Lucy,
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote Read Write Think and Stay Whole Lucy. Today, I circle back to Maria Popova on Woman Power Wednesday. Maria started Brainpickings 14 years ago.
In her words:
Brain Pickings was born on October 23, 2006, as a short email to seven friends. Seven years and several incomprehensible million readers into its existence, I began what has since become an annual tradition — a distillation of the most important things I have learned about living while reading and writing my way through life; private learnings offered in the public commons, in the hope that these thoroughly subjective insights of a single consciousness might be of succor or salve to another. It is the only overtly personal writing I do on Brain Pickings. (Though, of course, the whole of it remains a deeply personal exercise in processing my own life and annealing my own ideas through the lives and ideas I celebrate in writing.) We are, after all, made of the same stuff.
Like how Ryan Holiday deep-dives into the stoics, Maria has built her passion-work studying literature, art, and poetry that is not currently on the New York Times bestseller list. She finds classic-thinkers (or artists) and then connects dots between their thought and other's, or her own. I find this interesting and refreshing, much like I find Holiday's books so thoughtful and timeless. It seems especially invigorating as we live through a time when many people are so unsettled and upset.
Go here to read this year's Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings. Scroll down to 14. Choose Joy.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Lucy, you get to weigh the blue of your sky!
Dad
P.S. And note a link where you can see Maria's 13 prior years of essential life-learnings. And if you go deeper, you can also see thirteen of the pieces Maria has most enjoyed writing the past thirteen years. I'm hooked. Her writing style and her ability to use words in unique ways stirs and inspires me.
