I’m trying something new here, devoting the last Sunday post of the month to the sharing of a handful of links that piqued my interest this month but didn’t make it into a post. Rather than let them get buried under the new stuff that arrives daily (so much stuff!) I thought I might pass them along as is, without (much) commentary, because things need to flow.
Life is a river.
From an entry about Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations she calls “the original self-help book,” Maria Popova considers trauma and luck and stoicism:
[There is a way] to esteem in attention and admiration not the unluckiness of what has happened to us but the luckiness that, despite it, we have become the people we are and have the lives we have by the sheer unwillingness to stay in that small dark place, which is at heart a willingness to be larger than our hurt selves.
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Meg Elison on what it’s like to work in tech when you’re poor.
Trouble at Chelsea Green: like Montana poet Chris LaTray, who writes An Irritable Métis on Substack, I’ve alway caught a positive counterculture vibe from Vermont publisher Chelsea Green. But apparently there are dark things crawling about under that rocky Green Mountain soil.
Mark Manson clarifies, and it’s nothing new: we have met the enemy, and (surprise!) it is us. Social Media is Not the Problem.
Finally, The Woman and the Car, a “practical how-to guide for those who wanted to take to the roads, but did not quite know how.” Circa 1909. Enjoy.
ps pirro 
Thanks for the Maria Popova quote — “a willingness to be larger than our hurt selves”. What troubles me is that both this, and the Mark Manson article, presume that we have the free will to do other than exactly what we do. Melissa Pierson has convinced me we have no such free will (https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2020/03/17/no-choice-but-to-misbehave/) so I’m learning not to point fingers at anyone for anything. I confess I don’t always succeed in that. We do so want to hold people responsible, including ourselves. And thanks (I think) for the link to the Chelsea Green article — very sad to hear, after Margo embraced my book so wholeheartedly even before I’d written it. Ugh to what she’s now embracing.
That last part of Maria Popova’s quote, the “willingness to be larger than our hurt selves,” was what landed for me, too. I’ve gone back and re-read your post from March 2020, and will continue my own contemplation of free will, maybe with the help of Melissa Holbrook Pierson.