Anxiety works by anticipating and inhibiting. It says: Don’t do that, you’ll get hurt. Don’t do that, you’ll be disappointed. Don’t do that, you’ll embarrass yourself. Anxiety likes routine. It likes predictability. It likes knowing outcomes.

If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.

Words are our tools of resurrection.

There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.

It’s not been an easy year, but I’m so incredibly fortunate. Please enjoy my annual list of things I’ve learned.

What if we could handle the hard things better if we soaked up magic and wonder the rest of the time?

Wasting talent like yours is like burning a pile of money in front of a poorhouse. It’s cruel and it stinks.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway was that modern medicine does not really have a handle on when and how to treat the chronic diseases of aging that will likely kill most of us.

And, once that’s done, winning the peace, as they say, will be much more problematic than winning the war.

My young friend here is using a dull knife when a sharp one would be better.

She could protect him, or she could do what was right. But she was sure now that she could not do both.

Be you man or machine, death awaits us all.

Where the ice and the fire met the ice melted, and in the melting waters life appeared: the likeness of a person bigger than worlds, huger than any giant there will be or has ever been. This was neither male, nor was it female, but was both at the same time. This creature was the ancestor of all the giants, and it called itself Ymir.

Live in a crisis long enough and it just becomes normal.

Old men always think they know better than everyone else, even when the world has long since changed around them.

When a shark offers up a pearl, be wary of its teeth. My father liked to tell me that when we were sailing, though I found this lesson most often applied on land.

The cult of the self prioritizes the needs of the individual while disregarding the needs of others.

The story of a century of life.