note that showed the 1989 photo of Hunter S. Thompson and his beloved, hated typewriter. In The Writing Life this only book that Annie Dillard wrote about writing and creativity, she encapsulated this meandering search and process I was trying to describe so perfectly:

“The line of words digs a path you follow… It is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm.”

As a child, I remember flying my kite on the hill behind my childhood home. Running as fast as my tiny legs could carry me through the long golden grass of late summer, I knew the kite could be either given to the giddy turns of the wind or the crushing pulls of gravity. Following the yellow-black dragon’s capricious movements made me feel alive, and I intuitively knew that I had to give it to the rhythm of the world. Only then could I hope for it to gain momentum.

Momentum is what propels our creative engines when we write. When the words finally appear and shine their light on the path ahead, they almost feel unearned. But when such precious momentum strikes, we should trust this “gold standard that anchors creative life,” as Rick Lewis recently wrote in a Substack note: “If you’ve got it, protect it–with every ounce of attention that you have. Lock it in, by hook and by crook.” Momentum crushes doubt and failure, and we are well advised to follow its lead. When I arrive at writing with flow, and have finally given up control, I sometimes sense what Annie Dillard described as the grace of writing (and of course it can be applied to all art), and it is glorious:

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then–and only then–it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air headed your way.”

From the corner of my eye, I see my fear of failure losing its grip, now a wreck of burning ashes (haha). From the other corner of my eye, I suddenly see what wants to be written. As if guided by such a hand of grace, the right words are rising from the wreck of my once perfect idea.

And sometimes, they rip away my breath.

Around the age of 50, Leo Tolstoy experienced a deep existential crisis over what he perceived as the meaninglessness of life. Later termed “the Tolstoy problem”, his questioning became a famous expression of lost human and spiritual connection, a symptom of the predominantly mechanistic worldview of the West. “What will become of my whole life?” and “What is it all for? Why live?” were some of the questions he desperately wrote into this diary. Over stretches of his life, despite his high external acclaim and work efficiency, Tolstoy felt estranged from his own essential core of self and even the family around him.

This Tolstoy problem still haunts modern life. I believe it expresses our human despair that comes from falling out of resonance with the world. Interactions and relationships may feel weirdly flat and meaningless, made worse by the cultural denial that something was lost in the first place. Locked inside our neuroses and loops of habitual thinking, we become somewhat blind to the omnipresent richness of reality and the energetic potential that flows from our relationships.

We’ve lost the once sharp sense for life’s inner vibration, are denying ourselves the belief that life speaks back to us.

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa offers a way to understand this condition. In his book Resonance,1 he describes how the quality of our relationship toward the world – of being in relation with the world – determines whether we feel alive or alienated. For Rosa, resonance, as antidote to a feeling of separateness, is “what it feels when the self and the world meet in a living, responsive relationship.”

To illustrate better what he’s getting at, Rosa goes from the abstract to the more concrete by offering the example of two adult twins, Anna and Hannah. The sisters live in what they believe is “the prime of life” and in very similar life circumstances. Yet, and now it gets interesting, they experience the world and even their daily social relationships in profoundly different ways. Hannah feels often burdened by the world’s demands and intrusions, while her identical twin sister Anna responds to them in a substantially different way. For Anna, life vibrates with meaningful and loving relationships, and is therefore deemed “successful” by Rosa. Hannah, on the other hand, often feels heavy, grumpy and inert, her life appearing rather unsuccessful.

Over the course of a few typical morning hours (simplified of course, and shown here only in parts), Rosa lets us ‘accompany’ both twins as they move through their world:

It is 7:00 am. Anna sits down to breakfast. Next to her is her husband. Her adolescent son and nearly adult daughter join them almost immediately. Her children beam at her, and she beams back. My God, she thinks, how I love them. These moments together before starting our on our days are everything to me.

It is 7:00 am for Hannah. She sits down to breakfast. Next to her is her husband. Her adolescent son and nearly adult daughter join them almost immediately. Her bad mood is readily apparent. Everyone at the table looks at each other sullenly, if at all. My God, Hannah thinks, how I hate this. What do I have to do with these people? What ties me to them, other than the fact that I have to provide for them?

8:00 am. Anna is now on her way to work. The sun is shining. She takes pleasure in the warmth and enjoys a good stretch. She looks forward to seeing her co-workers; she has some stories to tell them. She quickens her pace at the thought of the flowers someone left on her desk today. She’s ready to get down to business. She loves her work.

8:00 am. The sun is [also] shining on Hannah’s way to work. Hannah hates the harsh light. She’s afraid of getting sunburned. She thinks glumly about the work that lies ahead. It’s bad enough to have to see the gloomy faces of my co-workers every day and put up with their constant patter.

As readers, we may, ever so slightly, tap into the music and inner vibration of their thoughts, with Hannahs’ more flat and muted than Annas’. Hartmut Rosa then describes what Anna can teach us about the potentiality of a life:

“Life is good not (or at least not necessarily) when we are rich in resources and opportunities, but rather, however banal and even tautological this may at first sound, when we love it. When we have almost a visceral and emotional connection to it – it here meaning the people, places, tasks, ideas, objects (...) that we encounter and with which we interact.”

Anna’s life description serves as a role model for a way of life and relationship to the world that is, and here again in Rosa’s words, “more responsive, elastic, fluid, one might even say cuddly… [Because] when we love these things, there emerges something like a vibrating wire between us and the world.”

I find this wording stunning: there is something like a vibrating wire between us and the world.2

We were meant to feel each other, and Anna seems to be living life from this place. She feels connected to her family and co-workers and is more attuned with nature. She believes that she can attain or affect something in each of these spheres (and she’s right), and feels that she can be affected and touched by them too.

We all catch glimpses of this inner life of things. Resonance is everywhere and elemental. Spiritual and psychological teachings speak about how our heart3 and psyche4 can open us up to more of it. Moment by moment, we can actively participate in the world and its potential. We are touching the world, and the world touches us.

Resonance is a generative impulse: life e x p a n d s. It compels us toward transformation and a higher, more evolved way of being: We can change! We can be more like Anna!

What’s catching my eye at this very moment? What are the signals, even the subtlest, when I pay attention?

In front of my large windows, thousands of yellow and red leaves are dancing against fall’s stark blue skies. My hands on the keyboard are catching their flickering movement, shadow and light turned into rhythm. For a tiny moment, my imagination reaches toward whatever life force and joy is animating them. I’m catching a piece of their vibrant energy onto the page, passing it on to you. And I’m asking you: What is catching your eye right now?

Every moment, we have one shot at being. Resonance helps us find the way.

A special thank you to , and of course for helping me with feedback on this piece.

What are the themes, tropes, details, and settings that excite [you] every time?
Which books have you devoured with a surprising level of intensity?
What makes your brain light up?

It was time to test my own bookshelf and finally put my favorite reading obsessions into words.

💮

Intense interior emotionality, and how others deal with life troubles
I currently read more non-fiction than fiction, but when I manage to find the kind I want to devour, it often dissects relationships or family ties that are stretched thin by contradictory human emotions. Desire and disappointment, intimacy and independence, joy pitched against grief. When I looked for some of my favorite fiction novels on my bookshelf, I was struck by how often they share some varying degree of this haunting question: how do their characters balance true closeness with the need for space?

Writers and artists and their truth-in-the-making
Peeking into writers’ or artists’ lives is endlessly fascinating to me. What raw thoughts, feelings, or rituals keep them returning to page or canvas, again and again? The following books are the kind of distillations I love and often return to. Hidden in a journal note, personal essay, or the description of a daily devotion, I might find what I didn’t even know I was looking for. In their human struggle and need for rituals, I sometimes catch an echo of my own search for aliveness and creative inspiration.

The life energy I find in photography books
I collect more photo books than art books and started wondering why. Maybe it’s because the photography I favor – people, always people! – tries to capture the mystery of life and time, and the beauty of impermanence. Photography is a form of attention: to notice, (re)discover, and celebrate the vigor of life right when it happens and before it slips away again.

The ego’s tug-of-war with wholeness
I feel drawn to books that capture the ongoing dialogue between the ego and one’s deeper self. The small self craves control and security, whereas the larger self insists on wholeness and authenticity. These books explore the inner tensions during life transitions, such as the reckoning and spiritual reorientation that often happens in the second half of life (James Hollis or Richard Rohr), or how to understand the differences between Western psychotherapy and Eastern Buddhism (Bruce Tift). Each in their own way, they have helped me wrestle with my own contradictions and to see them not as failures but as areas of growth and possibility.

What’s it with my fascination over the medieval mind?
I remember feeling the first “pull of the medieval mind” when I watched The Name of the Rose when I was twelve. What a mystery: how and what did people think and feel who lived a few hundred years before me? The wrestling with meaning, chaos, order, and the unknown, still faintly resonating despite the gap of several centuries, appears alien and yet not all different from my own.

What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
For me, part of the appeal of books around this fundamental question is that the answers rarely agree. Derek Sivers offers a thought experiment of 27 competing answers, Clayton Christensen frames life as a moral reckoning, Adam Phillips writes about the restless human desire to change (so fascinating!), while Rebecca Solnit explores how we may only find ourselves after getting lost first. I cannot thank these four authors enough – as well as the countless other writers (yes, you too) – whose voices have helped me in adding perspective and depth to what feels true and purposeful in my own becoming.

Consciousness and altered, non-ordinary states of mind
What is consciousness, and how can we begin to glimpse its depth and countless states and dimensions? These questions feel as fresh as ever, (re)surfacing now with new urgency. The books I return to suggest that these explorations are not fringe curiosities, but a fundamental frontier that may ripple outward into cultural and even evolutionary change. The stakes are high, and at their core, they ask whether the mystery of consciousness might hold not only the critical key to our capacity to flourish, but also for humanity to come together and survive.

The paradox of the immigrant and multilingual condition
The role of identity, in particular around the immigrant experience and all its contradictions, is another thread I like to follow: the ache of homesickness and nostalgia, the strangeness and enchantment of second languages, and the way one’s identity gets remixed by the tensions between different languages and different worlds. Svetlana Boym has written a whole compendium about nostalgia, Jhumpa Lahiri immerses the reader in two languages at the same time, while Nancy Huston excellently captures the delicate estrangements that happen after one leaves home and country. Books like these have reminded me that building a new life far away from home is never just about loss, but also about the incredible enrichment that comes with living a life of one’s own.

The intellectual and bookish life
Growing up, I sometimes felt embarrassed by how much joy I took from libraries and bookstores, even dreaming that one day I might have a bookstore of my own. That never happened – and that’s totally okay, considering I now have shelves full of books that I love. What has remained is my pleasure in the utter absorption and interior life of books, full of their own demands. Zena Hitz captures this so beautifully in her celebration of study for its own sake, and how intellectual inquiry must be enjoyed to be worth the cost. A hundred years earlier, Sertillanges had laid out a demanding (and inspiring) vision of study as a vocation. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to live a somewhat bookish life now; it feels like my own adventure and back to the roots.

….and lastly
What would a list of my reading obsessions be without books on writing? There are three dog-eared companions I come back to the most. First, Anne Lamott, of course. This quote may have been more powerful than anything else that got me first into writing: “You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart…your truth, your version of things, in your voice.” Wolfgang Zinsser continues to encourage me to trust my material more, while Alice LaPlante, who likes to get into the bones of narrative, offers some great parting wisdom with this:

“We are afraid that events that call forth [our intense] emotional experiences may seem inauthentic, or overwrought. We do not think we have the right to claim these emotions. Yet we do. And what’s more, our ability to write truly moving fiction and creative nonfiction ultimately derives from our ability to transform these very deep and very true experiences into language that effectively arouses deep, true emotions in others.” – Alice LaPlante

This concludes my list, and I can’t wait to see how it will morph over the next few years of reading. And I would love to hear from you: what are books and questions YOU are currently obsessed with?

Acknowledgments
I thank , , , and for reading and commenting on drafts of this piece!

My response had been intuitive. Something about reading, idling, unstructured blocks of time, and about awareness and trust in the process. Now the same question is tugging again, and a sense that I’d only touched on the edges of what I meant. Yet haziness remains, but isn’t that the nature of the creative process – quite hazy?

I realize: I already am in the middle of such serene but everyday inspiration I had tried to describe. Then why not try to write from within this half-formed but flickering process of creativity itself, and that is in a way similar to the leaves that are dancing in front of me? Hence this essay; I want to try to document in some small way how ideas may arrive and arrange themselves.

On the laptop in front of me, I type the word creativity into my Notion search field, and a quote I had written down in 2022 catches my attention. In the short book “A Technique for Producing Ideas,” James Webb Young, author and advertising agency executive in the 1920s through the 1950s, had written about the creative process:

“What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.”

Click.

What a perfect description of what I had been trying to get at when I answered the question: ideas often don’t arrive at once and as a whole, but in parts or seemingly unrelated fragments. I can gather them patiently, combining curiosity and the expansiveness of drifting, looping, and trusting. Yes, the creative process is the turning over of puzzle pieces, becoming more familiar with their messages, texture and edges, to see which might fit.

The process necessarily starts with something I pay attention to – for me often concepts or feelings I am curious about. What particularly interests me is hard to describe. It’s more a radiating energy that draws my attention toward something that might hold an answer for me. It’s weird how that works, like some ring of truth. “Aha! Interesting, and this reminds me of something else, what was that again?”, I think, or “Why does this feel true to me?”

I grab two books, my journal and phone and walk out onto my deck. Stretching out under the golden early summer sun, I want to do some more searching and reading.

That click, it typically opens to something wider. Last week, I read David Bohm’s On Dialogue, and some of the author’s thoughts on communication and creativity are now mingling with a line by “my oracle” Henrik Karlsson that I’ve just come across on my phone screen, now getting hot from the sun:

“Forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in my head into a definite statement is an art form.”

These subtle pulls of curiosity? They feel so fragile but vital, and it’s a way of honoring them when I follow them. And I find there also needs to be slack, some space I give myself for idleness. It’s often in this soft, unstructured state of energized tranquility that another puzzle piece finds its way to me.

In fact, it already had, also just the day before. I had read parts of The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. A paper-clipped excerpt of these essays had been sitting in one of my paper stacks for a few weeks. So finally I had picked it up, as if something inside me had nudged me. Already in 1994, writer and professor Birkerts was lamenting the decline of immersive reading and attention durability that he observed among his students. As antidote, he celebrated the human capacity for subjective interiority – this inner space where we can feel, think, and drift. He praised Virginia Woolf’s writing, a master in expressing “the motion” of thinking and creating. She had written:

“Thought is as much about the motion across the water as it is about the stepping stones that allow it… It is an intricate choreography of movement, transition, and repose, a revelation of the musculature of mind.”

Woolf put words to this being-state of creative and fluid searching; it’s like a current we can step into, if or when we are tapped in. Click. Isn’t she in a way also describing this day’s magic? My almost ecstatic feeling of flowing and moving, even if in a still hazy direction? A day when a few sparks of curiosity lead to an ongoing and serendipitous stream of interest or insight. I write both quotes down, and close my eyes, the moment fusing with some faint 80s music that is drifting over from a neighbor’s house.

The days of such fluid elation are my best days. I’m afraid to be greedy, as I want more and more of them, because I feel like living inside my curiosity. Over time, I have learned to lean into my own conditions that seem to favor this ineffable state that I treasure so much.

You know what else it feels like to me? Like an aesthetic experience. Ideas, layers of understanding – one fragment here, one reference there – come together like a mosaic borne by my taste. A piecing together of “somethings” into something new that hasn’t existed before, like this piece of writing.

From the outside, none of this feels very systematic. And yet. There’s a delicate inner order to it, with my attention as its scaffolding. I am noticing things and see if they speak to me and each other.

I’m a bricoleuse1, working with what’s at hand. Nothing flashy; just an ordinary person noticing what feels special in the ordinary.

It’s time to walk the dog.

Thank you to Rachel Parker, Rick Lewis, and Larry Urish for your helpful feedback and encouragement on this piece! Special thanks also to Harrison Moore who asked the original question that prompted this essay and gave me initial conceptual advice.

1

bricoleuse = the French word for tinkerer or creative assembler. I love both the word and the spirit of “bricolage”, the working with what’s at hand to make something new. This little collage, for instance, came together recently from an AI-generated image, a favorite quote, and some manual texturing.

I guess I’m a collector of questions. In the last few years, I’ve been tucking them away like glinting treasures, gathered from books or conversations, here and there. I don’t always know what draws me to a particular one, other than its aliveness or mysterious promise. Like a moth to light, I feel drawn toward the power of inquiry some questions seem to hold for me.

This post is different in form and function from my usual essays. Like a small open jewelry box, I just want to share some of my most cherished questions I’ve carried around and returned to. Some have already changed me. Others are ongoing conversations or remain patiently waiting for some future answer. When I remember where I picked up a question, I’ve included the source.

Maybe some of them hold some spark for you too.

What do I actually like and why? (Ezra Klein)

Is the thing I work on what I want to work on most?

When I’m learning about others or comparing myself to others: Am I willing to make the same sacrifices and trade-offs?

Is the decision I’m about to make reversible or irreversible? (Jeff Bezos)

What would this look like if I removed half? Would I still like it as much, or more?

Would I do {X} if I could never talk about it?

What might this look like if it were easy? (Tim Ferriss)

Instead of asking what will I force myself to become, what would it look like if I shifted the question instead to who I am curious about being?

Who wrote the software running in your head? (Naval Ravikant)

Is the upper limit of my mind as high (or higher), or lower than it used to be in college? (David Brooks)

What would happen if I looked at my story and wrote it from another person’s point of view? What would I see from this different–and possibly wider–perspective? (Lori Gottlieb)

What/who would I be without my story? (Byron Katie)

What would I want your life to look like if I only lived for a single day?

What would I do or my life look like if I knew you couldn’t fail?

Where am I now? Where do I most want to be? What’s in my way? (Brian Whetten)

How may I be complicit in creating the conditions in my life I say I don’t want? (Jerry Colonna)

What is the courageous conversation–with others or with myself–that I am not having? (David Whyte)

What will it be like for our children to grow up in a world where every question is [at least seemingly] answerable? (Dan Shipper)

If {X} is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

What would I hate the most not doing anymore?

*the end* - oh but wait:

Which question(s) do YOU find most meaningful? What’s one question that has lived inside you for a long time, and would you share it with me and other readers?

xo.

Others picked my words for me. Not out of cruelty, maybe not even full awareness, but still – they picked at my brave yet tender heart. The wide open flank of a child born porous. I translated the shockwaves of my emotions into the need to lock myself up in some deep well, a safe place to study how others moved through the world with seeming ease. Their words felt grown up and fluent, mine reluctant, only forming.

They echoed back a smaller version of me, made it sound flawed. “She is shy, silent, in deep waters,” they’d say, unaware of how hostile that sounded to me. Inside my childhood self, it became imperative to stay calm and collected on the outside, to only let the crisis quietly rage within. Did they ever sense danger the way I could, this critical need to retreat? Surely, this didn’t warrant a scene. All I had to do was survive one more terribly long moment and keep it together. Like this:

We sit down for lunch. My sister says something clever to my mother, some poignant opinion, presented with loud conviction. I add something, just to join in, but they don’t respond. Was there an exchange of glances, or did I just imagine that? Their quick banter continues toward a crescendo, followed by their laughter, rising like a tide, leaving me outside of its current. I’m unmoored; still at the table, but already floating elsewhere, far from shore.

This thing – this dreaded sensitivity – it arrived in waves. Gently, ongoing, or sudden and crushing, laying a heavy blanket of shame onto my heart. It was blinding me, disorienting me, obstructing clear thinking, making me wonder: How can I survive this much feeling?

I schlepped it through the years, like a heavy stone in my pocket weighing me down. Feeling fully was a danger to shield from and made me turn to strategies of hesitation. Surrendering to aliveness and joy could feel misplaced in the face of such heaviness, like light in a sealed room. Outwardly, I tried to smile instead of breaking down, reserving such defeat only for the times when I could no longer hold the barricades, when the center had to give way.

This was the call to insulate more and create yet better adaptations. This was my own race to tame this hard-to-control world and keep my sensitive core safe. And wow, it worked. I became the observer, the quiet thinker, the likable, the sweet one. The one to be chosen.

Only that there was this trouble: the more I achieved to insulate from emotional struggle, the more I shrank. In taming the world I also tamed myself, dulling the edge of my very own nature and aliveness. It was a Faustian deal for survival. Small, accumulating self-betrayals. A translation of myself into something legible, less wild and more palatable. Was the bargain worth it?

It took me time to grow to understand this. At first, there was a vague ache, a grief for something I couldn’t locate. Then I started to see the horrendous cost: how in emotionally retreating and abandoning parts of myself, I had also betrayed and locked away parts of my own truth. The dark inner shadow had turned me against my own innocent and noble self. The irony. In trying to escape the original ache, I was deepening the very void I was trying to outrun. Not just the pain itself, but my insulation from it. That was the real exile, the swamp of living out of integrity.

The ache swelling and my heart revolting, I got tired of my own strategies. And underneath it all, there was something beckoning. Now I know that this something was my future self whispering, subtly pulling me toward my wholeness and own adventures.

This journey carried me far from my homeland, onto a new continent, where I practiced the bravery of my wild becoming. I slowly grew into enough trust to continue to follow the North Star of my creative, authentic self. My eyes and heart opened to the beauty and love, all around me and within reach. And this is how I slowly saved myself: by building the precious life that had been waiting in store as my heart’s blueprint all along.

I came to understand that this sensitivity wasn’t just something to manage, but a kind of special intelligence. It kept me safe, let me listen carefully to others, and – maybe best of all – gave me embodied access to my own subtle intuition, plus the many synchronous nods the world offered to me.

In this way, the shadow I had tried to lock away hadn’t only guarded me, but had also been guarding something for me. The lock and key were the same: my own magic of seeing feelingly. My own deep river wasn’t buried, but flowed with quiet abundance, carving its path. Waiting for me to listen and let its current carry me toward what I value most. Attention, presence, language, love.

This connection to my core remains a sustaining mystery. Putting one true word after another for this piece felt vulnerable, and slow. It took me several weeks. Or, who knows, maybe a whole lifetime, after all. It’s both a release and return to something familiar, only that I can now live my life more in relation with and service to the world.

It’s as if my sensitivity has become something akin to a lifelong friend. And to my mother and sister: I love you so wildly, I may never find the words to properly express.

Proust and Joyce met only once, at a dinner party at the Ritz in Paris in 1922. Both were literary giants of their time, absolute masters of capturing the nuances of human interaction in their writing. They were seated next to each other, but their conversation was reported to be flat and awkward, bogged down by trivial talk of ailments, chauffeurs, and truffles, both repeatedly answering with the lonely word: ‘Non.’1

Their encounter certainly wasn’t a grand dialogue and exchange of ideas as one could have expected between these two great minds. But perhaps that’s the point: conversation isn’t a performance or controlled act of composition akin to their brilliant writing. Their awkward exchange can remind us that conversation is alive and human, precisely because it resists control and perfection.

If conversations aren’t about flawless articulation, then what does make them meaningful? It’s often the moments when something real breaks through, like a moment of raw honesty, or hesitation, or when something new starts forming in the space between two minds.

But what if we’re bad at talking (and that’s a good thing)?

We can perhaps view our imperfections in dialogue as features, rather than flaws. The mentally replayed dialogues that we silently scold ourselves over later. Looking back, my most meaningful conversations were never polished performances. What made them matter was my ‘okay-ness’ with the fumbling, because that wasn’t the point.

They were conversations when I could step out of the presentation mode2, this reflex to perform or sound clever to impress. When I could push back on my overly self-conscious or performative ego that would have otherwise blocked what I did end up saying, or truly receiving what I heard the other person say. Messy and nonlinear, yes, but also surprising and real.

What is it about strangers?

If imperfection makes conversation more alive, maybe familiarity isn’t a prerequisite for meaning either. Some of the most resonant conversations don’t even happen with those we’ve known for years, but with people we’ve just met. There’s a curious paradox at play here. We assume deep conversations require deep relationships, yet sometimes, the very lack of history is what allows us to speak more freely.

I remember the cab driver or stranger next to me on the plane who became my confidant, even for just a short but weirdly intimate window of time. Like mini (well, and less romantic) episodes of Midnight in Paris. Rather unexpected, yet deeply open and rewarding conversations. This is also known as the “stranger-on-the-train” phenomenon: we may disclose intimate details to strangers more easily due to our lower perceived risk of judgment or future repercussions. It’s as if strangers offer us some shortcut to intimacy, when we are able to discover new aspects of ourselves through the exchange. It’s not that strangers understand us better, but that we are momentarily unburdened by our own narratives.

Conversation as an active introspection

The word conversation comes from the Latin conversari, meaning to “to dwell with” and “to turn toward”: not only toward one another but toward unfolding thoughts, emotions, and questions within ourselves. In this sense, conversation is an inside out process: the more we’re willing to engage with what’s unfolding within us, the more authentic and meaningful our connections with others become.

Conversation can then become a process of thinking and feeling in real time, an exchange where our curiosity leads and nudges us to ask: What do I think about this topic, and how do I feel about it? In such exploration, we don’t just exchange ideas, but may actually discover new parts of ourselves that just weren’t quite as clear to us before.

So again, meaningful conversation isn’t much about getting all the words right, but to stay in the exchange long enough for something novel to emerge. Something neither person could have arrived at alone.

The co-creational power of conversation

When conversations unfold based on their own, energetic momentum, they can build their full power: this process of co-creation, where something novel is emerging in real time, in the process of exchange between two (or more?) minds.

Poet William Wordsworth described the creative process as ‘half-perceiving, half-creating.’3 To me, this applies also to the nature of transformative conversation, in which ideas take shape through the act of articulation. In this dance between listening and speaking, discovery and expression, it’s like witnessing the live creation of a new stepping stone of my understanding, its contour only becoming visible during (and often also post-) dialogue. Like the reaching out with my hands in a dark room. And I guess that’s the edge of conversation between chaos and order: the space where I don’t just exchange something repeated or rehearsed, but help (or am helped to!) crystallize something new.

The middle way of conversation

When we are in conversations that challenge us, there can be the reflex to either reject what we hear out of defensiveness, or to absorb what we hear into our worldview.

But there’s also a middle way approach. I can treat something challenging or even hurtful more as a mirror instead of a directive. The real question then isn’t whether to accept or reject something, but rather to feel into how something resonates within us: Do I feel myself contract or expand in response?

I believe that at its core, everything in life - in conversation as well - comes down to fear and love. The discomfort I felt in some conversations were at times a mirror of some of the fears I wasn’t facing. When I lean into this discomfort of a conversation, for example when I talk about grief or more hidden feeling, I experienced coming out of such conversation feeling so alive. There is, after all, something luminous in the moments when we turn toward the raw edges of truth. It’s when I was able to feel the human connection, and the energetic resonance and warmth from being seen.

The playful risk of “Yes, and…?

With his middle way, we may also create more space to lean into the inherent unpredictability of conversation. Dialogue isn’t just about careful listening and speaking, but also about play and risk.

In improv theater, the golden rule is “Yes, and….” In playful, improvised exchanges, participants accept what’s offered and build on it, and this also applies beautifully to conversation more in general: when we approach dialogue with a playful, improvisational spirit, we open ourselves more to the unexpected. In moments of improvisation - again, non-rehearsed - something spontaneous and novel reveals itself. And sometimes surprising not only the listener(s).

The role of silence: letting the gaps speak

Awkward pauses in conversation—how often have they unnerved me? That reflex to fill the air and smooth over the void with word is almost instinctual. But I think the discomfort isn’t in the silence itself but in our resistance to it. In reality though, good conversations should be allowed their natural rhythm, their interplay of speech and silence. Because both are equally essential.

Silence isn’t something we need to frantically push away. Instead, maybe, we can try to think of silence even as this: rest. David Whyte describes rest as “the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.” What if we approached silence in dialogue the same way? Instead of treating it as an unwelcome interruption, we can try to be a bit more relaxed, allow it to settle and do its quiet work. While in return letting us doing this: simply being in the moment with the other person. I have experienced this as particularly important when being with someone who is grieving, and that my caring was more felt and unfolding when I allowed myself to sit in what at first may have felt uncomfortable.

Conversation can then become this more embodied listening, to whatever quietly wants to unfold, during and after.

Perhaps this is what conversations ask of us: not just to speak, but to listen more deeply. To not just “perfectly” answer, but to follow more the questions, allow something new to emerge - despite all our flaws and imperfections. And lastly, to remain humble and a bit more (self-)forgiving if we still fail at successfully articulating certain things, especially those that are lodged deeper in us.

Give it space, the shaping will follow naturally.

This piece wouldn’t exist without the many conversations that shaped me and the conversations that shaped this essay. Thank you , , , and for your reflections, suggestions, and the generosity of your time with editing help.

I want to practice what I write, so I’d love to extend an invitation: if this piece resonated with you and you’d like to have a “spontaneous” conversation with me, please reach out! Let’s have a “conversation among strangers” ha, and schedule a call - no agenda, no script, just see what emerges. Talking about writing and Substack alone is always fun.

1.

It was a quiet evening after Christmas, the red glow of a Swiss sunset in winter still brightening our spirits. My sister, her husband and I were sitting together with a glass of chilled Chablis, letting the conversation drift through anecdotes and memories. Beneath the light mood lay weight of life’s reality. Our visit wasn’t just a joyful holiday with family, but also an episode of witnessing the slow unfolding of our parents’ old age. The past felt quaint, and close, but time had undeniably moved forward.

Still, the mood was easy enough, with a low-stakes intimacy that mutes vulnerability. I had been keeping my writing to myself since taking it more seriously last year, almost hilariously hesitant to share my more personal thoughts with those closest to me. Those I rather reserved for a small audience of like-minded strangers on the internet. That night though, buoyed by the warmth of the moment, I found myself asking, “Do you guys want to hear something I wrote about our old childhood home?”

The essay I was pulling up on my phone was the first Substack piece I had ever published, as part of the Write of Passage class I had taken the preceding fall. In what I called The Art of Memory, I had labored to bring to life house in rural Germany where we had grown up, an homage to the place we had long left behind. The essay unfolded along the map I had so much studied with my childhood’s eyes. There were the red-tiled steps, the texture of the brown carpet, our father’s old armchair, and walking in and out of these rooms of the past, I felt touched by rising waves of familiar movement. Our sounds, our shadows.

Now reading my words strangely sharpened the details, dragged the house further from foggy memory into the heightened presence of the moment. Amplified by the presence of my older sister sitting next to me, there this house stood again with so much clarity, as if alive with the proud pulse of personal meaning. My sister was intently listening. Her gaze on me, steady and searching, I felt both seen and secretly exposed. When I imagined entering our old kitchen, by paragraph four of the essay, my voice had started to crack. Once again I could see our once so chic olive-green cabinets from a 70s kitchen and the small kitchen table, where we so often sat to study, play and joke around. Upon recalling my mother’s younger voice and bright laughter, tears were running down my cheeks.

God did the essay strike differently in my sister’s presence. Flushed, and a bit flustered, I was finally done reading and then looked up. At least half expecting to see my sister moved as well, she asked me with a caring but measured expression, her eyes still searching:

“Do you struggle with memories like that?”

2.

They rang the doorbell of our suburban Minneapolis home on a late weekday afternoon near the end of summer, about six years ago. Two friendly-looking women stood in front of me, one around my age, the other much older—frail, her frame bent with time. It took just a moment and a few words of introduction to recognize the older woman: Mrs. Greengard. Together, she and her husband had built the house in the mid-80s, a modernist-influenced home with a contemporary style, the one I was standing in and had bought from them over 15 years ago. The house I fell in love with at first sight and went on to turn into my American Home. How young I had been, joyfully renovating, eager to brush fresh color and future on its walls. I hadn’t thought much about how I was also painting over the Greengards’ family stories held within.

My daughter and her friend’s laughter, running down the upstairs hallway during a playdate, were traveling down to us. Life was moving forward, filling the house with youth and fresh sounds. The younger of the two women—Mrs. Greengard’s daughter—now asked on behalf of her mother, their arms touching:

“Do you think it would be possible for my mom to see the house again?”

3.

My sister’s reaction startled me. An old, familiar heat—embarrassment—flushed across my cheeks and chest. I reeled. Oh why these tears, why now? Then, beneath them, something sensitive and quieter, the ache of holding a memory that no longer seemed to belong to both of us. The tears felt heavy, lonely without hers.

My writing had been an act of translation, turning raw memory into something tangible and spoken in my own voice. Was that what I was hoping for? To connect, for her to see what I saw and feel what I felt?

But for my sister, the house, at least in her current emotional state, may just have been a house, its rooms silent, not holding the same nostalgia that was now stirring in my chest. Maybe I had wished she would have stepped into the memory with me. But memory is also this: leaving each of us holding different pieces. Perhaps her own memory held little for her or at least not the same as for me. Or, perhaps, more than she was ready to touch.

Memory doesn’t always bind us together the way we expect, even when we inhabit some of the same moments, like my sister and I had done in this childhood home. What lingers and carries weight feels different for to two of us. Memories are deeply personal and don’t retain the same emotional coloration, are even physically differently encoded in the circuitry of our minds.

Memory is both personal and relational, tethering us to people and to places and other versions of ourselves, even ones we thought we already shed. People close to us who move – or once moved – with us through our days, add more context and deeper layers of memory based on what we know about each other. Making them more real, somehow thicker in detail and texture.1 I once read that we may even carry people as our “imaginary witnesses,” how they become our silent observers we conjure to help validating our experiences.

So when I was thinking about our childhood home with such emotional vigor, had I turned my family, and with it my sister, into this role of imaginary witnessing? In this way, sharing my essay was an expression of my unconscious hope that her presence would make memories even more vibrant and full color again, for me and for her. From sister to sister. That her eyes on them proved even more how much they mattered, even in 2025.

But can memories ever belong to anyone but the one who holds them?

4.

I welcomed both ladies in. As Mrs. Greengard stepped in, her eyes flickered for just a moment – or did I just imagine this? – toward a particular spot on the door frame. As if searching for proof that time had been holding space, had left something from theh past untouched, right in this spot. And there it was: the weathered plaque that said Peace to All Who Enter Here. We had intentionally left it right there on the door’s frame after moving in, exactly where the Greengards had put it, likely close to 40 years before.

I said, “Please take as much time as you’d like. The house might be a bit messy…my daughter is having a playdate with a friend. Oh, and, I—I’ve made quite a few changes to the house over the years, I hope you can still recognize it…”

They moved past me with soft steps. I remember how I wondered where Mr. Greengard was. Both women seemed content to be here, present in this moment. Who knows how many times they had driven past, talked about stopping but never had. I stayed behind, trying to busy myself with arranging one of my many stacks of books. Granting the two the privacy I felt they wanted.

I’ll never know what room or hallway they stepped into that day. Did they pause in the kitchen where they used to brew their coffee in the morning, or by the nook where the daughter might have sat to do her homework? Did she brush her hand against a doorframe, the place where they had measured their kids’ heights, or look for her husband reading the paper in the living room, sunlight one more time reflecting dancing leaves from lush trees in the green backyard? Especially now, as I write these lines, I hope they found at least a trace of what they were looking for that day. Something to hold on to for the journey still ahead.

Back at the doorway after just a few minutes, they lingered. Mrs. Greengard’s gaze swept the room one last time. “Thank you so much,” she said, her voice tender and warm, the house now releasing them back into the golden summer sun. Three women linked (and a very young fourth, obliviously playing upstairs), even if just for a brief moment, by the threads of memory and lived story.

And yet, I can only hold my own memories, not theirs. We cannot remember for others.

I closed the door and slowly walked back to the kitchen where I stood for a moment, totally still. I then started the preparations for that night’s dinner, but felt moved to turn on some music from my home country for some company.

5.

We were now getting ready for our traditional post-Christmas dinner in the quaint Swiss village nearby. I quickly rebalanced my emotions, and soon, we were caught up in the savoring Château Briand with pommes allumettes and more wine and family stories.

Since then, my sister and I haven’t touched the subject of writing again or the memories from the essay. Maybe we will at some point in the future; that’s how things between us sisters tend to unfold.

But something shifted in the last few weeks since Christmas. I have gained confidence in my writing. It feels further unshackled from self-expectation and the need for validation from others. And remembering, well… It doesn’t always mean connecting with others the way we hope. What I’ve learned though, also through my writing practice, is that our memories have the power to return us to ourselves. Like returning to our old house, I can see and feel inside what still holds meaning. It is me who holds the master key. If I’m lucky, I notice something I hadn’t seen before or almost forgot. If I’m lucky, I stay close to myself. What a treasure my memory is.

While finishing the draft for this essay, I came across these words from Marcel Proust, quoted in a beautiful tweet by Yim Kim. They stayed with me, like another kind of return.

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be contained wholly within ourselves; it radiates out to the beloved, encounters in her a surface that stops it and forces it to return to its starting point, and it’s this return shock of our own affection that we call the feelings of the other person, and that casts a spell on us even more than it did on the way out, because we don’t realize it comes from us.

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Blossom (trans. Charlotte Mandell)

If attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity toward the world…

• “Your time and attention are finite. Those who know this treat them preciously.”— Naval

• “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” — David Foster Wallace

And, if what we focus on becomes our reality…

• “Having more faith in the ability of our environment to signal to us where we should be focused is probably the most powerful idea I’ve ever encountered.” — Tom Morgan

• “Our mind is the garden, our thoughts are our seeds, my harvest will either be flowers or seeds.” — Mel Weldon

• “A proxy for meaning is what we proactively pay attention to; our heart, gut, and environment can provide external inputs that resonate.” — Tom Morgan

And, if our consciousness shapes the world we inhabit…

• “The world is actually a living breathing thing that we are in effect creating as we go.” — Jim O’Shaughnessy

• “Attention is how our world comes into being for us.” — Dr. Iain McGilchrist

• “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” — Norbert Wiener

And, if our awareness of our attention’s power is the doorway to agency and transformation…

• “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Victor Frankl

What could there possibly be left to understand?

• “The choice we make how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act; it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.” — Dr. Iain McGilchrist

• Love, if we look at it this way, is then also an expression of this creative attentiveness: “Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other.” — Louis Lavalle

So, in the end: “I began to realize that my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself.” — David Whyte

Irish poet David Whyte begins his essay Background with a striking observation:

“Foreground dominates our lives, it overestimates in importance and hides the greater context from which it has emerged. The neglect of background is the source of much of our present loneliness and most definitely, our present unhappiness.”

There is a strange paradox in how we experience the world: what we most often notice and deem important is rarely what matters most. Our attention clings to the sharp, defined, immediate edges of reality: the tasks, the images that blaze our screens, the measurable, the seemingly simple solutions to problems. This is the foreground, the crisp scaffolding of perception that promises clarity and certainty. But like the surface of water, the often clear and static surface often obscures the deeper and darker currents beneath—the background.

What Whyte describes as “emerging from the background” is something subtle yet more essential: the vast relational web of experiences, rhythms, and the hum of the elements and seasons cycling through us. The background are the unspoken exchanges that deepen our relationships, and the felt sense of truly belonging to the world. It’s what gives the foreground its meaning.

In short, the background is the unseen thread that underlies reality. It’s the world flowing through us in every moment—more spacious, ambiguous, and alive than the rigid structures we like to impose on how we perceive reality. We crave order and control, reflecting our deep fear of uncertainty and the unknown. And, let’s be real, our fear of dying.

The shift toward the foreground, an longstanding bias since Plato, was accelerated by the rise of industrialization, scientific rationalism, and the cultural glorification of precision and control—developments that reflect Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work on what he calls left hemispheric dominance.1 The left hemisphere loves to trump the right hemisphere, prioritizing measurable clarity over small parcels of reality instead of the fluid, relational, and intuitive ways of knowing that the right hemisphere excels at. Over time, a narrowing focus has increasingly left us disconnected from the richer, more embodied sense of reality that once shaped our experience.

Some remaining native tribes, for example the Anlo-Ewe of southeastern Ghana, still live in a way that reflects a deeper harmony with the world. The Anlo-Ewe are renowned for their sensory awareness, particularly their sense of balance and proprioception, which connects them to their environment in profound ways. They perceive themselves as part of a relational web, attuned to the movements of animals, the presence of water, and the cycles of the earth—guided by the intelligence of their bodies paired with the wide awareness of their minds.2 Their sense of time is attuned differently too, rooted in the present moment and guided by natural patterns and rituals, instead of our rigid linear conceptions of time. These practices, shared by other Indigenous cultures like the Western Apache, Inuit, and Māori, offer us a glimpse into what it means to live more wholly.3

By contrast, our Western culture can be called ‘whole-blind,’ a term used by embodiment teacher and author Philip Sheperd,4 which reflects our way of feeling and relating to the world as isolated, separate entities, disconnected from the fluid, relational web of life. One of the most powerful forces driving this disconnection is our reliance on language, a tool that shapes how we perceive and interact with reality. Language, with its abstract form, draws us into the foreground. Words like to categorize and fragment the world into fixed, conceptual representations. This is very helpful to solve problems and organize our world, but also detaches us from the aliveness of immediate experience—a bell jar of our own making.

If language often confines us to the foreground, it also offers ways to move beyond it. Metaphor and poetry, in particular, resist the pull of abstraction by creating more space for the depth of lived experience.5 Poet Robert Frost framed this perfectly when he wrote,

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with."

To ground this idea of relational truths beyond words, look at this photo—a fitting counterpart to the felt experience that a poem may be able to evoke. Taken just a few days ago, it captures the very moment when a father embraces his daughter for the first time after 15 months of separation after being held hostage.6

The photo itself is static, a fixed fragment of time. It cannot fully capture and put us inside the flow of this moment for father and daughter—their beating hearts, the warmth of their skin, the catching of breaths, the overflow of emotion, but it gestures toward it. Looking at it, I feel a lump in my throat. Without needing to label or rationalize what I see, I can open myself to a visceral awareness. Feelings of homesickness and of love sickness emerge—all contained in this moment of presence: I intuitively pick it all up, beyond words and categorizing thought.

The background, like the moment in the photo, may remind us what the foreground forgets: that meaning is shaped by the movement and flow of life, and in our participation in it. It may be found in a dancer’s arm moving in grace, in a daughter’s breath catching, or when locking eyes with a beloved animal. The wild peace found in gestures and every moment, at least potentially.

I am not when I think. Rather, I am when I relate.7 Reclaiming our connection to the background means stepping beyond the isolating confines of thought and back into the flow of life itself. It’s time to rewrite our story as part of the web of life. It’s wakeful, waiting for us—here, in the present.

Sorry, I am adding to the avalanche of year-end reading reviews. But I believe this one is still worth your time.

I read dozens of fiction and non-fiction books every year and felt inspired1 to compile my list of the 20 of my most remarkable reading highlights in 2024—moments when words made me stop, gasp, and think about why I felt deeply touched by them.

The books I pull from for this article vary in genre, subject and tone. Yet, there seems to be a slender thread subtly uniting them: they illuminate insights about life’s fundamental truths that feel both timeless and personal, and worth sharing at the beginning of the year.

3, 2, 1, here goes:

Writing is the form of prayer that chose me. When I write, I drop so deeply into myself that I enter somewhere else, somewhere sacred and urgent, the silent place where Reality keeps what still needs to be said and seen and sung. When I come back, I craft a home for the unsaid thing, the living aurora that has curled up in my chest like a cat in sunlight. From words, I shape a place for it to live, a house of prose where people can visit, be touched by it, be transformed by the aurora’s bloom in the space behind their own hearts.
We’re Here to Renew the Sacred, by River Kenna (essays)

Why I love it: I’ve long been interested in how writers live, practice and describe their habits and feelings around their writing craft. River, writer and aliveness guide, expresses the mystery of writing with such poetic yet luminous clarity. I love his image of turning our personal, unspoken thoughts and ideas into a communal, tangible home that we can carry with us, revisit, and open up for others.

She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (novel)

Why I love it: In just a few words, Woolf captures the struggle between an instinct to support others and the selfishness that’s required for the desire of self-expression—especially for women in Victorian England and, to a lesser degree, today. In this book, she transforms her own inclination into something brave and beautiful—showing how being alone with oneself can be not just an escape, but an act of profound self-recognition.

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me- not even you…Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference.
Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (novel)

Why I love it: This isn’t just a love quote—it’s a radical declaration of love’s purest form, where the very act of loving transcends the need for reciprocation. Ayn Rand holds up the fierce independence of the feeling itself, despite the danger of such love devouring us. It’s about an ideal of love and its duality, between its potential that lives next to its built-in risk.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit (personal essays)

Why I love it: Going through some grief from transitions in life, in my case the gradual letting go that is involved from having a teenage daughter and elderly parents, I am interested in how to handle loss and uncertainty. Solnit’s reframing of loss as a form of richness spoke directly to my heart. Her distinction between forgetting and letting go opens us a space and way of thinking of these transitions not as something to get over, but as something that can deepen my capacity for life and love. Loss, in such re-evaluation, can become its own kind of permanent possession.

Having a willingness to feel good and have life go well all the time is a genuinely radical act.
The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks (non-fiction)

Why I love it: Gay Hendricks believes each of us has a kind of inner thermostat that determines how much love, success and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. He calls this individual conditioning—set in childhood—the ‘upper limit problem.’ This insight from human psychology is quite transformational and hopeful: We have the power for change and resetting these inner thermostats, even radically.

[I] was always trying to figure out how I, and other people, could create lives we actually enjoyed. … Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.
The Way to Integrity, Martha Beck (non-fiction)

Why I love it: A perfect companion to the previous highlight, as Martha Beck lays out a way to compose the life we actually want and that feels right by pursuing the maxim of personal integrity. It takes no small amounts of discipline, but we can choose to do, in each moment, and even joyfully, what feels truest and most in line with our true nature, like a ‘bloodhound on a scent.’

Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri (memoir)

Why I love it: Lahiri wrote this book in Italian, a second language she only learned later in life. Writing in a second language myself, it was intriguing to read about her account of being humbled as well as enriched by language. There is so much metamorphic potential for a writer and speaker when engaging in and with another language. Her observation about imperfection leading to creativity particularly resonates with me—it’s precisely in the struggle with linguistic imperfection that I find new ways to express myself. The practice makes me paradoxically feel more alive, helping me discover new facets about myself and how I relate to the world.

And now we get to the hard part. The endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. If you don’t hear from me often, remember that you’re in my thoughts.
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster (memoir)

Why I love it: RIP Paul Auster. Oof, what a loss last year. I love tender authors and introspective writing. In this early book of this, Auster writes about the meaning and handling of memory that he calls the ‘space where things happen for the second time.’ What a beautiful sentiment, and I’d like to shout out the lines above to my friends and the meaningful people whose paths I’ve crossed in life: I think of you often, also when I’m absent, and you live in some corner of my heart’s mansion, even if we may now live in slightly different worlds.

You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart…your truth, your version of things, in your voice.
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (non-fiction)

Why I love it: What better promise and warning about writing as expressed by Anne Lamott’s is there? Ignore that tugging in your heart at your own peril. Answer it and you might just find your voice.

Who would you be without your story.
Loving What Is, Byron Katie (non-fiction)

Why I love it: What a punch in the form of a mere 7 words. Ever feel stuck in ‘your ways’ of thinking and feeling, ever trying to actually get to a much clearer life? Then consider giving Byron Katie’s method a try. She calls it The Work—a process of introspection involving four questions to challenge and dissect stressful thoughts, culminating in a ‘turnaround’, a way to explore the opposite of a belief we carry. And this leads to direct experiences of this profound truth: ‘Reality is always kinder than the story we tell ourselves.’

There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring into the light, together with his.
How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain De Botton (non-fiction)

Why I love it: I haven’t read Marcel Proust’s work directly yet—certainly a future reading goal of mine. Even better when authors like De Botton act as intermediaries who create the indirect dialogue between the reader and a master’s original words (here Proust) and help reveal their intended meaning behind them. What Proust suggests in these lines is how reading isn’t just about passive consumption but also discovering ourselves. We can illuminate our own thoughts by trying to deeply understand another’s.

You know all your life that you’re going to die, but you don’t really know it, until you cross that fold. It feels like a crisis of faith, but faith in what? Not God, not in my case. Perhaps an unspoken belief I hadn’t realized I needed to function, an unexamined assumption that my life would continue getting better. That making good choices would lead to more freedom. I hadn’t known, really known, that there would be fewer choices.
Any Person Is The Only Self, Elisa Gabbert (essays)

Why I love it: I only discovered author Elisa Gabbert last year and love this collection of vulnerable, lively, and contagious essays she wrote about life, reading, literature, aging, and art. In these lines from ‘On Recently Returned Books,’ she articulates masterfully one of these precise instances we live through when abstract knowledge becomes visceral understanding—in this case our inevitable mortality.

The main question of my psychology. What persists through all states? What remains in sleep, in dreams, in drunkenness, in horror, in the rapture of love? in madness?
I Am Grazing My Brain’s Meadow, Paul Valéry (memoir, journals)

Why I love it: These lines are from the wonderful compilation from Paul Valéry’s (French poet, essayist, philosopher 1871-1945) personal—even secret—cahiers. He cuts right to the chase: what persists, what is our essence?

The human being is a multi-layered tissue, an onion consisting of many hundreds of layers, not a being with one layer or five, but innumerable: the human being is a woven fabric made of existing layers. Recognized and well known, this has been understood by the ancient Asians, and in Buddhist yoga a precise technique has been invented to peel off the delusion of personality.

Amusing and diverse is the game of humanity: the delusion of this leeration, which India has striven for so strenuously for thousands of years, is the same one that the Occident has so laboriously endeavored to support and strengthen.
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse (novel)

Why I love it: The delusion of identity and personality, masterfully described in three sentences. I like how the German author Hesse peels, with surgical precision, the human psyche like an onion in front of our eyes. He connects with seeming ease Eastern and Western philosophy through a single and startling metaphor. And what he reveals in the third sentence—how both East and West chase the same illusion, just from opposite directions reads almost like a cosmic joke, but explains so much.

The babies ‘slept through the night,’ while my nights were full of broken sleep. As my children learned to sleep, I unlearned. It’s hard to believe, but I had exchanged my sleep for that of my babies. And yet shouldn’t I have slept, since they slept?
Sleepless—A Memoir of Insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq (memoir)

Why I love it: My favorite memoir this year. Having suffered from longer and desperate bouts of insomnia myself, especially after the birth of my daughter (now a teen), I drank up Darrieussecq’s unabashed writing about the shocking nights, dead mornings, and her ‘creeping spider of malaise’ as a consequence of her sleeplessness. For those of you who have a weird nostalgia for sleep like me, this may be a book you want to read.

What is the structure of awe’s epiphany? Its big idea? What form of self-knowledge do we gain in experiences of awe? In our studies and the stories of awe we have encountered, people most reliably say something like: ‘I am part of something larger than myself.’
Awe, Dacher Keltner (non-fiction)

Why I love it: The topic of awe interests me, with its vicinity to the themes of intuition, meaning and connection. Dacher Keltner’s unique gift is his ability to examine awe through the scientific, personal, and spiritual lenses, showing how this profound emotion shrinks and expands us—making us feel small while connecting us to something greater.

Uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and (…) make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling.
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (novel)

Why I love it: Mann performs magic in these lines and made me feel time itself shift on the page. In one breath, he captures both the terror of monotony and the way remarkable moments can crack time open. It’s also a reminder of why we read (to break the uniformity, to let nuance of colors and light in, and to break bread with the dead) and why we write (to make moments expand). The paradox of life—it can feel simultaneously endless and fleeting, depending on how we fill our days.

Complexity prods me to consider how I can participate in the world around me, rather than simply cower, with my head down. My gestures don’t have to be large, because all effects are local and one never knows what this butterfly flapping its wings will produce in the larger world.
Notes on Complexity, Neil Theise

Why I love it: Once in a while, I come across a book so surprisingly magical and profound that it fundamentally shapes my thoughts and understanding of the world (and universe)—and this (short, and non-fictional!) book fit exactly that bill in 2024. I have a crush on complexity theory with its explanatory power, and as an antidote to simplistic and rigid platitudes of organized religion. Dr. Theise wrote a beautifully clear and concise reconciliation of modern science and spiritual thought—plus who can’t love the thought that each moment in our lives has the random potential to surprise us with new possibilities.

Free yourself from the need for a top-down causation, for an explanatory principle for all that happens. Celebrate the simple beauty of the unexpected! The hard-earned credibility of science, the work of thousands of dedicated men and women around the globe over four centuries, should not be misused to seduce those who seek for a safe harbor. (…) The source of science’s true spirituality lies in revealing the material connectedness between us and the Universe.
The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, Marcelo Gleiser (non-fiction)

Why I love it: Another great surprise discovery of author & physicist Gleiser who marries scientific rigor and spiritual wonder in this book. His imagery and vision of science as a path to both material and spiritual wisdom feel deeply authentic.

Let’s say that the critic is a person whose interest can help to activate the interest of others. That’s not a bad definition. (…) For that to work, what the critic writes or says has to be interesting in itself. And, of course, it can only really succeed in that way if the critic’s own interest is genuine. I may or may not like your drawing, but it’s essential that I care about it.
Better Living Through Criticism, A. O. Scott (non-fiction)

Why I love it: Renowned critic Scott unveils the secret of what makes writing about art, or any writing for that matter, magnetic. Critiquing is not about mere judgment but genuine care that sparks genuine interest (in this case in the reader). It reminds me that the best criticism, but also one’s own shared writings, aren’t about proving taste or intelligence. It’s about transmitting enthusiasm so purely that (some) others can’t help but catch it. This feels like permission and purpose wrapped in one. So give yourself permission to write about what you love and are enthusiastic about.

Particularly was I struck by the effect of writing things down. It was as if I were trying to catch something and the written word provided a net which for a moment entangled a shadowy form which was other than the meaning of the words. (…) Sometimes it seemed that the act of writing was fuel on glowing embers, making flames leap and throw light on the surrounding gloom, giving me fitful gleams of what before unguessed at.
A Life of One’s Own, Marion Milner (memoir, meta diary)

Why I love it: This hovering between two states—the verbalised and yet-to-be-captured—quite perfectly describes how writing often feels, and how difficult it actually is to catch fleeting thoughts. I wrote more about this state and feeling earlier this year in Going Where the Wild Things Are.

That’s a wrap—I wish us all many happy hours of reading in 2025!

Three weeks into the last cohort of Write of Passage, nostalgia got the better part of me. We were in a timed exercise on a writing app that erased our words if we paused too long—designed to curb overthinking and encourage spontaneity. The faster and more purposefully I typed, the more it felt like I was chasing thoughts, like catching fleeting butterflies. When I did keep pace, a surprising solidity emerged, my touch typing fingers etching thoughts onto the page. And that’s when it hit me—the nostalgic spark.

A few clicks on eBay later, I had bought a used black Sharp typewriter. Just like the one I first learned to touch type on in seventh grade.

It arrived slightly beaten up, its body dented like it had been through something. I imagined its scuffs telling me a story late-night scribbles and cramming into tight attics, surviving spilled coffee and the occasional impatient fist. I plugged it in, listened to its hiss and hum, and tried a few lines. While the keys pushed back with a satisfying heft, memories rushed in.

The first time I saw a professional typewriter I must have been four, trailing like a quick shadow behind my father’s knowing and steady steps. It was a quiet, foggy Sunday in the late 1970s, and he had taken me to the brown wood-paneled offices of his growing German sauna manufacturing business. Dust hung in the fluorescent light, settling on deserted desks, waiting for hands to stir it back into motion. As I wandered past meters of files and half-empty coffee pots, my mind tried, impossibly, to take everything in. I remember the hush—the sound of work paused, playing on replay, waiting to resume.

The typewriters towered large like stoic obelisks, their weighty metallic frames shimmering under the dim light. The keyboards, to me sets of cryptic hieroglyphs, holding some of the secrets of this mysterious business world. I didn’t touch them, not then, and my father didn’t explain anything either; he didn’t need to. Even at that young age, I intuitively understood the importance of this world. What I witnessed was purpose, although I didn’t know this word back then. Not loud or obvious, but still and embedded in the pine perfumed air, heavy with meaning.

Three years later, a typewriter appeared in my bedroom. My father had brought it home from the office just for me, without fanfare. It was white and had the weight of an anchor, pressing into my lap as if demanding respect. It instantly became a most precious possession. I loved the important sound it made and the words and messages I could now create, and the way the keys struck paper with authority. I’d retrieve it from under my closet whenever inspiration struck me, believing that whatever I typed was part of a secret ritual.

In seventh grade, I took typing more seriously, and encouraged by the sleek, modern black typewriter I had received. The class was taught biweekly by my good friend’s father, a man who seemed both intimidating and immensely patient, like a figure carved from granite. He rarely smiled and rarely scolded, watching us stumble through the endless drills:

A-S-D-F. J-K-L;
der die das

I can still see us sitting there, rows of us in stiff silence, fingers poised like obedient soldiers waiting for their orders. The clacking keys fell into uneven rhythms, some of us marching confidently, other stumbling, pausing, heads down and shoulders slumping. I remember the scrapes of chairs breaking through the clacking amid our wrestling with slowness. Occasional heavy sighs escaped. Yet no one stopped. We typed with the dogged determination of builders laying brick by brick, our fingers forging fortresses out of muscle memory. The final speed test was like a war metal to be won.

I’m still not sure happened, but I barely passed it—though has this ever truly mattered? I didn’t see back then how typing taught me something else: it wasn’t just a skill to master. It was an exercise in mental endurance, supported by my own body. Showing up, letter after letter. Typing and writing were skills to be earned. And in earning them, I found a quiet purpose. My rhythm of fingers on keys was more than just a sound but he steady heartbeat of persistence, of turning effort into something solid. A bridge to purpose and a connection to the world beyond me—one I was quietly building on my own.

The actor and author Tom Hanks referred to writing by typing as his ‘heart’s meditation.’ I think what he means is that it’s a practice—not unlike knitting or gardening—that focuses the mind while letting it wander. At first glance, these seem like opposites: focus is sharp and narrow, while wandering suggests looseness, even aimlessness. Yet, sitting at the typewriter, both are partners, with the disciplined focus of typing creating the space for mental freedom. Body and mind work together, bound by the rhythm of one’s fingers on the keyboard’s fixed coordinates. A structure to create within, like a river bank guiding the current and allowing a freer flow of consciousness.

This contact between the keys and my fingertips has been a connection I could somehow always count on. School, university, my first job, a long career, my move across continents—always a part of my journey, of me growing up.

Now, the black typewriter—the same model as the one from my seventh grade typing class—sits nearby on a desk. I bought it because I thought I missed it, but maybe it missed me too, as one of the few who still sees its value. It doesn’t see much use, but its presence is a reminder: of my purpose, where I come from and where I hope to go. Of course, I can’t predict the path, but I know now that it’s not marked by perfection but by the further unlocking of my potential. Key by key and word by word, what I hope to bring to life is this: to write about what’s lurking in the dim but near distance—the thriving edge of my past and future.

It’s beautiful when ideas from different disciplines meet and, instead of clashing, can enhance and deepen our understanding about them. I had this experience again recently when I was reading these two books in tandem: The Matter With Things—Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist and David Whyte’s Consolations—The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

Our lives are largely determined by how we think and feel, and both books deliver precious perspectives and visions of how we can do exactly this: grapple with the how and why of these fundamental questions of human existence. The rigor of neuroscience meets with the soulful introspection of poetic expression, creating a

dialogue that illuminates both disciplines in profound ways. It is striking how McGilchrist’s framing of metaphor and poetry as some of the means by which we come to know the world resonates so deeply here. They act as a bridge, connecting the more rigorous neuroscience with the reflective, interpretative lens of poetry—expanding our grasp of the complexities of being thinking and feelings humans.

In The Matter With Things, Scottish neuroscientist Dr. McGilchrist analyses and applies his sweeping scientific and philosophical hemispheric theory to the world and reality, and our place in it. On the most fundamental level, his vision is based on the profound observation that the two hemispheres of our brain see the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere, analytic and detail-oriented, seeks clarity and control, breaking down the whole into its constituent parts. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is relational and expansive, attuned to context, ambiguity, and the interconnectedness of life.

McGilchrist argues that our understanding of the world and ourselves is at its richest when these two perspectives are in balance. However, in modern life, the left hemisphere’s narrow focus often dominates, at the expense of the right’s more intuitive, holistic, and embodied wisdom. This interplay between the analytical and the relational offers access to meaning—which we all crave and need so much—and reminding us that wisdom emerges from the integration of two complementary ways of seeing (see more on this aspect of ‘seeing’ under the vignette ‘beauty’ below).

A quick spoiler alert: For a lot of what actually matters, it is the right hemisphere over the left hemisphere that has—or rather should have—”the final say.” The following excerpts and quotes from the sources will reflect further on this view.1

In Consolations, poet and philosopher David Whyte takes readers on an exploration of both beauty and struggle inherent of the human experience in a different way: He uses everyday familiar terms, such as courage, loneliness, beauty, pain, etc. and describes them with poetic precision and profound insight in the form of short and meditative essays.

So let us begin a short journey and exploration across a few select themes from Whyte’s essays and how they converge, touch, or overlap with an integrative philosophy of neuroscience.

i. beauty

For Whyte, the eternal theme of beauty is not a distant ideal but an intimate, transformative presence that invites us into a deeper engagement with life. It emerges when we are fully present, “entranced” by the world’s imperfect nature against our fears. Beauty, for Whyte, represents a call to vulnerability and connection, a reminder for our shared humanity, and the realness and richness that comes from witnessing and being witnessed.

McGilchrist argues that beauty is universal—there is no formula for it, it can’t be commanded. It has to be experienced, and in that experience we become “aware of being the presence of something greater than ourselves.” This perspective resonates with Whyte’s idea of beauty as an invitation to deep relational engagement—necessitating vulnerability and humility.

Both McGilchrist and Whyte highlight beauty’s role in transcending the mundane. McGilchrist sees beauty as arising harmony and unity and is picked up by right hemispheric perception. He asserts that “beauty is a matter of seeing through the surface to the depth, seeing through the parts to see the whole [its Gestalt].” The way we see beauty is by seeing with “soft eyes”: a gaze that is wide, open, and receptive. And this receptiveness of aesthetics, again, is highly dependent on the right hemisphere. Writes McGilchrist,

“Aesthetic appreciation involves perception, emotion, intuition and cognition, (...) emotions of pleasure, disgust, sadness, joy, or awe; and draws on responses to form, colour, sound, action, memory, association with bodily sensations, sexual responses, action preparation, and much more.”2

Whyte locates beauty in the symmetries and asymmetries of life, in the tension between the opposites of imperfections and perfections, that ground us in shared rhythms of existence and the interconnectedness of the human and human-made world. McGilchrist similarily highlights the right hemisphere’s ability to find beauty both in symmetry and subtle variations and imperfections, as a testament to the right hemisphere’s sensitivity for balance and harmony.

ii. shadow

Whyte calls shadow a “presence of absence,” representing the unseen parts of ourselves that shape how we appear in the world. Shadow is inescapable, a reminder of our ultimate vulnerability and interconnection with others. It’s not good or, as we typically like to think, bad, but rather essential and human.

Within the framework of McGilchrist’s right hemispheric engagement with absence and relational depth, shadow can be seen not as a flaw but an integral part of understanding ourselves in relation to the world. In The Matter With Things, he refers to shadow as “what Jung called the dark side.” More specifically he writes, in this wonderful quote:

“Every adult human being must learn to accept the contradictions in himself or herself which we all inevitably embody; and learn even to embrace them. This acceptance and embrace is not just good for us in the sense that, while it does not change anything, it brings us to a position of reconciliation with ourselves: it does really effect a change. It helps us to draw the venom of what Jung called the dark side.”3

The left hemisphere might attempt to suppress or explain the shadow away, while the right is in the business of accepting: our contradictions, dark next to light, and lastly our striving for a union of union and divisions—we need both.

iii. courage

Similar to beauty, Whyte also roots courage in a heartfelt participation with life, an active engagement with relational depth and our vulnerabilities. He rejects the notion that courage is about dramatic action; instead, it’s about living with integrity and presence in the face of uncertainty. Courage, for Whyte, is deeply embodied and tied to the “necessity of relationships.” It requires anchoring ourselves in the present: within the body, within our communities, and allowing connection and care to guide us.

This perspective mirrors McGilchrist’s emphasis on the right hemisphere’s capacity to embrace paradox and the unknown. It reflects an openness to life’s uncertainties, encouraging us to intuitively engage with the present and the relational aspects of experience. For him, courage involves stepping away from the left hemisphere’s impulse for control and abstraction in favor of an embodied approach to life’s inherent ambiguities (examples: staying with even difficult conversations, engaging in art, music, or writing, or practicing to hold oppositional views/positions in our minds).

Together, both authors reveal that courage should not be considered a singular heroic act but a continual practice of presence and engagement that orients us to the interdependence of our inner and outer world.

iv. memory

Wythe brilliantly describes memory as a “living threshold”—a crossroads where chance, choice, and imagination converge. It is deeply relational, shaped not only by what we remember but also by how we reinterpret those memories in the context of our lives and our believed identity and attitudes. Memory in that understanding ties the present to both past and future: if we participate fully in the present, we connect to the unfolding possibilities of the future—and this, I find, is such a transformative insight: Memory is both a psychological act (we can make peace with past negative beliefs and trauma) and a creative act. We can orchestrate our remembering, through the feelings in our heart. We are not locked in the past; memory has the potential to transform us and vice versa (I wrote about ‘The Art of Memory” in an earlier essay here).

McGilchrist complements this view by emphasizing the right hemisphere’s role in memory as an integrative and associative process. It excels at making connections, resisting reductionism, and holding autobiographical memory in a way that fosters a deeper relational understanding. He sees memory as alive and active, rooted in the emotional and narrative dimensions of life rather than mere recall of (auto)biographical facts.4

v. rest

This essay’s last vignette is short but meaningful, and it is about rest.

In Consolations, Whyte reframes rest as an essential act of reconnecting with life’s rhythms. It’s not just the absence of activity but a deep, embodied experience of letting go and returning to ourselves. In this understanding, rest is not passive but an active reengagement with life and our surroundings. We are to feel what rest means, and make it part of our lived experience.

And the right hemisphere also shines here, once again. It allows for being—a mode of attention that values presence and receptivity over the left hemisphere’s constant doing. McGilchrist emphasizes this in multiple passages of his book, advocating for a patient, open way of understanding the world: through a patient, more lightly held—relaxed and rested— awareness of whatever exists apart from ourselves. That aligns seamlessly with Whyte’s call to make rest a lived experience, rooted in attention and care.

In the end, perhaps the most profound wisdom from reading these books and applying this (limited) scope here lies not in striving to constantly conquer life’s complexities and contractions but in learning to sit with them. The wisdom emerges in the spaces—those liminal moments between certainty and uncertainty, where courage meets vulnerability, where beauty reveals its depth and invites us to pause, and where memory and ambiguity shapes and reshapes our self-discovery. These are the spaces where we are most fully alive and life gains meaning. And how rest, in its subtle ways, teaches us to simply: be.

This leads us to consider how also our language, as McGilchrist argues, is deeply tied to lived experience, historical context, and—once again—to these in-between spaces where language moves beyond mere literal meaning to something more expansive. Here, Whyte’s poetic expression becomes essential: it invites us to experience what lays beyond the literal, into something felt, something intuitive, something that analysis along cannot grasp. In this way, poetry becomes not just a form of expression but a way of seeing the world, opening us to truths that cannot be pinned down by reason alone.

And in this sense, what we may want to take away from these beautiful books is the reminder that a more poetic, metaphorical lens serves as one of the bridges to something larger and more enduring. It teaches us that to live fully is not to solve life, but to dwell in its mysteries also. To see, feel, and participate in its endless unfolding.

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live,” Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. So how ought one best figure out how to live? It’s an existential question I found myself returning to time and again.

Carl Jung, in a letter offering guidance on how to navigate life, once wrote: “One lives as one can. [...] If you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other … [and] quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”

There is so much clear-sighted wisdom in Jung’s words, but how do we determine the next and most necessary thing, and then the one after that? Life often feels like a push and pull, between intentional choice and the randomness of chance, between the illusion of control and the pull of one’s cravings and impulses.

I often enough tried to map out my future in my imagination, to be a few steps ahead before taking my next step.

Life rarely conform with our fuzzy imaginings though. But we at least excel at this skill: making sense of our lives backwards. Now that I’m older and reflect on the life path I’ve taken so far, I sometimes marvel at how certain parts appear almost choreographed. Schopenhauer’s wondrous question about life appears timeless: “Who wrote this novel?”—his startling answer: “You did.” Our life’s messy twists and turns of experience (or what remains of it in our memory) seem to have arranged themselves into hard-won coherence and patters of meaning we now live by. A narrative, a more or less fuzzy outline of a life story.

So is something deeper here at play that we can harness? Could life be following some intelligent rhythm, with different names for it like serendipity or synchronicity, that tries to guide us toward where we’re meant to go? Or is what we may perceive as synchronicity our mere attempt to invent and add hindsight meaning to our lives and just a comforting illusion, perhaps?

Friedrich Nietzsche was dismissive of synchronicity and regarded it as a trap of spiritual unfreedom. A few decades later, Jung offered a counterpoint. Synchronicities, he argued, are “an ever present reality for those with eyes to see.” Jung believed that much of how we experience and create our lives may emerge in the dialogue between ourselves and the world, a co-creation shaped by our attention, perception, and openness. Can we therefore sharpen an intuitive responsiveness to subtle and half-hidden signposts we come across in life that seem to guide us along the way?

To be clear, what I am hinting at here is not some blind following of dogma or woohoo beliefs. Interestingly, the same Nietzsche who was dismissive of outright synchronicity still urged us to listen to the cues of our conscience, as if imploring us to awaken our sleeping heroes within. He shouted at us and our hesitations: “Be Yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.” Then he asked, “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” What simple (not easy) and profound advice: perfection in life can never be the goal. Instead, Nietzsche urged us to follow with courage what resonates, and become our own heroes on the journeys toward our truth.

This journey, whether we ultimately believe in whether it’ shaped by synchronicities or not, is of course no easy promenade. Being alive is messy, uncertain, and full of unexpected events and emotional upheaval. We all have eaten chalk. But we have also, despite the mess of it, created something so uniquely ours.

My own life was in part shaped by a few bold, impulsive decisions. Like for instance my leap from Europe to America years ago, or my transitioning from a busy career to a new (and quite pathless) path. Still, what stands out most though, at least in hindsight, are my many less stark choices along the way. The largest landmass of my life was traversed one step at a time, arranging themselves like uneven but fitting pearls strung along a delicate chain. One courageous foot in front of the next, often vulnerably and sometimes awkwardly.

Over time, especially in the last five, six years, I’ve grown more and more accepting and welcoming to what is coming my way. What has helped me is a practice of leaning more into life’s trusting this: my own delicate resonance with what feels meaningful to me in the present moment.

Attractors and the Belief in Meaning

Love is the felt-sense of a meaningful life as the result of integration and consciousness with the flow.—Tom Morgan

This felt sense of resonance has become a sort of compass for me. Could Jung be right that such resonance may even be a beckoning from my future self1 , gently drawing me into alignment with what matters? Either way, I decided to pragmatically adopt a stronger belief in this. Because what is there to lose if I bank on my very own intuition of doing the next thing that feels authentic and right, and as a welcome counterweight to my natural bias toward hesitancy.

Tom Morgan, founder and inspired guide of the Leading Edge community, first introduced me to the idea of attractors. He describes them as “a force that helps intelligently and benignly guide us into our unique niche in life. [,..] Where what only we can do is what the world needs.”

What an extraordinary insight: doing the next right thing as the following of our inner north star of resonance and radiance that–subjectively–seems to surrounds the things or people we love or find beautiful. What elevates and inspires us, what holds our attention and makes us feel alive, often appeals to us with alluring intensity. These attractors, somehow embedded in certain places, ideas, or people, shimmer with hues of interestingness. I believe the “attractor intelligence” resides in our hearts, intuiting us towards resonant patterns that link to our purpose, work, or niche in life. A force of intelligence that we can pick up on best when we are present to actually perceive it.

Which brings us to the power of attention itself.

Attention and a Wider View

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
—”Love at First Sight”; closing verse of the poem by Wisława Szymborska

Consciousness applies its force through its crucial lens: attention. Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s work deepens our understanding of how attention shapes our reality and connects us to what we love. Our ways of seeing can be infused with more relevance and meaning if we approach the world with a broader and more compassionate, heart-led awareness. He writes:

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”2

The quality of our attention is guided by what we love, and what we love becomes the world we recognize. As McGilchrist explains, this act of recognition actively shapes how we experience our reality, how it is “firmed up—and brought into being.”

The brave act of generating meaning

Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?—Elizabeth Gilbert

Uncovering and expressing our authentic selves requires the courage to follow the slender threads of resonance as they show in our lives. It can’t be a coincidence that the etymological origin of courage is the old Norman French word coeur (heart): courage leads back to the heart.

I’ve long valued the practice of dedicated reading and, more recently, of writing for cues of meaning. When I truly engage with a book—and they often find their way to me serendipitously—it can feel as though the words hold up a mirror. By stepping into someone else’s perspective, I may also gain new insights about me and the world. Reading and writing help me to reframe situations where I still may feel stuck or unsure, or where I find inspiration from new ideas that feel meaningful to me.

There’s something almost magical about how, once I hold a certain idea or question in mind, I can create a mental and magnetic bucket for it, and what the writer James Somers described as “an attractor and generator of thought. [...] I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better. Everything will mean more to me.” This is one of the many ways how I pick up the insight that I may need for my next right step.

E.L. Doctorov once said: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the right trip that way.” The path of our life before us will forever remain foggy and uncertain. But what we can do is engage directly, and with our heart, with what presents right in this moment, and then the next. We can participate courageously in our lives.

We do the next right thing.