⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ You Are An Unrepeatable Miracle: Omar Najjarine on the animating spirit of culture. Watch it here.

❓Try Asking People Why Things Matter to Them: It can make your conversations weirder and more interesting. Read it here.

📖 Your Life Is Not A Story: Why narrative thinking holds you back. Read it here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

This photo was taken by Wang Xin in the Chongming District of Shanghai, China. The photograph, titled "Sprites Dancing in the Dark Night," captures the rare phenomenon of red sprite lightning during a thunderstorm. These red sprites are fleeting, occurring only for milliseconds about 50 miles above the ground in the mesosphere, and are difficult to photograph. Xin used a four-second exposure to capture the ethereal, fairy-like sprites, which appear as faint red figures due to changes in the energy of nitrogen atoms high in the atmosphere.

⏳ Seeing From The Other Side of Loss

I believe it's hard to practice "memento mori" until you've experienced significant loss.

Then you can feel its full gravity.

It can lead to the unnerving sense that the other things in your life you hold dear could be ripped from your hands

This is true but need not be a recipe for everlasting dread. No, instead you can find a place to view your life where you deeply appreciate all that you have.

Where simple moments with friends and family become shrouded in the golden light of still-having-them.

Loss can plant the seed of deep gratitude for all the love that remains.

This is a lens on life where you've already attended everyone's funeral and you've been gifted the ability to go back and still be with them.

Some might find that this is a grim thought.

But it's a fact of life.

And until you've stared loss squarely in the face your won't fully realize your capacity to appreciate this one wondrous life you have and all those dancing with you in it.

🐲 Ready To Overcome Procrastination?

How deeply does procrastination intertwine with our relationship to discomfort, and what might we discover when we look beneath its surface? Through ancient wisdom and modern understanding, this course invites you to explore how procrastination shapes not just our actions, but our very sense of self, our emotional landscape, and the way we perceive our life's possibilities.

Ready to explore these depths? Take this free course now and begin unraveling these patterns with compassionate awareness.

🌱 Make Me Good Soil

Let these words from Sophie Strand fertilize your mind:

"What then is decay? Watching a compost heap transform into fertile soil it can seem like decay is genesis. Decay is the first scene in a comedy of mycelial threads and millipedes and sprouting wildflowers, seeds invisibly deposited by a bird flying overhead. Sometimes I think about death as being the transition from a solitary aliveness to an anarchic polyphony of aliveness. Years ago, a deer, hit by a car, managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parent's property where it died. It was high summer, frying-pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives. Worms. Ants. Maggots. Beetles. Mushrooms. Death was almost the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn't an end of life. It was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into four hundred narratives.

Am I decaying? Well, yes. But decay is always a day, a microbe, a rootlet, away from sprouting. Maybe I'm losing touch with a self, and melting into a more-than-human mind."

🤓 Learn This Word

Parea: A group of friends who regularly gather together to share their experiences about life, their philosophies, values and ideas.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

How to Defeat the Procrastodragon Once and For All

Articles like the one you’re reading now typically start with a confession by the author. Probably by necessity, because you, the reader, rightfully want to know if this internet-guy knows what the hell he’s talking about.

Does he truly understand my suffering and struggles? My unique strategies of self-deception? Does he know my biology and bad habits? The events that have made me who I am? And has he resolved these issues within himself in such a way he can shine a light on my own and help me fix them?

Deep down, you want to know if this is another one of those articles that make you temporarily feel good, but is rather quickly forgotten. Or worse, an article that offers tremendous insight, only to be used as additional ammunition to judge yourself into an even deeper procrastination paralysis.

I believe these reservations are valid, so I’d like to share you a little bit of my story. I hope to show you this article is none of the above, and that by fixing the core existential issue at the heart of procrastination, you can no longer see it as an option.

Honestly, it is possible to overcome procrastination. The key is to aim so far away from self-defeating behavior that you can no longer seriously consider it an option.

I am sure you can picture some individuals who do exactly this.

However, I wasn’t always like this. I had to learn it, the hard way.

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