artwork from a diverse lineup of independent and emerging artists, designers and illustrators, including Brain Pickings favorites Marian Bantjes, Marc Johns and Mike Perry. The project is an invitation to look at existential truisms with new eyes in a context of honesty and simplicity, delivered through such outstanding graphic design that the medium itself becomes part of the charm of the message. Reviewed in full, with more images, here. THE OPTIMISM BIAS The reason pessimism is easily escapable, as Martin Seligman posits, might just be that its opposite is our natural pre-wired inclination. At least that&rs... posted on Jun 5 2012 (40,792 reads)

year, Joan Wright-Albertini, a first-grade teacher at Park Day School in Oakland, California, transforms her classroom into a virtual rainforest, a desert, or an ocean — whatever ecosystem interests her students most. But in recent years, she has also added to the months-long study of habitats an unusual, daring twist that has deepened both her students' understanding of their connection to the natural world and belief in their ability to help protect it. The story, which appears in the Center's book Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence, is illustrated through the photos below. In ... posted on Aug 14 2013 (47,112 reads)

terrible at gratitude. How bad am I? I’m so bad at gratitude that most days, I don’t notice the sunlight on the leaves of the Berkeley oaks as I ride my bike down the street. I forget to be thankful for the guy who hand-brews that delicious cup of coffee I drink mid-way through every weekday morning. I don’t even know the dude’s name! I usually take for granted that I have legs to walk on, eyes to see with, arms I can use to hug my son. I forget my son! Well, I don’t actually forget about him, at least as a physical presence; I generally remember to pick him up from school and feed him dinner. But as I face the quotidian slings and arrows of pare... posted on Mar 19 2014 (182,515 reads)

greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it.” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” Montaigne wrote in his timeless meditation on death and the art of living. And yet in the half millennium since his day, we’ve made paltry progress on coming to such nonchalant terms with the reality of death. We are stillprofoundly unprepared when it strikes our loved ones and paralyzed by the prospect of our own demise. Our discomfort with “the idea of a permanent unconsciousness in which there is neither void nor vacuum... posted on Nov 3 2014 (25,097 reads)

want to just listen for the evening, and after the sharing ends we have dinner together. The first time I was planning on attending Stone Soup, I had no idea what to expect and no clue what to share. I'm a visual artist, but it seemed pretty strange and egotistical to pass around a painting or drawing I'd done. Therefore, I decided I'd share one of my favorite poems by Rilke. I'm such a visual thinker however, that as I read through the poem I started having all these images in my head about what the poem might look like if it were illustrated. I started sketching and realized that it could make a fun coloring page for kids and adults. So, I went in with a tiny sta... posted on Dec 16 2014 (104,187 reads)

is how we mature… There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.” “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf asserted in the only surviving recording of her voice. But words also belong to us, as much as we belong to them - and out of that mutual belonging arises our most fundamental understanding of the world, as well as the inescapable misunderstandings that bedevil the grand sensemaking experiment we call life. This constant dialogue between reality and illusion, moderated by our use of language, is what poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in Consolations: The Solace, Nourish... posted on May 12 2015 (31,084 reads)

must always take sides,” Elie Wiesel urged in his spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” And yet part of the human tragedy is that despite our best intentions and our most ardent ideals, we often lull ourselves into neutrality in the face of injustice — be it out of fear for our own stability, or lack of confidence in our ability to make a difference, or that most poisonous foible of the soul, the two-headed snake of cynicism and apathy. How, then, do we unmoor ourselves from a passivity we so masterfully rationalize, remember that “injustice ... posted on May 7 2016 (9,753 reads)

questions I have which relate to the topic. I’ve been working as an artist all my adult life, but for the last 15 years, I’ve been working with a narrative which has yielded a lot for me, and I can think about it in two ways: from the standpoint of art and from the standpoint of psychology. Since I’ve become a therapist, I’ve become interested in it in both ways. In general, the idea is that the unconscious is the part of us which remains hidden. It emerges sometimes in images and dreams, and these can become an important part of artmaking. RW:  Do you think the uncovering of these hidden parts of ourselves could be a transforming process? RH:  Yes, a... posted on Jun 15 2016 (7,950 reads)

I was five years old, I wanted to go to an Ivy League school because I’d heard somewhere that they were the best. I remember this because my family moved to a new house in Denver, the lock on the front door said “Yale” which I knew was a sign. For the next 13 years I worked like crazy. I got all the As. I joined all the clubs. I ran for all the positions. My best friend and I were president and vice president of a French club with only one other member, which was all that was needed to put it on our resumes. I took the SATs three times, until I got a perfect score in math. My mom often encouraged me to slow down I was doing everything ... posted on Nov 21 2016 (35,515 reads)

those of us who live in urban areas, what does returning to a life in the village really mean? What is the impulse that moves folks to reverse the direction of migration of their recent ancestors to the city? What can living on the land, growing your own food, and using your hands to make clothing and shelter offer souls hungering for a real connection to the Earth? Here, Hang Mai, a Vietnamese natural farmer and social entrepreneur, who together with her partner Chau Duong mid-wifes those wanting to make this transition to the village, reflects on this question. I belong to the baby-boomer generation in Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975. My generation experienced the difficult... posted on Jul 8 2021 (3,709 reads)

Schaefer / shutterstock Watching starling murmurations as the birds swoop, dive and wheel through the sky is one of the great pleasures of a dusky winter’s evening. From Naples to Newcastle these flocks of agile birds are all doing the same incredible acrobatic display, moving in perfect synchrony. But how do they do it? Why don’t they crash? And what is the point? Back in the 1930s one leading scientist suggested that birds must have psychic powers to operate together in a flock. Fortunately, modern science is starting to find some better answers. To understand what the starlings are doing, we begin back in 1987 when the pioneering computer scientist Craig... posted on Feb 18 2022 (5,323 reads)

more than a decade, I’ve been studying the effects of gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on our relationships with others. digitalskillet In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have helped people systematically cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a “gratitude journal” in which they regularly record the things for which they’re grateful. (For a description of this and other ways to cultivate gratitude, click here.) Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices often seem so simple and basic; in our studies, we often have people keep gratitude journals for just three weeks. And yet the results have been overwhelmi... posted on Jun 20 2011 (78,772 reads)

prestige is the enemy of passion, or how to master the balance of setting boundaries and making friends. “Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness,“and dedicate your life to it.” But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that make it easier. Gathered here are insights fr... posted on Apr 22 2012 (56,768 reads)

the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens’ risk for smoking. “Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: C... posted on May 20 2012 (18,320 reads)

Persian and then translated into English by somebody else—then you turn it into a Coleman Barks translation. Can you tell us how that process goes for you? CB: Well, it's a little mysterious. I go into a kind of a trance, reading the poem in its scholarly translation, and try to—well, [there's] nothing marvelous about it, it's just kind of a trance that any reading involves—where I try to feel what spiritual information is trying to come through Rumi's images and then I try to put that into an American free-verse poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman and many others. So that's the general liniments of the process. TS: Do you ever have a ... posted on Dec 29 2013 (36,170 reads)

Tippett, host: Sherry Turkle founded and directs the intriguingly titled MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She made waves with her book Alone Together; it was widely reviewed as a call to "unplug" our digital gadgets. But as I've read her and listened to her speak, I hear Sherry Turkle saying something more thought-provoking: that we can lead examined lives with our technology. That each of us, in our everyday interactions, can choose between letting technology shape us and shaping it towards human purposes, even towards honoring what we hold dear. Engaging Sherry Turkle on this is full of usable ideas — from how to declare email bankruptcy to teachi... posted on Jul 1 2013 (29,607 reads)

is challenging to define, despite the huge role it plays in our everyday lives. Steve Jobs called it, for instance, "more powerful than intellect." But however we put it into words, we all, well, intuitively know just what it is. Pretty much everyone has experienced a gut feeling -- that unconscious reasoning that propels us to do something without telling us why or how. But the nature of intuition has long eluded us, and has inspired centuries' worth of research and inquiry in the fields of philosophy and psychology. "I define intuition as the subtle knowing without ever having any idea why you know it," Sophy Burnham, bestselling author of The Ar... posted on Apr 30 2014 (137,844 reads)

people. The flashfloods this month have absorbed villages, ravaged homes, and left thousands displaced. New Delhi-based NGO Goonj provides relief aid to those affected by such natural calamities. Goonj has been on the forefront to bring relief items to the families of Uttarkhand as evacuations and rescue efforts continue. Last year, David reported on Goonj for the Fixes column in the NYTimes. Given the recent events, we’re reprinting that column this weekend. But, first, here are some images from the relief efforts at Goonj’s base in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand. Bridging the Clothing Divide by David Bornstein, NYTimes The sign on the rickshaw caught the attention ... posted on Oct 23 2014 (13,842 reads)

strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.” “Our human definition of ‘everything’ gives us, at best, a tiny penlight to help us with our wanderings,” Benjamen Walker offered in an episode of his excellent Theory of Everythingpodcast as we shared a conversation about illumination and the art of discovery. Thirty years earlier, Carl Sagan had captured this idea in his masterwork Varieties of Scientific Experience, where he asserted: “If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” This mu... posted on Mar 16 2015 (18,834 reads)

beginning of another new year is the perfect time to reflect, as a family, on memorable moments of togetherness and inspiration from the year gone by and to express gratitude for all that it offered. It is also an opportunity to plant seeds for the intentions you want to cultivate at both a personal level with your families and, more broadly, to plant seeds of goodness for the change you wish to see in the world in 2017. Our team of volunteer editors hopes you enjoy our personal selection of the Top 10 Kindful Kids of 2016 here below! We are grateful to this entire community for nourishing children's journeys in the beautiful ways that you do and we look forward to seeing all of the ... posted on Jan 10 2017 (10,734 reads)