The art of self-possession and knowing what you really want, a tender illustrated meditation on loneliness and how friendship transforms us, and more

The art of self-possession and knowing what you really want, a tender illustrated meditation on loneliness, belonging, and how friendship transforms us, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. Share [[Forward] Forward to a friend]( Connect [[Facebook] Facebook]( [[Twitter] Twitter]( [[Instagram] Instagram]( [[Tumblr] Tumblr]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Unsubscribe]( [Welcome]Hello, {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [brainpickings.org]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition – the nine kinds of silence, how art transforms us, Ursula K. Le Guin on growing older and what beauty really means, and more – you can catch up [right here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. [Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us]( spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. There is a strange and sorrowful loneliness to this, to being a creature that carries its fragile sense of self in a bag of skin on an endless pilgrimage to some promised land of belonging. We are willing to erect many defenses to hedge against that loneliness and fortress our fragility. But every once in a while, we encounter another such creature who reminds us with the sweetness of persistent yet undemanding affection that we need not walk alone. Such a reminder radiates with uncommon tenderness from [Big Wolf & Little Wolf]( ([public library]( by French author Nadine Brun-Cosme, illustrated by the [always magical]( Olivier Tallec and translated by publisher Claudia Zoe Bedrick, the visionary founder of Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse [Enchanted Lion](. With great subtlety and sensitivity, the story invites a meditation on loneliness, the meaning of solidarity, the relationship between the ego and the capacity for love, and the little tendrils of care that become the armature of friendship. We meet Big Wolf during one of his customary afternoon stretches under a tree he has long considered his own, atop a hill he has claimed for himself. But this is no ordinary day — Big Wolf spots a new presence perched on the horizon, a tiny blue figure, “no bigger than a dot.” With that all too human tendency to project onto the unknown our innermost fears, Big Wolf is chilled by the terrifying possibility that the newcomer might be bigger than he is. But as the newcomer approaches, he turns out to be Little Wolf. Big Wolf saw that he was small and felt reassured. He let Little Wolf climb right up to his tree. “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar,” Anaïs Nin [wrote]( and it is precisely the stark contrast between Big Wolf’s towering stature and his vulnerable insecurity that lends the story its loveliness and profundity. At first, the two wolves observe one another silently out of the corner of their eyes. His fear cooled by the smallness and timidity of his visitor, Big Wolf begins to regard him with unsuspicious curiosity that slowly warms into cautious affection. We watch Big Wolf as he learns, with equal parts habitual resistance and sincerity of self-transcendence, a new habit of heart and a wholly novel vocabulary of being. Night came. Little Wolf stayed. Big Wolf thought that Little Wolf went a bit too far. After all, it had always been his tree. When Big Wolf went to bed, Little Wolf went to bed too. When Big Wolf saw that Little Wolf was shivering at the tip of his nose, he pushed a teeny tiny corner of his leaf blanket closer to him. “That is certainly enough for such a little wolf,” he thought. When morning breaks, Big Wolf goes about his daily routine and climbs up his tree to do his exercises, at first alarmed, then amused, and finally — perhaps, perhaps — endeared that Little Wolf follows him instead of leaving. Once again, Big Wolf at first defaults to that small insecure place, fearing that Little Wolf might outclimb him. But the newcomer struggles, exhaling a tiny “Ouch” as he thuds to the ground on his first attempt before making it up the tree, leaving Big Wolf both unthreatened and impressed with the little one’s quiet courage. Silently, Little Wolf mirrors Big Wolf’s exercises. Silently, he follows him back down. On the descent, Big Wolf picks his usual fruit for breakfast, but, seeing as Little Wolf isn’t picking any, grabs a few more than usual. Silently, he pushes a modest plate to Little Wolf, who eats it just as silently. The eyes and the body language of the wolves emanate universes of emotion in Tallec’s spare, wonderfully expressive pencil and gouache illustrations. When Big Wolf goes for his daily walk, he peers at his tree from the bottom of the hill and sees Little Wolf still stationed there, sitting quietly. Big Wolf smiled. Little Wolf was small. Big Wolf crossed the big field of wheat at the bottom of the hill. Then he turned around again. Little Wolf was still there under the tree. Big Wolf smiled. Little Wolf looked even smaller. He reached the edge of the forest and turned around one last time. Little Wolf was still there under the tree, but he was now so small that only a wolf as big as Big Wolf could possibly see that such a little wolf was there. Big Wolf smiled one last time and entered the forest to continue his walk. But when he reemerges from the forest by evening, the tiny blue dot is gone from under the tree. At first, Big Wolf assures himself that he must be too far away to see Little Wolf. But as he crosses the wheat field, he still sees nothing. We watch his silhouette tense with urgency as he makes his way up the hill, propelled by a brand new hollowness of heart. Big Wolf felt uneasy for the first time in his life. He climbed back up the hill much more quickly than on all other evenings. There was no one under his tree. No one big, no one little. It was like before. Except that now Big Wolf was sad. “The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation,” Simone Weil wrote in contemplating [the paradox of closeness]( “we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be.” But Big Wolf feels only the bitterness of having lost what he didn’t know he needed until it invaded his life with its unmerited grace. That evening for the firs time Big Wolf didn’t eat. That night for the first time Big Wolf didn’t sleep. He waited. For the first time he said to himself that a little one, indeed a very little one, had taken up space in his heart. A lot of space. By morning, Big Wolf climbs his tree but can’t bring himself to exercise — instead, he peers into the distance, his forlorn eyes wide with sorrow and longing. He bargains the way the bereaved do — if Little Wolf returns, he vows, he would offer him “a larger corner of his leaf blanket, even a much larger one”; he would give him all the fruit he wanted; he would let him climb higher and mirror all of his exercises, “even the special ones known only to him.” Big Wolf waits and waits and waits, beyond reason, beyond season. And then, one day, a tiny blue dot appears on the horizon. For the first time in his life Big Wolf’s heart beat with joy. Silently, Little Wolf climbs up the hill toward the tree. “Where were you?” asked Big Wolf. “Down here,” said Little Wolf without pointing. “Without you,” said Big Wolf in a very small voice, “I was lonely.” Little Wolf took a step closer to Big Wolf. “Me too,” he said. “I was lonely too.” He rested his head gently on Big Wolf’s shoulder. Big Wolf felt good. And so it was decided that from then on Little Wolf would stay. Complement the immeasurably lovely [Big Wolf & Little Wolf]( with Seneca on [true and false friendship]( and astronomer Maria Mitchell on [how we co-create each other in relationship]( then revisit other thoughtful and touching treasures from Enchanted Lion: [Cry, Heart, But Never Break]( [The Lion and the Bird]( [Bertolt]( [The Paper-Flower Tree]( and [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating 1930s Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want]( “One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing [the nature of genius](. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, [“is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.”]( Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. In 1926, more than a decade before a team of Harvard psychologists commenced [history’s longest and most revelatory study of human happiness]( and half a century before the humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm penned his [classic on the art of living]( the British psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner (February 1, 1900–May 29, 1998) undertook a seven-year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the existential rind of all we chronically mistake for fulfillment — prestige, pleasure, popularity — to reveal the succulent, pulsating core of what makes for genuine happiness. Along her journey of “doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails,” which she chronicled in a diary with a field scientist’s rigor of observation, Milner ultimately discovered that we are beings profoundly different from what we imagine ourselves to be — that the things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and contentment, but there are other, truer things that we can train ourselves to attend to in the elusive pursuit of happiness. Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from [The Well of Being]( In 1934, under the pen name Joanna Field, Milner released the results of her inquiry in [A Life of One’s Own]( ([public library]( — a small, enormously insightful book, beloved by W.H. Auden and titled in homage to Virginia Woolf’s [A Room of One’s Own]( published three years after Milner began her existential experiment. Milner would go on to fill her ninety-eight years with life of uncommon contentment, informed by her learnings from this intensive seven-year self-examination. In the preface to the original edition, Milner admonishes: Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought. This disorienting yet illuminating task of turning the mind’s eye inward requires a practice of recalibrating our conditioned perception. Drawing on Descartes’s [tenets of critical thinking]( she set out to doubt her most fundamental assumptions about what made her happy, trying to learn not from reason alone but from the life of the senses. Half a century before Annie Dillard offered her beautiful lens on [the two ways of seeing]( Milner writes: As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide focus way that made me happy. She reflects on the sense of extreme alienation and the terror of missing out she felt at the outset of the experiment, at twenty-six: Although I could not have told about it at the time, I can now remember the feeling of being cut off from other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living. I was so dependent on other people’s opinion of me that I lived in a constant dread of offending, and if it occurred to me that something I had done was not approved of I was full of uneasiness until I had put it right. I always seemed to be looking for something, always a little distracted because there was something more important to be attended to just ahead of the moment. Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for [a special edition of Alice in Wonderland]( Throughout the book, Milner illustrates the trajectory of her growth with the living record that led to her insights, punctuating her narrative with passages from her diary penned during the seven years. One, evocative of [eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath’s journal]( captures the disquieting restlessness she felt: I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden. In another, she distills the interior experience of that achingly longed-for sense of belonging to with world: I want… the patterns and colourings on the vase on my table took on a new and intense vitality — I want to be so harmonious in myself that I can think of others and share their experiences. Looking back on the young self who penned those journal entires at the outset of the experiment, Milner reflects: I had felt my life to be of a dull dead-level mediocrity, with the sense of real and vital things going on round the corner, out in the streets, in other people’s lives. For I had taken the surface ripples for all there was, when actually happenings of vital importance to me had been going on, not somewhere away from me, but just underneath the calm surface of my own mind. Though some of these discoveries were not entirely pleasant, bringing with them echoes of terror and despair, at least they gave me a sense of being alive. Much of that aliveness, she notes, came from the very act of chronicling the process of self-examination, for attention is what confers interest and vitality upon life. Joining the ranks of [celebrated authors who championed the benefits of keeping a diary]( Milner writes: Not only did I find that trying to describe my experience enhanced the quality of it, but also this effort to describe had made me more observant of the small movements of the mind. So now I began to discover that there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways that were controllable by what I can only describe as an internal gesture of the mind. It was as if one’s self-awareness had a central point of interest being, the very core of one’s I-ness. And this core of being could, I now discovered, be moved about at will; but to explain just how it is done to someone who has never felt it for himself is like trying to explain how to move one’s ears. Art by Katrin Stangl from [Strong as a Bear]( This inarticulable internal gesture, Milner found, was a matter of recalibrating her habits of perceiving, looking not directly at an object of attention but taking in a fuller picture with a diffuse awareness that is “more like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.” One morning, she found herself in the forest, mesmerized by the play of sunlight and shadow through the glistening leaves of the trees, which left her awash in “wave after wave of delight” — an experience not cerebral but sensorial, animating every cell of her body. Wondering whether such full-body surrender to dimensional delight could provide an antidote to her feelings of anger and self-pity, she considers the trap of busyness by which we so often flee from the living reality of our being: If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of their own. That tuning into one’s most elemental being, she came to realize, was the mightiest conduit to inhabiting one’s own life with truthfulness and integrity undiluted by borrowed standards of self-actualization. Nearly half a century before the poet Robert Penn Warren contemplated [the trouble with “finding yourself,”]( Milner writes: I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose, whether it would not burst its way out, or if the purpose were too strong, perhaps grow distorted like an oak whose trunk has been encircled with an iron band. I began to guess that my self’s need was for an equilibrium, for sun, but not too much, for rain, but not always… So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.” Distilling the essence of this reorientation of being, she adds: I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it. Several decades later, Jeanette Winterson would write beautifully of [“the paradox of active surrender”]( essential to our experience of art. As in art, so in life — Milner writes: Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes. Half a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that [“no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,”]( Milner considers the difficulty — and the triumph — of recognizing that you are crossing life on someone else’s bridge: I had at least begun to guess that my greatest need might be to let go and be free from the drive after achievement — if only I dared. I had also guessed that perhaps when I had let these go, then I might be free to become aware of some other purpose that was more fundamental, not self-imposed private ambitions but some thing which grew out of the essence of one’s own nature. People said: ‘Oh, be yourself at all costs’. But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own. Art from [Kenny’s Window]( Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want “One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf [wrote in her own diary]( in the same era. “Looked at, it vanishes.” Happiness, Milner found, was similarly elusive to direct pursuit. Rather, its attainment required a wide-open attentiveness to reality, a benevolent curiosity about all that life has to offer, and a commitment not to argue with its offerings but to accept them as they come, congruous or incongruous as they may be with our desires. Looking back on the diary entires from the final stretch of her seven-year experiment, she reflects on the hard-earned mastery of this unarguing surrender: It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering. I suppose I did not really reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel what it meant to be alive. Having termed this nonjudgmental receptivity “continual mindfulness” in her journal from the time, Milner evokes Plato’s metaphor of [the two charioteers of thought]( and reflects: I came to the conclusion then that “continual mindfulness” could certainly not mean that my little conscious self should be entirely responsible for marshalling and arranging all my thoughts, for it simply did not know enough. It must mean, not a sergeant-major-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to look and readiness to accept whatever came…. Whenever I did so manage to win its services I began to suspect that thought, which I had always before looked on as a cart-horse, to be driven, whipped and plodding between shafts, might be really a Pegasus, so suddenly did it alight beside me from places I had no knowledge of. Those interior unknowns, Milner discovered, were the recesses where insecurity lurked, in that ancient here-be-monsters way we humans have of filling unmapped territories with dread. She examines the vital relationship between inner security and happiness: I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense of security, and yet that I could apparently never feel safe enough to do it, because there was an urge in me which I had dimly perceived but had never yet been able to face. It was then that the idea occurred to me that until you have, once at least, faced everything you know — the whole universe — with utter giving in, and let all that is “not you” flow over and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security. Art by Vern Kousky from [The Blue Songbird]( an illustrated parable of belonging and finding one’s authentic voice Looking back on her seven-year study of what her moments of happiness depended on and how her thought wrapped itself around her lived experience to extract from it a felt sense, Milner summarizes how she came to discover her most authentic existential needs as a human being: By continual watching and expression I must learn to observe my thought and maintain a vigilance, not against “wrong” thoughts, but against refusal to recognize any thought. Further, this introspection meant continual expression, not continual analysis; it meant that I must bring my thoughts and feelings up in their wholeness, not argue about them and try to pretend they were something different from what they were. I had also learnt how to know what I wanted; to know that this is not a simple matter of momentary decision, but that it needs a rigorous watching and fierce discipline, if the clamouring conflict of likes is to be welded into a single desire. It had taught me that my day-to-day personal “wants” were really the expression of deep underlying needs, though often the distorted expression because of the confusions of blind thinking. I had learnt that if I kept my thoughts still enough and looked beneath them, then I might sometimes know what was the real need, feel it like a child leaping in the womb, though so remotely that I might easily miss it when over-busy with purposes. Really, then, I had found that there was an intuitive sense of how to live. For I had been forced to the conclusion that there was more in the mind than just reason and blind thinking, if only you knew how to look for it; the unconscious part of my mind seemed to be definitely something more than a storehouse for the confusions and shames I dared not face. […] It was only when I was actively passive, and content to wait and watch, that I really knew what I wanted. Art by Jacqueline Ayer from [The Paper-Flower Tree]( That knowledge, Milner found, arises from breaking the inertia of mindless thought that governs much of our perception, which in turn shapes our entire experience of reality. She considers what it means, and what it takes, to apprehend the world with unclouded and receptive eyes: Blind thinking… could make me pretend I was being true to myself when really I was only being true to an infantile fear and confusion of situations; and the more confused it was the more it would call to its aid a sense of conviction. Yet for all its parade there was as much in common between its certainties and the fundamental sense of my own happiness as between the windy flappings of a newspaper in the gutter and the poise of a hovering kestrel. And only by experience of both, by digging down deep enough and watching sincerely enough, could I be sure of recognizing the difference. By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most widely aware. So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension…. Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs. And, by finding that in order to be more and more aware I had to be more and more still, I had not only come to see through my own eyes instead of at second hand, but I had also finally come to discover what was the way of escape from the imprisoning island of my own self-consciousness. Complement the uncommonly penetrating [A Life of One’s Own]( with Hermann Hesse on [the most important habit for living with presence]( E.E. Cummings on [being unafraid to feel]( and Maurice Sendak’s forgotten debut — a magnificent [philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: Made inBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](