My most inspiring newsletter

 The Marginalian

I save the bi-weekly issues of this newsletter if I don't have time to read it that day. Often I'm out of the house and only glimpse at the emails...deleting about half as not enough interest. They aren't spam any more, I've finally rid myself of them. But they are news about things I don't care about that day.

No matter what else, I always go back to the Marginalian and read some of the quotes...skim some. Sometimes I devour what's written about/by favorite authors...sometimes not. 

I have high regard for Maria Popova, the editor. She has a wonderful ability to see patterns where most of us completely miss them...connections of ideas mainly, from all that she's read and studied. It's a gift I have seldom seen, and never experienced so often in my own literary readings.

It's for me, like taking my favorite 3 authors (who they might be at any given moment) and asking them all to have a conversation on any topic. Then Ms. Popova weaves that conversation easily from their written works and presents it to us all.

OK, enough said. Except last (or maybe before last) Sunday's post recognized the 17th year of publication by sharing 17 life-learnings. Very insightful. Here're a few:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

And something that's more seasonal and less Marginalian perhaps. 

1923 Life Magazine's version of a modern witch, by Frank Leyendecker

And another thing before I go...

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Have you ever been confronted by a huge overlay screen, complete with sound, saying your Facebook Account has some link that's been hacked, so we've shut down Facebook and the Internet, and do not close your computer, just call this Microsoft number...? I now have had it happen twice. Funny it didn't cause any disruption on my phone's Facebook. So I finally found a way to shut down the laptop. 

I have a pretty darn powerful security and virus protecting program, so I figured it was itself a BOT, and I wasn't going to call their damn number. I shut down anyway, and when I started back up in Chrome, it was still going. Shut down again. This time do not pull up the previous links, and so far I'm ok. Haven't opened FB again though. I had been peacefully copying old photos of my grandchildren into the computer from FB. No way that would have triggered anything unless the photos had something attached to them on my daughter-in-laws' account. Anyway, I can look at FB on the phone for a while just fine.

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Happy trick-or-treating this chilly evening. Our little ghosts or goblins (how very few do those costumes these days) will meet on Church St. in Black Mountain where youngest start at 5, then older kids arrive around dusk. Lots of fun things and candy candy candy...a blocked off street right in downtown. I'll try to go, if it's not too cold and there's parking, and will share on "Living in Black Mountain" tomorrow.