thinking thursday.
MIND
It’s time for all the year-end round-up lists. Here’s one to ponder: The 5 most underrated books of 2013.
I can point to a handful of thinkers and writers who have shaped my intellectual landscape: Authors William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Virginia Woolf, and Audre Lorde are among them. So are strategists and thinkers Charles Hampden-Turner and James Carse. To that list, this year I added author and philosopher, Andrew Solomon. His beautifully crafted and delivered TED talk on love and identity was all the catalyst I needed to hear him speak in Asheville, NC, this year during Autism Pride Week. As charming and attentive as he is smart, I started reading everything he has written after meeting and talking with him, one of which is The Noonday Demon, about depression. I urge you to take the time to watch his TEDx speech about depression. If it is not something with which you struggle, someone near you does.
BODY
Roger Ebert would also be on that list. His later writings were and still are often exquisite, like this piece, “I do not fear death” in which he writes: “I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes,” he wrote. In this essay, Ebert puts in front of us his belief in kindness, plain and simple.
This looks so good for this time of year, doesn’t it? And this!
The moment our oven gets fixed, I’m making this life-changing bread.
When we moved, we left our huge fig tree behind. Obviously we need to plant another one.
SPIRIT
What he said before he died: “He said, ‘You’re green. Don’t you think she’s green, Dad?'”
A big part of my daily practice is and is increasingly the act of letting go. Here are 21 things to let go of. Three samples:
#5 Anger and resentment. Accept the unsent apology — today. Could it also be time to send some?
#6 Regret. Do now. You’re still here. Do now. Take action with integrity and responsibility. Do now.
#7 Superficial shape chasing. Accept the body you’re in right now. Not yesterday, not 10 years ago, the body you have in this very moment. It is the greatest, most important instrument you have to experience this life. Love it and use it in every you-supporting way possible.
WORD
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
-Neil Gaiman
(Image: Tess made me a fox for Christmas. I love it.)
