⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧐 When Curiosity Doesn’t Fit the World We’ve Built: How do we design a world that supports hypercurious minds? Read it here.

🌳 Breathing With The Forest: An immersive experience of shared breath with the Amazon rainforest. Try it here.

🪦 A Beautiful Death: When Aldous Huxley was on his deathbed, he asked his wife Laura to administer him with LSD. She agreed. Two weeks after her husband’s death, Laura wrote this moving and detailed account of Aldous’s last days to her brother-in-law, Julian. Read it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

“Why is there a spiral around the North Pole of Mars? Each winter this pole develops a new outer layer about one meter thick composed of carbon dioxide frozen out of the thin Martian atmosphere. This fresh layer is deposited on a water-ice layer that exists year round. Strong winds blow down from above the cap's center and swirl due to the spin of the red planet -- contributing to Planum Boreum's spiral structure. The featured image is a perspective mosaic generated in 2017 from numerous images taken by ESA's Mars Express and elevations extracted from the laser altimeter aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission.” Source.

☀️ 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.

❤️ Love Letter from The After Life

Remembering the author of this comforting poem, Andrea Gibson, who passed away yesterday.

🤓 Learn This Word

Vranyo: a blatant, mutually understood lie that everyone pretends to accept so life keeps moving.

⏳ From The Archives

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

The most profound wonder is stirred by what is most ordinary

Rare moments of wonder at the mere existence of things – rather than the dramatic or new – involve perceiving with the soul

‘It is!’ exclaims Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his essay ‘The Friend’, struck with awe by the sheer existence of things – be it a person, a flower, or even a grain of sand. The particular forms of existence – person, flower, sand – point to a silent, but wondrous fact that they share: they are.

Coleridge is not alone in describing this strange wonder, nor is he the first. Plato thought that philosophy begins with profound wonder at being. Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of the wonder at the fact that anything exists at all as central for the good life. And the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka described the capacity to wonder at the fact ‘that we are at all and that the world is’ as a sign of ‘a spiritual person’, someone for whom the human life remains an open question.

For those who haven’t experienced it, Patočka’s description of a wonder that doesn’t discover anything new might seem odd. Typically, wonder is directed towards the novel and the unusual: the new Guinness World Record, an emotion we had never experienced before, an impressive artwork, the latest gadget. The list of the remarkable, the curious and the astonishing is endless. But Coleridge’s, Wittgenstein’s and Patočka’s wonder is different: what is most ordinary suddenly looks like a profound mystery. We are taken by the quiet realisation that ‘we are at all and that the world is’, that ‘everything is’. Martin Heidegger calls this a wonder at the most usual unusual: ‘In wonder, what is most usual of all and in all, ie, everything, becomes the most unusual … in this one respect: that it is what it is.’

This is not about the Universe coming into existence – after all the Big Bang is as unusual and extraordinary as it can get. Instead, what lights up is the fact that things are present and meaningful to us, ‘that things appear to us’ in Patočka’s words. To experience wonder at the being of things is to experience wonder at the fact that we make sense of them. When we are in the park, we do not perceive green and brown patches in our visual field; instead, we perceive a tree, which stands meaningfully before us and, as it were, says to us ‘I am’. How we move from raw sense data to present entities is a puzzle that Socrates and the young Theaetetus discuss in a Platonic dialogue: unlike what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears, there is no sense organ to perceive that something is. Instead, they suggest, it is the soul itself that perceives what all things share.

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