⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

Can't miss gems of the weird and wonderful

🪐 Space Timelapse: A stunning video of stars in space shot from the International Space Station. Watch it here.​

🤯 Naval's Insights: A collection of piercing wisdom bombs from a recent Naval Ravikant talk. Read it here.​

☯️ Mind-Altering Essay: The dance of the Tao and the ten thousand things. Read it here.​

💙 Empathy: An app designed to help people navigate the loss of a loved one. Learn more here.​

🎵 Chrome Music Lab: Make learning music accessible through fun, hands on experiments. Try them here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

This photo of two penguins from Tobias Baumgaertner won Oceanographic magazine’s Ocean Photography Awards 2020. An elderly female is on the right with a younger male on the left. The story behind the photo suggests both penguins lost their partners within the past 2 years and the younger male penguin now comforts the older penguin. The two would stand for hours watching the lights together, night after night.

⚾️ Life's Curveballs

We can build perfect plans with precise details and the exact steps we need to take.

But life can always introduce a variable when we didn't expect that tosses our perfect blueprints out the window.

These are life's curveballs.

They can come in the shape of a loss or a gain.

We can never know when these things will happen but they always do.

No one is immune from broken expectations and interrupted plans.

And yes, it's a noble act to author your own story instead of solely acting from what you've inherited.

But as we seize our agency and make empowered choices it would be wise to remember that we are not simply the authors of our lives.

We are co-authors with life.

Events can arise that change the entire direction of our narratives.

The curveballs are coming.

But don't let that stop you from aiming high and advancing in the direction of your dreams.

Sometimes these curveballs turn out to be exactly what was needed.

By pushing us in directions we could have never envisioned, we become more than we could have ever imagined.

☀️ The Good Life

Carl Rogers describes which words are well suited to describe The Good Life:

"I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming."

🤓 Learn This Word

Ambedo: From the dictionary of obscure sorrows "a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life..."

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article

​How Jonathan Haidt’s 6 Moral Tastebuds Can Heal a Divided World​

"It’s no secret that we live in a divided world.

For millennia, we humans have been splitting up into groups, distrusting groups we're not part of, and fighting amongst ourselves. Our groups used to be nothing more than the tribes into which we were born, but nowadays, our groups are based on many things: politics, religion, class, race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, etc.

This tendency to split up into groups—sometimes called “tribalism”—is often harmless, but it can also become catastrophic if it gets out of hand. The 2016 US election and its aftermath is a recent example of extreme tribalism resulting in nasty consequences. People have become hyper-polarized, combative, distrustful, and violent toward one another. Close friends, family members, and neighbors are at each other’s throats. “We the people” are now thoroughly caught up in a seemingly unending, toxic game of “Us vs. Them.”

And the situation in the US is not isolated. It’s mirrored throughout the world in different ways. Tribalism is alive and well, and in many places, it’s leading to disaster. Given this situation, I find myself asking:

Is there a way out?"

​[Keep Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin & The HighExistence Team

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