The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.
From Kathryn Schulz
If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.
Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.
The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.
The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.
If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.
Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people's errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.
We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.
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