⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🚶🏻Why I Walk: A simple walk through Brooklyn became a turning point that revealed how much of real life you miss when you move too fast. Read it here.

🤔 How To Stop Overthinking: Grappling with your thoughts will leave you even more entangled in worry. Use metacognitive strategies to break free. Read it here.

📲 Reclaim your digital life with Clearspace: Take control of your digital habits with thoughtful screen time controls and mindful moments. Try it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

“Photographer Kathrin Swoboda frequents Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria in search of red-wing blackbirds as they sing. On a cold morning back in 2019, she captured the conspicuous avians mid-tune, an activity that produced what appears to be smoke rings emanating from their beaks. The frigid temperatures make the hazy formations of condensation visible, and the serendipitous shot won the top prize in that year’s Audubon Photography Awards.” Read more here.

👁 Seeing The Invisible

I've adored this proverb from the moment I heard it.

I find too often our collective attention is fixated on conflict, both genuine and manufactured.

Sure, conflicts need to be addressed but a consciousness only riddled with resolving fights and settling feuds misses something essential.

By bringing light to the trees growing in the background, we encounter a space of nourishment that can imbue us with the strength and resilience to navigate the falling wood.

Making choices and attempting transformation from a place of fear and hatred begets more fear and hatred.

By seeing beyond the front and center, we find an abundance of reasons to love this world as it is, despite its flaws.

By seeing behind the curtain, we find pathways to greater significance.

Then we can reckon with our own imperfections, instead of projecting our perceived lack of wholeness onto the world.

This isn’t about fabricating something from nothing or perceiving what isn’t there.

It’s about seeing what is there that we no longer notice. Countless treasures get rendered into the background as we age and our constructs of the world solidify.

Other things have always lived in the background. That is because we are much more prone to notice the dynamic aspects of our “salience landscape” rather than the still and silent ground upon which they rest. The things that remain pervasive are often left unconsidered. That which is ubiquitous becomes invisible.

Bringing these things into focus can serve as a profound wellspring of gratitude and wonder.

🌬️ Everything Lightly

Contemplate on these words from Aldous Huxley:

🤓 Learn This Word

Gezelligheid: A Dutch word referring to coziness, fun, the general togetherness that gives people a warm feeling.

⏳ From The Archives

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

36 Questions To Foster Love and Intimacy (Even With Complete Strangers)

If you’re allergic to small talk like I am and always feel a desire to strike cords of greater connection, then you’ll want to learn these 36 questions for fostering greater closeness in your relationships.

It can be very easy to get frustrated with the automatic “how’s the weather” questions that feel like dead ends to actually arriving at some semblance of intimacy.

But if we want to experience more depth in our relationship, the onus is on us to steward that process. It can be very easy to complain about the surface level conversations for those who crave more meaningful interactions but complaining isn’t a recipe for more meaning. Instead, we need to take the responsibility, grab our conversational partner by the hand and swim towards the deep end together.

Arthur Aron’s work can help us do that.

In 1997 he designed an experiment to see if he could get strangers to feel a sense interpersonal closeness after only a brief encounter.

He took pairs of people and had them spend time answering 3 sets of questions. Each set was more emotionally provocative than the last. The participants would take turns sharing their answers with each other, this created a mutually reciprocated vulnerability that by the end of 45 minutes the individuals felt a kind of intimacy you would expect to experience with a close friend or romantic partner. What’s astonishing is that this process will even work with complete strangers who you just met before answering the questions.

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