This week started with a story about teeing it up for the Scots in the All-World on Make it a Great Monday. On Stay Whole Tuesday, I shared my six questions for chatting about life and career. That exercise seems to separate the pretenders from the non-pretenders. Yesterday, on Woman Power Wednesday, there were supportive husbands and supermums. Today, on MAKE Anything Thursday, let’s MAKE the Sum of Who You Are, with hot off the press insight from Maria Popova.
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are.
Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.
Popova’s website, The Marginalian, has been a source of inspiration for my (what is) ‘every gPage Singletary thing’. I find her writing authentic and thought-provoking. She features the work of classic writers, artists, scientists, and poets. It would be difficult to match her intellect, but I relate to her passion for writing and how it helps me think, learn, and grow. Her statement below completely resonates: “because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life.”
Each year, Maria adds to a list of her key learnings over the past twelve months. She describes this past year as the most challenging and the most transformative of her life. I would say the same has been true for me, and it took something challenging that came my way to get my website off the ground. Sometimes, the obstacle is truly the way!
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal — not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read — so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
Wow! Maria is so damn good at doing what she loves. MAKE the sum of who you are!
