2026-03-13 18:34:10
“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so — given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment “you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.
But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That is what philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) explores in a marvelous 1994 paper in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, marvelously titled User-Friendly Self-Deception.
Recognizing that “many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful,” Rorty writes:
We should not wish to do without the active, self-induced illusions that sustain us. Nor can we do without second order denials that they are illusions, the second order and regressive strategies that we self-deceptively believe rationalize our various self-deceptive activities. The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?
Self-deception, she notes, has various “cousins and clones” — among them “compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false consciousness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection” — some of which are socially rewarded for their adaptive value in helping us attain our goals:
When we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution.
But as much as self-deception might animate our own inner lives, with our reflexive tendency to mistake self-righteousness for morality, we too readily indict with self-delusion anyone whose model of reality differs from ours:
The person who does not have our favoured reactions is open game for the charge of self-deception, if not of a more serious form of psychological abnormality.
One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of the self in time: We must each answer the question of what makes us and our childhood selves the “same” person despite a lifetime physical and psychological change, and we can only do so with a certain measure of self-deception, because, of course, in some essential sense we are not the same person — our personhood is pocked by inconstancy and inner contradiction, unstable across time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion” — the fundamental illusion upon which the structure of human life is built.
Rorty considers the psychological roots and mechanisms of self-deception:
Like deception, self-deception is a species of rhetorical persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and co-operative process. Successful deceivers are acute rhetoricians, astute seducers who know how to co-opt the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with a manner of approach, certain gestures and intonation patterns, intimations of directed and redirected attention.
With an eye to the social dimension of all deception, she adds:
Deception and self-deception are not merely detached conclusions of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective aetiology.
[…]
The canny self-deceiver puts herself in situations where her deflected attention will be strongly supported by her fellows.
[…]
It is extremely difficult to sustain self-deception without a little help from our friends, often rendered by observant but tactful silence.
This very fact points at the best antidote to harmful self-deception:
Since we are highly susceptible to socially induced self-deception, the wisest practical course is to be very careful about the company we keep… Unfortunately self- deception is just the thing that prevents us from seeking its best therapy: it does not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other kinds of reasons for being astute about the company we keep. With luck, a canny self-deceiver’s other psychological and intellectual habits — a taste for astringency and a distrust of hypocrisy, for instance — can prevent the wild imperialistic tendencies of self-deception from becoming entrenched and ramified.
Much self-deception, Rorty observes, is not a matter of outright lying to oneself, but of selective attention and fragmentation of truth:
Self-deception need not involve false belief: just as the deceiver can attempt to produce a belief which is — as it happens — true, so too a self-deceiver can set herself to believe what is in fact true. A canny self-deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying a truth that is importantly relevant to her immediate projects.
This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all deception, possible because “any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions”:
Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers — something red, something anomalous, something desirable — in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. The strategy of perceptual self-deception is identical: the trick is to place oneself where patterns of salience are likely to deflect attention away from what we do not wish to see.
But for all of its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continually questioning when it becomes self-defeating, self-deception can be greatly beneficent in our endeavors of self-transformation and growth, offering assurance that bolsters our will and an antidote to the “generalized uncertainty about the worth of our projects.” Rorty writes:
By convincing themselves that a desired self-transformation is within relatively easy reach, canny self-improvers can use self-deception as an energizing instrument.
Self-deception is also necessary in propping up the precarious pillar of modern life in this century of selfing — identity:
We invent something we call our identity, resting our self-respect on our engaging in its projects, independently of any other measure of their merits.
But perhaps the most essential function of healthy self-deception is in allaying our ambivalence about projects and life-choices that bring us tremendous rewards, but also have tremendous personal costs, an accurate assessment of which might undermine our willingness to undertake them:
Without some species of self-deception, our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse. In deciding to have children, we ignore the travails of parents, obliterating our otherwise keen awareness of the typical relations among parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we conveniently forget how little philosophy we are willing to read; in the interest of sanity and joy, we sidestep our deep ambivalences about our kith and kin.
[…]
Disguising and submerging the ambivalence that is natural to most of our enterprises not only brings us the energy, verve, style and ease that successful action requires; it also helps to assure the social co-operation that is equally essential to our individual and collective projects. A good deal of the polite conversation of social life, — the public description of the joys of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) — channels and streams us to play our parts without the mess, confusion and upheaval that would occur if we openly expressed our natural and sensible ambivalence about these roles. It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.
Complement with Walter Lippmann’s superb century-old anatomy of deception and self-delusion, then revisit Rorty on what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-13 08:45:43
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment.
The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut’s eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.
While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:
I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I’ve done, and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love.
This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life’s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:
It’s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths.
A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and it is with a poet’s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their “huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.”
Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century.
Many died to know the unknown.
Many sank into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime.
Over and over, they were saved by wonder.
In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun’s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth’s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.
Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth’s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter.
Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these “huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.” He writes in his memoir:
The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like “supernatural,” “divine,” “miraculous.” I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding.
It is not unimportant that the word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things — the only perspective, available in every act of unselfing with wonder right here on Earth, that hallows a broken world whole.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-13 08:14:34
“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she reflected on the relationship between nature and human nature. But what we call place — that unalloyed presence with a here and now, with the unfolding of time in a locus of space — penetrates more than the mind: it permeates body and spirit and the entire constellation of being. There is a reason why the original Latin use of the word genius was in the phrase genius loci — the spirit of a place. We become who we are in the crucible of where we are.
Our minds, however, are born wanderers — perpetual refugees from presence, perpetually paying for their flight with loneliness. We go on forgetting that we are not only embodied creatures, but embodied in the body of the world; we go on forgetting that the here and now — that locus of intimacy with everything and everyone else inhabiting this island of spacetime, intimacy with the pulsating totality of our own being — is our only refuge from the existential loneliness that is the price of being alive.
That is what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in “Invitation” — one of the twenty-six exquisite essays in his posthumous collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (public library).
Drawing on his longtime immersion in indigenous cultures and his lifelong travel with native companions, Lopez counters the hollow stereotype that indigenous people’s connection to place is a sort of “primitive” sensitivity to be contrasted with “advanced” civilization:
Such a dismissive view, as I have come to understand it, ignores the great intangible value that achieving physical intimacy with a place might provide. I’m inclined to point out to someone who condescends to such a desire for intimacy, although it might seem rude, that it is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.
Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.
This longing to belong with the world is the fulcrum of our yearning for meaning. Whitman knew it when, after his paralytic stroke, he arrived at what makes life worth living; Mary Shelley knew it when, in the wake of her staggering bereavement, she reckoned with what gives meaning to a broken life; Lopez knows it, locating the cure for our existential loneliness in our intimate relationship to place:
The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.
This question of how our relationship to place deepens our relationship to life permeates the entire book. In another essay from it, titled “An Intimate Geography,” he writes:
Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.
Lopez is the ultimate modern anti-Cartesian, reminding us again and again of our creaturely nature, interconnected and indivisible — the life of the mind indivisible from the life of the body, our portable totalities interleaved with the whole of the world. He offers a succinct prescription for remedying the elemental longing pulsating beneath our restlessness and our loneliness:
Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.
Complement these fragments from the wholly magnificent Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World with C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing and this lovely illustrated antidote to our elemental loneliness, then revisit Lopez on the key to great storytelling and the three steps to becoming a writer.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-12 08:10:57
This essay originally appeared in The New York Times
I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust and tenderness.
Freud, who catalyzed the study of dreams with his foundational 1899 treatise, would have discounted this as a mere chimera of the wishful unconscious. But what we have since discovered about the mind — particularly about the dream-rich sleep state of rapid-eye movement, or REM, unknown in Freud’s day — suggests another possibility for the adaptive function of these parallel lives in the night.
One cold morning not long after the kiss dream, I watched a young night heron sleep on a naked branch over the pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park, head folded into chest, and found myself wondering whether birds dream.
The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior.
In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. This view was reinforced in the 20th century by the deviation, led by B.F. Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response.
In 1861, just two years after Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, a fossil was discovered in Germany with the tail and jaws of a reptile and the wings and wishbone of a bird, sparking the revelation that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. We have since learned that, although birds and humans haven’t shared a common ancestor in more than 300 million years, a bird’s brain is much more similar to ours than to a reptile’s. The neuron density of its forebrain — the region engaged with planning, sensory processing, and emotional responses, and on which REM sleep is largely dependent — is comparable to that of primates. At the cellular level, a songbird’s brain has a structure, the dorsal ventricular ridge, similar to the mammalian neocortex in function if not shape. (In pigeons and barn owls, the DVR is structured like the human neocortex, with both horizontal and vertical neural circuitry.)
Still, avian brains are also profoundly other, capable of feats unimaginable to us, especially during sleep: Many birds sleep with one eye open, even during flight. Migrating species that traverse immense distances at night, like the bar-tailed godwit, which covers the 7,000 miles between Alaska and New Zealand in eight days of continuous flight, engage in unihemispheric sleep, blurring the line between our standard categories of sleep and wakefulness.
But while sleep is an outwardly observable physical behavior, dreaming is an invisible interior experience as mysterious as love — a mystery to which science has brought brain imaging technology to illuminate the inner landscape of the sleeping bird’s mind.
The first electroencephalogram of electrical activity in the human brain was recorded in 1924, but EEG was not applied to the study of avian sleep until the 21st century, aided by the even more nascent functional magnetic resonance imaging, developed in the 1990s. The two technologies complement each other. In recording the electrical activity of large populations of neurons near the cortical surface, EEG tracks what neurons do more directly. But fMRI. can pinpoint the location of brain activity more precisely through oxygen levels in the blood. Scientists have used these technologies together to study the firing patterns of cells during REM sleep in an effort to deduce the content of dreams.
A study of zebra finches — songbirds whose repertoire is learned, not hard-wired — mapped particular notes of melodies sung in the daytime to neurons firing in the forebrain. Then, during REM, the neurons fired in a similar order: The birds appeared to be rehearsing the songs in their dreams.
An fMRI study of pigeons found that brain regions tasked with visual processing and spatial navigation were active during REM, as were regions responsible for wing action, even though the birds were stilled with sleep: They appeared to be dreaming of flying. The amygdala — a cluster of nuclei responsible for emotional regulation — was also active during REM, hinting at dreams laced with feeling. My night heron was probably dreaming, too — the folded neck is a classic marker of atonia, the loss of muscle tone characteristic of the REM state.
But the most haunting intimation of the research on avian sleep is that without the dreams of birds, we too might be dreamless. No heron, no kiss.
There are two primary groups of living birds: the flightless Palaeognathae, including the ostrich and the kiwi, which have retained certain ancestral reptilian traits, and Neognathae, comprising all other birds. EEG studies of sleeping ostriches have found REM-like activity in the brainstem — a more ancient part of the brain — while in modern birds, as in mammals, this REM-like activity takes place primarily in the more recently developed forebrain.
Several studies of sleeping monotremes — egg-laying mammals like the platypus and the echidna, the evolutionary link between us and birds — also reveal REM-like activity in the brainstem, suggesting that this was the ancestral crucible of REM before it slowly migrated toward the forebrain.
If so, the bird brain might be where evolution designed dreams — that secret chamber adjacent to our waking consciousness where we continue to work on the problems that occupy our days. Dmitri Mendeleev, after puzzling long and hard over the arrangement of atomic weights in his waking state, arrived at his periodic table in a dream. “All the elements fell into place as required,” he recounted in his diary. “Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” Cosmologist Stephon Alexander dreamed his way to a groundbreaking insight about the role of symmetry in cosmic inflation that earned him a national award from the American Physics Society. For Einstein, the central revelation of relativity took shape in a dream of cows simultaneously jumping up and moving in wavelike motion.
As with the mind, so with the body. Studies have shown that people learning new motor tasks “practice” them in sleep, then perform better while awake. This line of research has also shown how mental visualization helps athletes improve performance. Renata Adler touches on this in her novel Speedboat: “That was a dream,” she writes, “but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love — you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night.”
It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that the kiss in my dream was not nocturnal fantasy but, like the heron’s dreams of flying, the practice of possibility. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-12 00:00:33
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it,” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem thought experiment, illustrating the paradoxical psychology of why have such a hard time changing, breaking the patterned ways of being by which we hedge against the fear of not knowing who we are, what we want, and how to be safe.
Our paradox is that we are the pattern-seeking animal — a kind of superpower conferred upon us by our complex consciousness, which came with a high price. Like the hero of the Greek myths eternally bedeviled by his tragic flaw, we pay for our power with our vulnerability. The patterns we discover — fractals, the harmonic scale, the laws of planetary motion — give us a firmer foothold on reality, set us free to know the world as it really is, in all its fearsome unknowns. But the patterns we invent — in our habits, in our relationships, in our myths and power structures and organizing principles of civilization — cage us, stiffen us with certainty until we grow too ossified to change.
In a world doing its best to make us mistake being sure for being safe, living with the courage of uncertainty — the courage to break the pattern of the familiar in order to release the possible — is a radical act, an act not only of resistance but of redemption. The building blocks and practice of that courage, as an antipode to the reflex of fear, are what therapist, teacher, and organizer Prentis Hemphill reflects on in the inaugural episode of trauma therapist Mariah Rooney’s wonderful MOVD podcast:
The fear is absolutely there, and the fear is often the driver toward isolation, toward my old patterning, toward the thing I think will keep me comfortable and alleviate the fear. But what changes our patterns, ultimately, is the courage to feel that fear and do something different anyway. You step into the unknown and you don’t know what is going to happen — that is the act of courage.
This reorientation is not merely a cerebral decision but an embodied action — something that renders the courage to change, or simply the courage to get real, all the more difficult and all the more urgent in a neo-Cartesian culture that keep driving us further and further away from the lush life of the body as disembodied artificial intelligences make more and more decisions for us and the real world — the world of fireflies and owls and lichen, trembling with aliveness — takes up less and less space in our mental model of reality. Hemphill celebrates this necessary reclamation of the body as the instrument of transformation:
Everything that we do towards recovering aspects of ourselves that we have disowned or parts of our body that we have vacated, every act that we take where we work through and with the fear rather than succumb to the isolation that fear recommends — those are the moments where we start to change our patterning.
In What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (public library), Hemphill considers the psychophysiology that makes fear such a powerful default:
When what we face overwhelms our ability to respond and/or to escape unscathed, or when we are given the message to suppress the body’s reactions, our nervous systems don’t know that the traumatic experience has ended, and our survival response continues to exist in our bodies. We live then in a near-constant state of reaction, either scanning for an indication that the threat has returned or reproducing aspects of the experience in our relationships and lives in what many understand to be an attempt to complete the threat we feel. It is alive in our tissues, our muscles, our thoughts, and our moods. It lives on in our behavioral patterns, our habits, what we do and don’t do, what we say and what we are afraid to say… You can have a region of your body living out of time, out of step, with the rest of you… A physiological memory from ten or twenty years earlier can be lodged in the structure of your fasciae, and therefore in your actions and relationships… Trauma stays… lingers long past its welcome in our bodies.
Against this backdrop, courage may just be the refusal to partition ourselves, to vacate our embodiment or cede it to our ideas about what life should look like, ideas programmed by our unexamined and uncontested defaults. Insisting that “every inch of progress, every ounce of love, every truly meaningful action from here on out will happen through courage, not comfort,” Hemphill writes:
Courage changes things and courage changes us. It’s how we become. I have found that there is a “right-sized” fear inside any vision for change, and in taking courageous action we develop a part of ourselves that can talk back to and hold the fear without letting it lead… The courage we need is the courage to fail and stay… The courage to exit the safety of our dying delusions… The courage to surrender… The courage to love and be loved.
Complement with George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty and how to unbreak our hearts by breaking our patterns, then revisit Charlie Mackesy’s wondrous watercolor meditation on how to bear your fear and what it means to love.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-11 20:44:28
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his beautiful letter to a bereaved father.
We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.
And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.
That is what Judith Viorst explores in her 1987 consolation of a book Necessary Losses (public library) — an inquiry into the profound and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing renunciation as a fulcrum of growth. She paints the vast landscape of loss upon which life plays out:
When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety — and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.
[…]
These necessary losses… we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact… that we are essentially out here on our own; that we will have to accept — in other people and ourselves — the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;… that there are flaws in every human connection; that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent; and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection — protection from danger and pain, from the in-roads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.
These losses are a part of life — universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.
As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives. Viorst writes:
The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings.
We enter the realm of loss the moment the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls the “blurred-boundary bliss of mother-child oneness” — the primal loss that sets off the ongoing task of becoming ourselves. From this origin point, she traces the lifelong vector of losses and gains:
Exchanging the illusion of absolute shelter and absolute safety for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible, adult self, discovering — within the limitations imposed by necessity — our freedoms and choices. And in giving up our impossible expectations, we become a lovingly connected self, renouncing ideal visions of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfections of all-too-human relationships. And in confronting the many losses that are brought by time and death, we become a mourning and adapting self, finding at every stage — until we draw our final breath — opportunities for creative transformations.
In a sentiment the poet Mark Doty would echo — “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” he wrote in his beautiful reckoning with love and loss — she adds:
We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.
Complement Necessary Losses, which goes on to explore the many regions of loss in human life and how they can become frontiers of growth, with Hannah Arendt on learning how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, Thoreau on living through a loss, and Alan Watts on learning not to think of gain and loss, then explore two uncommon lenses on loss: fractals and chlorophyll.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.