⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🐲 The Power of Myth: In this beloved 1988 PBS series, mythologist and storyteller Joseph Campbell joins Bill Moyers to explore what enduring myths can tell us about our lives. Campbell argues that these timeless archetypes continue to have a powerful influence on the choices we make and the ways we live.  Watch clips here. 

✅ Life of Discipline: Track your habits with beautiful calendar heat maps, customizable statistics, and a built-in habit journal.  Try it here. 

🪩 Hobby Disco: Discover new hobbies and get a list of everything you need to start.  See more here. 

🎇 Image of The Week

The collection of images above where disproportionately rated as representing ego death by people who were sure they hadn't had an ego death experience. The collection of images below were disproportionately rated as representing ego death by people who were sure they had. Read more about this  here. 

🍻 Dry January

I'm not someone who drinks a lot in the first place but I've increasingly felt more is lost than gained through my experiences with alcohol. Most often justified as a vehicle for socializing, I know I can have just as much fun without it. And a hangover-free morning is a glorious thing.

I'm not one for grand new year resolution plans but I do like to use natural demarcations in time as a reason for minor adjustments to my behavior.

I found this text-based  accountability tracker  that I'm using to maintain a sense of progress. If you're feeling called to take a breather and create some space around your use of alcohol, check it out.

👁 Wide-Eyed Wonder

Ponder these passages from Rachel Carson:

"A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years … the alienation from the sources of our strength."

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

🤓 Learn This Word

Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it...

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 John Keats on Creativity, Mastery and The Art of Practice 

When John Keats was 14, his mother was killed by Tuberculosis (though some say her broken heart from the unexpected loss of her beloved husband six years earlier invited the disease in).

Now orphaned, Keats, along with his sister and two brothers, went to live with his grandmother in her small London residence.

Keats dealt with his grief, not helped by his turbulent teenage anguish, by focusing on a pastime he’d grown fond of in his last few terms at school: poetry.

This fondness for wordplay turned into an obsession for Keats — so much so that in his leisure time, he’d return to the school library and devour as much poetry as he could swallow.

Keats wanted to write himself, but without the instruction of a mentor, he struggled with direction.

He began teaching himself the only way he knew how: reading all the works of the greatest poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He modelled their poetic form and style; imitated, then built on their stanzas to develop a voice uniquely his own.

At 21, Keats (now a licensed physician) made a controversial decision that shocked his peers: he ditched the physician life trajectory, instead, choosing to dedicate his life to writing poetry.

He knew inside, this was his life’s task, this would be his living, whether he was paid for it or not.

 [Continue Reading] 

100 Book Summaries To Accelerate Your Personal Growth

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🎬 Endnote

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