The conversations that change us rarely happen in the heat of the moment. They happen after the noise fades, when the room settles and someone finally says what they were afraid to say all along.

Thom Hartmann

Mar 18, 2026 (wisdomschool.com)

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Decades ago when I lived in suburban Atlanta I had a good friend who’d grown up in Japan but had been assigned by his Japanese company to our city. We’d met on a flight to Hong Kong and instantly struck it up, eventually getting together every month or so to explore the city and its uniquely American offerings from Western music to a plethora of restaurants.

One afternoon we were sitting together on the dock behind our house (we lived on a small lake) and our conversation sort of ran out of steam; we just sat together quietly for a few long minutes. I was starting to feel uncomfortable when he said:

“In my Japanese culture, sitting quietly with another person is one of the highest expressions of a deep friendship.”

It was an extraordinary learning moment for me. After all, some of the most important moments in life arrive quietly, after everyone else has stopped talking.

They happen when the argument has burned itself out, when the room empties, when the adrenaline fades and the performance ends. They happen late at night, in kitchens and living rooms, on long drives, during walks that weren’t planned to solve anything. They happen when no one is trying to win.

The noise comes first, of course; it always does.

Noise is urgency, explanation, defense, certainty. It’s the part of conversation that rushes to fill space, to justify positions, to make sure nothing vulnerable slips out unguarded. Noise is efficient: it gets things said quickly and establishes where people stand.

But it rarely gets to the truth.

Truth usually waits until the noise exhausts itself.

After the raised voices soften, after the clever arguments lose their edge, after the stories we tell about ourselves stop working quite as well, something else becomes possible. People slow down. They stop performing. And they begin to listen not just to each other, but to what’s been sitting underneath the words all along.

This is where real conversations live.

They aren’t always dramatic. Often they’re halting, imperfect, a little awkward. People speak in fragments. They revise sentences midstream. They admit things they didn’t intend to admit. The tone shifts from assertion to exploration.

Instead of “I’m right,” the subtext becomes “This is what I’m actually feeling.”

Modern life leaves very little room for this kind of exchange. Speed and visibility reward quick takes, decisive language, confident stances. Conversations are expected to conclude, to resolve, and to produce instant outcomes. Silence feels like failure; pauses feel uncomfortable.

So we rush past them.

We mistake resolution for understanding. We confuse agreement with intimacy. We leave conversations thinking something is settled when it’s only been covered over.

The most important conversations don’t feel tidy. They feel unfinished in a different kind of way because they open space rather than close it. They leave you quieter, not louder. They don’t give you a talking point; they give you something to sit with.

Children know this instinctively. They often ask their hardest questions right before sleep, when defenses are down and time loosens its grip. They sense that truth needs softness to surface. Adults often forget this and try to force clarity under fluorescent lights and tight schedules.

But emotional truth doesn’t respond well to pressure.

It emerges when people feel safe enough to be uncertain. When they don’t have to protect an image. When they trust that they won’t be punished for saying the wrong thing.

This is why some of the most meaningful conversations only happen after loss, illness, or crisis. When life strips away urgency and exposes what actually matters, people suddenly speak differently. They say things they’ve been circling for years. They regret waiting, but they also recognize why they did.

The noise had been protecting them.

Learning to stay for the quiet part of conversation is a form of wisdom. It means resisting the urge to fill every silence, to solve every tension, to steer dialogue toward comfort. It means allowing pauses to stretch long enough for something honest to emerge.

This doesn’t mean forcing vulnerability or demanding confession: instead, it means creating conditions where truth isn’t rushed.

It might look like asking one fewer question and listening longer to the answer. It might look like letting a moment pass without commentary. It might look like saying, “I don’t know yet” and meaning it.

The quiet part of conversation often reveals what people actually need, not what they’ve been arguing about. Beneath many conflicts are unspoken fears, griefs, and longings that never found a place to land. Once they’re named, the shape of the problem changes.

Sometimes the conversation doesn’t lead to agreement. Sometimes it leads to understanding instead, and that’s often enough.

Wisdom values this distinction. It knows that not every difference can be resolved, but many can be humanized. When people feel seen, even disagreement becomes less corrosive.

In a noisy world, choosing to wait for the quiet is an act of patience. It requires tolerance for discomfort, ambiguity, and unfinishedness. It asks you to trust that what matters most won’t always announce itself loudly.

But again and again, experience confirms it.

The conversations that change us rarely happen in the heat of the moment. They happen after the noise stops, when the room settles, when the performance drops away, and when someone finally says what they were afraid to say all along.

Wisdom learns to recognize that moment. And, when it comes, it knows to stay.

Rebecca Solnit

The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment

Work continues on the construction of the ballroom at the White House on 9 December in Washington DC, where the East Wing once stood. Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

Sun 12 Apr 2026 (TheGuardian.com)

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country … We’re fighting wars … It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.

The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn around might be why the nation seems relatively stable, and why reactions have been inadequate; the full impact is yet to come. At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump. He has started a war for no particular reason – the word fun was deployed – that is further undermining the global economy he already badly damaged with his ever-fluctuating tariffs. Enterprises need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so. In much the same way, threats that aren’t carried out, talks that never took place, administration actions that the courts reverse become forms of political whiplash, jerking everyone and everything around, a show of force that is also a show of incoherence and inconsistency.

We need to talk about the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality

But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.

It’s also evident that Trump wanted to come back into office in part to revenge himself on a country that in 2020 had rejected him, the way an ex-partner sometimes becomes a murderous stalker of the woman who dared to escape him, and specifically revenge himself on the individuals and institutions that had prosecuted him for crimes or otherwise thwarted him. Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.

But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that is the universe. It is a hollowing, a withering, a deadening of the spirit that can manifest as burnout or creative block, as a breakdown or a midlife crisis, or as the persistent low-frequency din of despair.

Often, it comes in the wake of some great achievement.

Often, it strikes at 4AM.

Always, you simply have to live through it until you glance over your shoulder staggered by the recognition that it had been a vital period of recalibration and regeneration — fallow ground for the rewilding of your spirit.

Brian Eno

In 1995, shortly after a major retrospective of his work had been released, Brian Eno hit that point of pointlessness. In a stirring entry from A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (public library), he writes:

After several months of work, I slowly grind down and it all starts to seem like “my job.” I do it, and I probably don’t do it too badly, but I find myself working entirely from the momentum of deadlines and commitments, as though the ideas are not springing forth but being painfully squeezed out. At the back of my mind, unadmitted to, are some nasty thoughts swimming about in the darkness. They whisper things like: “You’ve had it” and “You’re out of steam.”

Experience has shown me that, when I reach this point, all the distractions I can muster are only postponements. It’s time to face up to total, unmitigated despair.

I sometimes do this by going alone on a “holiday” — though that word scarcely conveys the crashing tedium involved, for I usually choose somewhere uneventful, take nothing with me, and then rely on the horror of my own company to drive me rapidly to the edge of the abyss.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle:

It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for?/ What’s the bloody point?/ I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next/ I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice — apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes — that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

By the end of the year, Eno had pioneered generative music and had traveled to war-torn Bosnia, across the border from where I was growing up, to lead music therapy workshops for orphaned children in the grounds of a shelled primary school.

Half a century earlier, traveling through these same troubled lands in the interlude between two world wars, Rebecca West had written:

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

It is, in the end, the taste of aliveness that saves us. But we must choose to raise the cup, may even have to make it. A generation after Albert Camus observed that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Eno captures the resuscitation of the creative spirit — that terrifying, transcendent transmutation of despair into a defense of joy:

The process involves reaching the point of not trying any more to dig inside, but just letting go, ceding control… And at the point of giving up I’m suddenly alive again. It’s like jumping resignedly into the abyss and discovering that you can just drift dreamily on air currents.

[…]

This feeling, of sheer mad joy at the world, is ageless. It’s the fresh, clear stream at the bottom of the abyss.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a person but as a projection, mistaking for intimacy its myriad illusions — admiration, adoration, desire. It is always dangerous and damaging, and we are almost never aware — or never willing to listen to the parts of us who are aware — that it is happening until the delirious turbine of the dynamic has spat us out with a concussing confusion and a dislocated heart.

We use each other all the time, of course, in benign ways — to draw inspiration from another mind, to see the world with another set of eyes, to broaden the repertoire of the heart. But such uses are more akin to the relationship between symbionts: two differently specialized organisms nurturing each other with their strengths. The damage happens when the relationship takes on the form of parasite-host or predator-prey, when the user devours the used and discards them after their use.

Art from Birds by Brian Wildsmith

It can be hard to see these dangerous dynamics from the inside of our own lives, but we can shine a sidewise gleam on them through the lives of others, real or imagined. The great gift of all the works of the imagination — literature, theater, film — is that they hand us our experience back to ourselves, annealed and clarified, unfiltered by self-judgment or pride. This is why, as Zadie Smith observes in her magnificent essay collection Dead and Alive (public library), the people about whom such works are most curious are “the conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the wilfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided” — the people almost all of us have at some point loved, or been.

In one of the essays, anchored in the movie Tár, she paints a haunting portrait of one such dynamic: The protagonist, a narcissistic and image-conscious composer, has had some passionate involvement, never clearly detailed, with another woman and has terminated it abruptly, leaving her lover reeling with heartache and confusion, gaslighting her and giving the world the impression it never happened in order to rinse the knowledge that she has done harm:

First, like any bad guy, [Tár] attempts to cover her tracks. We watch her emailing everyone she knows in the music community to warn them of an unstable young woman called Krista Taylor, who may be spreading untrue rumours about her. Then checking Twitter to see if said rumours have broken out into the world. We begin to get the picture. Krista is a young, aspiring conductor. Tár was her mentor. Also (secretly) her lover — although only briefly… We never meet Krista, but from our glimpses of the many pleading emails she sends Tár’s assistant, we gather that an affair that proved seismic for Krista barely registered on her older lover’s radar… For Tár, it’s as if it never happened at all. She is already on to the next distraction.

It is one of the most discomposing experiences in life, to have felt a profound connection with someone and then to discover that it had been trivial to them — a fleeting fantasy, a frivolous experiment, a use. Smith writes:

There’s a word for this behaviour: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can.

Tár’s instrumentalism begins in actions but completes itself in words as she recasts the facts of her choices as another’s figments, accusing her lover of having imagined it all. Language itself becomes an instrument of manipulation.

In the introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of his diaries, Brian Eno addresses this obliquely in observing the same dynamic that plays out on the scale of the personal playing out on the scale of the political, the cultural, the civilizational:

This era has been called post-truth because language is increasingly intended to be instrumental — that is, intended to bring about an effect — rather than accurate.

It is not incidental that instrumentalizers always use emotionally charged language in their mendacity, preying on our human tendency to mistake the strength of the emotion for the strength of the evidence. And yet, in the end, the user is the true victim of her use: The instrumentalizer is left with the emptiness of her own incapacity for connection. We find Tár “stripped bare at last, with no theory, no defence, no prefabricated arguments,” faced with the aftermath of her lies, facing the final truth:

There is no redemption. Nothing to be said or done except feel it.

The paradox, and perhaps the redemption, is that the user always loses more than the used, for one has chosen erasure and the other is left with life — experience that is, however painful, lived. The person who is truly alive will always choose experience over erasure, for experience is the pulse-beat of aliveness while erasure — the disavowal of experience by means of denial, dissociation, and deceit — is always a living death.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book.

Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William Blake. Walt Whitman considered them our greatest teachers in living with authenticity. For Hermann Hesse, the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees.

But far beyond the realm of human-wrested metaphor, trees are sovereign marvels of nature, dazzling in the native poetics of their biological and ecological reality. Their photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. Chlorophyll — which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood — allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse.

Trees hungrily absorb red light — the longer wavelengths of the visible spectrum — but the neighboring infrared passes straight through them. Under the canopy, where fierce competition for these wavelengths rages, red light is depleted and infrared dominates. Even though trees cannot absorb infrared, they, unlike humans, can “see” it with chemical photoreceptors called phytochromes. The ratio between the two types of light tells trees how much to grow and in which direction, with phytochromes acting as on-off switches for growth. An abundance of red light under uncrowded skies turns the switch on, signaling to the tree to spread its branches wide into any gaps in the canopy; in the crowded shade where infrared dominates, the switch turns off, reducing the growth of side branches and prompting the tree to grow straight up, reaching for the open sky above.

Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

As summer recedes into autumn, cooling the air and dimming the light, the alchemy of transmuting light into growth becomes too metabolically costly for deciduous trees. Chlorophyll begins to break down, revealing the other pigments that had been there all along — the yellow of xanthophyll, the orange of carotenoids, the reds and purples of anthocyanins, turning the canopy into an aria of color.

Meanwhile, the layer of cells by which the stem holds on to the branch is fraying. Leaves begin to let go — a process known as abscission.

But as they denude the branches, they reveal the subtle nubs of the new buds that had been forming all summer, readying next spring’s growth.

Skeletal and pulmonary, winter trees rise into the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience.

Winter Moon at Toyamagahara, 1931 — one of Japanese artist Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage woodblocks of trees. (Available as a print.)

OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Crossing the River

A man needed to cross a wide river but had no boat. Instead of asking for one or finding a way across, he wrote the word boat on a piece of paper, placed it carefully on his head, and stepped into the water. At first, he felt secure, believing the name alone could carry him across. But soon, he began to sink, struggling in the current. A passerby rescued him, shaking his head at the folly. The lesson was clear: words or appearances alone cannot accomplish a task; only true effort and faith can carry one through challenges. Spiritual teachings are the same—reciting sacred names or formulas without sincere devotion or inner transformation will not bring liberation. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886) Indian Mystic and Saint AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

(Image from JeffBrown.co)

“Sometimes people walk away from love because it is so beautiful that it terrifies them. Sometimes they leave because the connection shines a bright light on their dark places and they are not ready to work them through. Sometimes they run away because they are not developmentally prepared to merge with another- they have more individuation work to do first. Sometimes they take off because love is not a priority in their lives- they have another path and purpose to walk first. Sometimes they end it because they prefer a relationship that is more practical than conscious, one that does not threaten the ways that they organize reality. Because so many of us carry shame, we have a tendency to personalize love’s leavings, triggered by the rejection and feelings of abandonment. But this is not always true. Sometimes it has nothing to do with us. Sometimes the one who leaves is just not ready to hold it safe. Sometimes they know something we don’t- they know their limits at that moment in time. Real love is no easy path- readiness is everything. May we grieve loss without personalizing it. May we learn to love ourselves in the absence of the lover.”  

~ Jeff Brown

Jeff Brown is a Toronto-based author, former criminal lawyer, and psychotherapist known for developing “Soulshaping” and founding the Soulshaping Institute and Enrealment Press. His work focuses on “grounded spirituality,” advocating for an integration of emotional healing and human experience, rather than escaping into purely spiritual realms. He is the author of several books, including Soulshaping and Grounded Spirituality.  Psychology Today +3

(Image from LitHub.com)

“It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

–Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Sir Tom Stoppard was a British playwright and screenwriter. He wrote for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covered the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical bases of society. Wikipedia

Born 1937, Zlín, Czechia

Died November 29, 2025 (age 88 years), Dorset, United Kingdom

(Image from Goodreads.com)

~ Hafiz

Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī (Persian: خواجه شمس‌‌الدین محمد حافظ شیرازی), known by his pen name Hafez (حافظ Ḥāfeẓ lit. ’the memorizer’ or ‘the keeper’; 1325–1390) or Hafiz,^[1] also known by his nickname lesān-al-ḡayb (‘the tongue of the unseen’),^[2] was a Persianlyric poet^[3][4] whose collected works are regarded by many Iranians as one of the highest pinnacles of Persian literature. His works are often found in the homes of Persian speakers, who learn his poems by heart and use them as everyday proverbs and sayings. His life and poems have become the subjects of much analysis, commentary, and interpretation, influencing post-14th century Persian writing more than any other Persian author.^[5][6] (Wikipedia.org)

The harvest belonged to the powerful. Those who labored were left to bend for scraps. The Gleaners (1857), Jean-François Millet.