The “I” of the Beholder: What Is the Self? by Maria Popova “The fate of the world depends on the Selves of human beings.” “I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations,” Anaïs Nin wrote to Harper’s Bazaar editor Leo Lerman in history’s most gracious turn-down of a major magazine profile, “I am a series of moods and sensations. In her seminal book The “I” of the Beholder: A Guided Journey to the Essence of a Child (public library), education pioneer and Roeper School co-founder Annemarie Roeper considers the origin and nature of identity and of the self as it relates to developmental psychology and our formative years. Roeper, who fled to America from Nazi Germany, was born in Vienna in 1918 and came of age in the aftermath of “the age of insight,” which had sparked a historic cross-pollination of science, the arts, and the humanities. Roeper writes in the introduction: [We have] a sense of the mystery of life, the mystery of the universe that surrounds us, and the mystery that is within us.
The Science of Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Maria Popova “The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.” “Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind,” Einstein wrote, “life would have seemed to me empty.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the iconic physicist, celebrated as “the quintessential modern genius,” intuited something fundamental about the inner workings of the human mind and soul long before science itself had attempted to concretize it with empirical evidence. The research my wife and I have done over the past decade shows that this response, far from being an accident, is actually profoundly important to our survival. The neural basis for our personal beliefs overlaps significantly with one of the regions of the brain primarily responsible for allowing other people’s beliefs to influence our own. Our sociality is woven into a series of bets that evolution has laid down again and again throughout mammalian history. Donating = Loving
Meanwhile: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Living Fabric of a City and Our Shared Human Longing to Be Understood by Maria Popova A tender reminder that however vast our differences, we are bonded by the yearning to feel seen for who we are. I’ve written before that every city needs a love letter. Though Meanwhile, in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words (public library) by illustrator extraordinaire and frequent Brain Pickings contributor Wendy MacNaughton — who gave us the wonderful Lost Cat, one of the best books of 2013 — may be “about” a city, in the sense that the raw inspiration was drawn from the streets of San Francisco, it is really about the city, any city — about community, about subcultures and belonging, about the complexities of gentrification, about what it means to have individual dignity and shared identity. We meet the Mission Hipsters, who might as well be the Williamsburg Hipsters*, or the Insert-Any-City’s-Neighborhood-That-Has-Become-Synonymous-With-Hipsters Hipsters, an affectionate portrait of the cultural trope, down to “hand-knit dog sweater #62″: Donating = Loving
Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and the Shared Dignity of Giving and Receiving by Maria Popova “When we really see each other, we want to help each other.” “It would be a terrible calamity,” Henry Miller wrote in his meditation on the beautiful osmosis between giving and receiving, “for the world if we eliminated the beggar. Last week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the wonderful Amanda Palmer who, besides being an extraordinarily talented musician, is also a fellow champion of open culture and believer in making good work freely available, trusting that those who find value in it will support it accordingly. Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. Given how close to home Amanda’s eloquent words strike, I chatted with her about what seems to be the greatest challenge to this cultural shift toward destigmatizing asking: MP: As someone who’s been called an “internet pan-handler” for asking my community for support, I’m astounded by some people’s cynicism in failing to see the dignified mutuality in these exchanges. Share on Tumblr
Einstein on Kindness, Our Shared Existence, and Life’s Highest Ideals by Maria Popova “Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind… life would have seemed to me empty.” In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions — the definitive collection of the great thinker’s essays on everything from science and religion to government to human nature, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. It’s been a challenging week, one that’s reminded me with merciless acuity the value of kindness and compassion, so I’ve once again turned to Einstein’s timeless “ideas and opinions” on this spectrum of subjects. On the ties of sympathy: How strange is the lot of us mortals! On public opinion, or what Paul Graham might call prestige: One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. On our interconnectedness, interdependency, and shared existence: On good and evil, creative bravery, and human value: On life’s highest ideals:
3 Bad Habits That Can Derail Any Relationship As a marriage therapist, one of the questions I get asked most by family and friends is What should I do so we don’t end up in couples therapy? As a wife, I get it: you want to know what goes wrong in other relationships so you can avoid it in yours. Unfortunately, there’s no magic checklist that will guarantee marital bliss. 1. Culturally we've embraced this idea that happy couples don’t fight. No two human beings alive will agree on everything and always meet each other’s needs and expectations; and that’s part of the excitement of being together. Too often couples think that conflict is a sign that the relationship is falling apart. 2. If you disagree on a major issue, it's so much easier to turn to a friend or family member who shares your position rather than facing the conflict with your partner. In order to establish a deep and meaningful connection, you must learn how to weather storms as a team, relying on one another first. 3. So, there you have it! Photo Credit: Stocksy.com
Buddhadharma In Everyday Life. ~ via Linda Lewis Lojong 12, “Drive All Blames into One” Perhaps the most challenging and provocative of Atisha’s slogans is Drive All Blames into One. Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing? Sometimes it is difficult enough to take the blame for something we actually did, like reaching for honey in the grocery store and accidentally knocking a glass jar of peanut butter off the shelf and onto the floor. When we see our own or others’ defense mechanism shun blame, we also see self-cherishing and ego-fixation. Obviously, it’s good to be responsible for our own mishaps. As a Bodhisattva in progress, why in the world would we want to lay emotional or aggressive blame on anyone else? Interestingly, this simplifies the situation. I remember many years ago, one of my best bosses called me into his office. “Linda, you’ve been doing a good job, working independently, and I am to blame for not giving you enough guidance.” “Absorb the poison—then the rest of the situation becomes medicine.”
A Simple Tool That Will Improve Every One Of Your Relationships Whether you're a friend, a partner, an employee, a boss, a world leader, or a parent, you will inevitably encounter communication challenges at some point in your relationships. And there is one simple tool that will produce radical changes when you implement and practice it. It's psych 101. It's the first modality I learned as a graduate student in counseling psychology almost 20 years ago. It's basic information that we all instinctually know yet easily forget because we're not encouraged to practice it. The tool is called active listening. I'll give you an example from my life as a parent: My kids are screaming at each other. "He won't stop scratching the back of my chair! "I DON'T WANT TO STOP!" We're on vacation, trying to enjoy a peaceful morning in the snowy mountains, but as anyone with more than one child knows, the best-laid plans come to a screeching halt when siblings begin their rivalry. My husband and I look at each quickly and then act. "I'M NOT ANGRY! "Oh, you're sad.