Issue 30: On Walking on Water, Clearing Your Mind,

 and Chasing Your Dreams.

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1922

What detail surprises you in this painting?

 

Carole, poet and author of This Life and the Fireworks and Green Eyes and Fireflies, noticed the thrust of the horizontal lines across the landscape, saying they make her feel, “I can walk on the water.”   

 

Now my eye goes directly there. 

 

Do you see something surprising?

Congrats, you've just sharpened your ability to identify emerging possibilities.

First name / Reader, , would you like to be featured in an upcoming issue?

Want to clear your mind? Read Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut, Wikicommons

The first time you read this line, immediately after a character dies, you take Vonnegut at face value. 

 

So it goes.

 

The second time he says it, after the second character dies, it hits differently. And it hits differently again after the next character's death. And the next, and so on.

 

The rhythm and repetition, the déjà-vu of it all pushes you to introspection. Is that how it goes? 

 

You believed it. But now, after the repetitions, you wonder how you could have believed it. You're alienated— not from Vonnegut— but from yourself.

 

Something shifts. Your brain recognizes that you sometimes believe things that simply aren't true.

 

Suddenly, your brain feels free from the chokehold of other people's ideas.

 

Why do we do this exercise? 

So you get better at identifying what you feel and why. 

So we have a reference library of literary works to help you alleviate hard  feelings when they hit and build on positive ones. 

You can learn more about the narrative techniques that free your mind in chapter 16 of Wonderworks.

 

 

If you chose option A, you have the kind of commonsense that might net you not one, but two Nobel Prizes.

 

Commonsense is your ability to match the newness of your plan to the newness of your environment. 

 

Pierre Curie's death undoubtedly rocked Marie Curie's world, dramatically altering her environment. 

 

But what it didn't change was the importance of their research. 

 

Their shared devotion to their work connected the Curies and made their life together special. Pierre's death broke her heart but it didn't shake her devotion. Marie continued to chase their dreams: assuming Pierre's role as lab director, becoming the first women to teach at the Sorbonne, and dedicating her second Nobel Prize to her late husband.

Fun fact: Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice, and remains the only person to win in two scientific fields. 

 

Congrats, if you gave the game a go, you're getting better at matching newness of the plan to the newness of the environment.

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