balance - by Elaine - manners & mystery

how to live a life

Odilon Redon, Ophelia, 1905 What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or I used to have this fear that I would never be a good writer because my life was too good. To write well, I thought, you had to have suffered, and I mean, truly suffered, not just failed a math test or applied to ten jobs out of college and gotten ten rejections. I was fully bought into the myth of the “struggling artist.” If you’re generally content with your…

related reading

• Søren Kierkegaard’s Struggle with Himself | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• How to cope with an existential crisispsyche.co
• Søren Kierkegaard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)plato.stanford.edu
• How to write and what to write aboutreading.supply
• Kierkegaard Saw Why Your Search for a Definition Is Keeping You Stucksubstack.com
• the life you were meant to livepersonalcanon.com
• Keeping Your Options Open is Ruining Your Lifemnqrls.substack.com
• What If You Could Do It All Over? | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• on being selectivemindmine.substack.com
• Søren K.’s Two-Hundredth Birthday | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspirationpersonalcanon.com
• do what you love but have a contingency planava.substack.com