⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🤯 Multiscale causality and the meaning crisis: Why your mind can never contain the universe it lives in. Read it here.

🤥 The Lies I Used To Tell Myself: I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger. Read it here.

💪 No, Willpower Isn't a Muscle – Here's a Better Way to Think of It. The muscle metaphor based on ego-depletion theory hasn’t survived scrutiny. But there’s an alternative that holds promise. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Very faint planetary nebula Abell 7 is about 1,800 light-years distant. It lies just south of Orion in planet Earth's skies toward the constellation Lepus, The Hare. Posing with scattered Milky Way stars, its generally simple spherical shape about 8 light-years in diameter is revealed in this deep telescopic image. The beautiful and complex shapes seen within the cosmic cloud are visually enhanced by the use of long exposures and narrowband filters that capture emission from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Otherwise Abell 7 would be much too faint to be appreciated by eye. A planetary nebula represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience 5 billion years hence, as the nebula's central, once sun-like star shrugs off its outer layers. Abell 7 itself is estimated to be 20,000 years old. But its central star, seen here as a fading white dwarf, is some 10 billion years old.”

❤️ Offer Your Happiness

I'm consistently reminded of the value of kindness. Not a performative kindness that is done for the sake of being perceived as a good person or having attained some level of advanced spiritual status, but a gesture of good will towards humanity that benefits all involved. Deep meaning that erupts from this kind of heart-centered caring that enriches the lives of both the "donor" and "recipient."

It can be easy in our current day to get lost in transactional scorekeeping across our relationships. But there have, more than likely, been those who have treated you with kindness in moments where you didn't "deserve" it. You had nothing to offer them but they treated you with dignity and respect anyway.

These moments are shimmering with significance. I strive to show up in my relationships in such a way that those around me feel a sense of refuge from the harsh winds of life. That they are loved independent of what they can do for me. I believe this is the bedrock for truly enduring friendship.

I'm also reminded not to derive my sense of significance from the kindness I'm able to provide. This very easily slides into dynamics of people-pleasing that evaporate our sense of choice creating resentment where we should feel gratitude.

The truth is, kindness is never an obligation. It's an opportunity to plant beautiful seeds in our own lives and the lives of others. To sustain our ability to offer this to the world, we must remember to nourish ourselves and practice kindness inwardly.

This sentiment calls to mind this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:

"The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.

If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment — whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day — can be a moment of joy."

👁️ Reality is Poetry

Let these words from David Byrne simmer inside you:

🤓 Learn This Word

Occhiolism: A humbling awareness of how limited your perspective is in the grand scheme

🕸️ From Around The Web

Waking Our Animal Senses

I’m beginning these thoughts during the winter solstice, the dark of the year, during a night so long that even the trees and the rocks are falling asleep. Moon has glanced at us through the thick blanket of clouds once or twice, but mostly left us to dream and drift through the shadowed night. Those of us who hunger for the light are beginning to taste the wild darkness, and to swallow it — taking the night, quietly, into our bodies.

According to a tale told in various ways by diverse indigenous peoples, the fiery sun is held, at this moment, inside the body of the earth. Each evening, at sunset, the sun slips down into the ground; during the night it journeys through the density underfoot, and in the morning we watch it, far to the east, rise up out of the ground and climb into the sky. But during the long nights of winter, and especially during the solstice, the sun lingers longer in the ground, feeding the dark earth with its fire, impregnating the depths with the diverse life that will soon, after several moons of gestation, blossom forth upon the earth’s surface.

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