Hindsight is how we connect the dots that figure our lives. To look back on even a single year is to see clearly the contour of who we are in its points of attention and priority. “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is how we spend our lives.” How we spend our minds is our primary purchase on our days.
In the annual hindsight ritual of distilling the “best” of The Marginalian, here is a Venn diagram of the most read pieces and those I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide — a lovely reminder that we read the same way we love: with ideas about what is best as different as the minds that carry them.
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An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
Read it here.
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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
Read it here.
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Love Anyway
Read it here.
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
Read it here.
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But We Had Music
Read it here.
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Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World
Read it here.
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The Universe in Verse Book
Read it here.
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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
Read it here.
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A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith
Read it here.
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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace
Read it here.
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The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning
Read it here.
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A Lighthouse for Dark Times
Read it here.
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Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge
Read it here.
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The Pleasure of Being Left Alone
Read it here.
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Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
Read it here.
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Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship
Read it here.
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Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent
Read it here.
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How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible
Read it here.
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Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World
Read it here.
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Let the Last Thing Be Song
Read it here.
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A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings
Read it here.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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