“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his meditations. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.” Two millennia later, Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) … Read more
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space,” Albert Einstein wrote in a beautiful letter of consolation to a grieving father. “He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving … Read more
I cannot stress enough the importance of finding your flow. Once you do, almost every other activity will fade in comparison. You’ll have access to a constant source of enjoyment that gives meaning to everything you do. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (September 29, 1934–October 20, 2021), the author of “Flow: … Read more
In 1969, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. Three decades later, in her final book On Grief and Grieving, co-authored with her friend David Kessler and published posthumously, Kubler-Ross adapted the stages she had observed in the dying to account for the similar … Read more