⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

☘️ How To Be Lucky: Most of us think that luck just happens (or doesn’t) but everyone can learn to look for the unexpected and find serendipity. Read it here.

^{As someone who spends probably too much time in front of screens, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for tools that nudge me away from them. Here are a few I’m looking forward to trying:}

🖨 Printernet: Your reading list, periodically shipped to you in a beautiful print issue. Learn more here.

📸 Camp Snap: These digital cameras are crafted with the aim of fostering social interaction. Without a screen, users won't be distracted by reviewing the photos they took and can instead focus on spending time with friends, playing games, and exploring the outdoors. Learn more.

🧱 Brick: A device that temporarily removes distracting apps (and their notifications) from your phone - leaving only the powerful tools you choose. Learn more here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This is “The Mask” by San Francisco painter Rozzi Roomiar. “Her work focuses on the colorful, psychedelic, and transcendent vision of reality she experiences. Her world is one where the Universe is alive and aware, the micro and the macro layer in each other like nesting dolls, and our bodies melt into the very environment that makes us.”

☀️ Blindspotting Your Brilliance

A tragic occurrence in the human experience is how people can be so oblivious to their gifts while hypersensitive to their faults.

Our flaws are highlighted because we can often see the greatness in others but their struggles are less obvious to us than our own.

That's because we get a front-row seat to our self-criticism and inner turmoil but these things in others can often be hidden behind closed doors creating the perception that we're the only one struggling.

This causes us to become preoccupied with our challenges and think "If I could only fix my flaws I could become worthy."

But we all have flaws and fixing them won't make us worthy. It's a dead-end strategy because although you might fix a flaw or two, you will not have resolved your tendency for flaw finding. There will always be more blemishes for our inner critic to wrestle with.

That's why it's important to elevate our perception of the gifts we possess. These can be hard to see because they are often so close to us. They tend to be something that comes so naturally that we don't even recognize their value.

Other times, our gifts become just another venue for further self-criticism. It's an area that we can see clearly so we know how much room for improvement there is. Rather than celebrating how far we've come in cultivating our skill, we judge ourselves for how far we can still travel.

So this is my plea: pull your brilliance from your blindspot. Do not cast your gifts into the background.

The world needs them.

Rather than incessantly trying to eliminate flaws, focus instead on elevating your gifts.

If you struggle knowing what they are, you can start discovering them by asking yourself...

What activities cause you to lose track of time? What brings you immense joy? What comes easy to you that seems challenging for others?

Our gifts bring value to the world because they help others in ways it's hard for them to help themselves. We're then helped in turn because this brings meaning to our lives.

When we give our gifts, we get the gift of giving.

This creates a virtuous cycle encouraging us to further express our gifts, honing our abilities, and adding depth to our experience.

📈 Progress & Human Flourishing

Ponder this commentary from author Ted Gioia:

“The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and economists. But in the current moment, they are the wrong people to decide which metrics drive quality of life and human flourishing.

Real wisdom on human flourishing is now more likely to come from the humanities, philosophy, and the spiritual realms than technocrats and politicians. By destroying these disciplines, we actually reduce our chances at genuine advancement.

Things like music, books, art, family, friends, the inner life, etc. will increasingly play a larger role in quality of life (and hence progress) than gadgets and devices.

Over the next decade, the epicenter for meaningful progress will be the private lives of individuals and small communities. It will be driven by their wisdom, their core values, and the courage of their convictions—none of which will be supplied via virtual reality headsets or apps on their smartphones.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Aesthete: Someone with deep sensitivity to the beauty of art or nature

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

D.H. Lawrence on the Overdeveloped Ego and Our Connection to the Cosmos

One of the major themes that runs through all of D.H. Lawrence’s work is that there is something ‘wrong’ with present-day human beings.

His attitude is as far removed from the optimistic humanism of his contemporary H.G. Wells as it is possible to be. Wells celebrated human invention and achievement, saw human history as one step forward after another, leading to the ‘advanced’ state of present day civilisation and further glories thereafter. But Lawrence’s trajectory of history ran the other way. He believed that modern human beings had degenerated from an earlier, healthier state and that industrial civilisation was heading irrevocably for disaster.

Because of these kind of views, Lawrence has a reputation for being a bad-tempered misanthrope, who was consumed with hatred of the human race. And it is true that some of his pronouncements do seem a little irrational and even hysterical – for example, when he writes, “how easily we might spare a million or two of humans and never miss them”  or “There are too many people on earth; insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.” Nevertheless, this picture of Lawrence is, I believe, flawed. Rather than being a cranky, subjective view generated by his own bitterness and bad-temperateness – or even his tuberculosis – Lawrence’s negative opinion of present day human beings was, from his point of view, justifiable and even inevitable. His sense that there was ‘something wrong’ with human beings came from a deep intuitive understanding of the human race’s early history and of the world’s pre-civilised primal peoples.

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin