⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🤩 You are a miracle: On the unfathomable odds of your existence. Read it here.

🏔️ What Is Beauty? In this profound conversation John O'Donohue explores beauty as the unseen force that emerges in the spaces between—between light and dark, music and silence, life and death—awakening awe, creativity, and the deep interconnectedness of the human spirit. Watch it here.

👶 Imagine You Are A Baby Again: A beautiful animation of Alan Watt's speaking about what it's like to be a baby, to be completely new to this world, and how different the world appears than to our adult eyes. Watch it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

“This is a representation of Saturn as seen through the eyepiece under clear, dark and stable skies with a mid-size telescope which are usually the ones used at star parties held by local astronomy clubs. So if you haven't had the opportunity to look through a telescope, I recommend you to look up for any events held by your local astronomy clubs and go see for yourself.” Photo taken by Daniel Borja.

 👶 Musings on The Fall of Snow

There is something whimsical about freshly laid snow. Perhaps it’s the associations with Narnia or the nostalgia of snow days in childhood.

On winter days in Pennsylvania, when snow came to greet us in the night, my brother and I would wake up for school and rush to turn on channel 11. This is where they’d announce if school was canceled.

The elation we felt when it was. I still remember putting on our snowsuits and playing in the tundra of our yard. You could not trace the source of redness in our faces. Was it the bite of the winter chill or the physical exhaustion of molding the snow into its many playful forms? It must have been both.

Eventually, we would come inside to warm up. We’d sip fresh hot chocolate while playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. We had gotten a demo disc from Pizza Hut that only granted access to level 1 so we’d play it repeatedly until thoroughly warmed. Then we’d don the snowsuits once again.

There’s something about the quiet that falls alongside snow. Tiny air pockets in the snow trap and scatter sound waves, making it harder for distant noises to bleed into the near. The absence of cars on the road doesn’t hurt either.

Perhaps the only thing louder in a snowstorm is the laughter of children who didn’t have to spend the day being force-fed a curriculum they didn’t care for.

No, today there is a pop quiz on more important matters—like how fast the snowball travels and if the snow has the consistency needed to build an igloo.

Adulthood doesn’t leave much room for snow days, but soon I’ll get to live them vicariously through my son.

I took him on his first little snow walk today. Well, my wife and I walked, and he snoozed contentedly in his stroller. Eventually, he will be alert to the frosted mountains and the novelty of the falling flakes.

Not yet, but someday soon, he will meet this most delightful form of precipitation, and for that, I have immense anticipation.

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☀️Magnify Each Other’s Light

Take these words from Maria Popova to heart:

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

Pairs well with this passage from James Baldwin:

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.”

Which reminds me of this quote from Roy T. Bennet:

“Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; it is what gives life its deepest significance.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Kram: A Norwegian word that refers to the quality of snow that makes it moldable so that one make snow balls and snowmen.

⏳ From The Archives

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

How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

“For most of us, childhood is kind of like a river, and we’re kind of like tadpoles.

We didn’t choose the river. We just woke up out of nowhere and found ourselves on some path set for us by our parents, by society, and by circumstances. We’re told the rules of the river and the way we should swim and what our goals should be. Our job isn’t to think about our path—it’s to succeed on the path we’ve been placed on, based on the way success has been defined for us.

For many of us—and I suspect for a large portion of Wait But Why readers—our childhood river then feeds into a pond, called college.1 We may have some say in which particular pond we landed in, but in the end, most college ponds aren’t really that different from one another.

In the pond, we have a bit more breathing room and some leeway to branch out into more specific interests. We start to ponder, looking out at the pond’s shores—out there where the real world starts and where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives. This usually brings some mixed feelings.

And then, 22 years after waking up in a rushing river, we’re kicked out of the pond and told by the world to go make something of our lives.

There are a few problems here. One is that at that moment, you’re kind of skill-less and knowledge-less and a lot of other things-less:

But before you can even address your general uselessness, there’s an even bigger issue—your pre-set path ended. Kids in school are kind of like employees of a company where someone else is the CEO. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you. And you’ve spent your whole life becoming a pro student, leaving you with zero experience as the CEO of anything. Up to now, you’ve only been in charge of the micro decisions—”How do I succeed at my job as a student?”—and now you’re suddenly holding the keys to the macro cockpit as well, tasked with answering stressful macro questions like “Who am I?” and “What are the important things in life?” and “What are my options for paths and which one should I choose and how do I even make a path?” When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this.

Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.

At the end of our life, when we look back at how things went, we can see our life’s path in its entirety, from an aerial view.

When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.

So this is a post about path-making. Let’s take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at the path we’re on, and ahead at where that path seems to be going, and make sure it makes sense.”

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