How to Change Your Life

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
by Maria Popova

Don’t try to wash
your tired hands
clean from the bloodshed
of your private wars.
Just unclench the fist
that has come to feel like home
and let the story slip
between your trembling fingers
into the river of time,
silver and indifferent.
You may have to kneel
for days
       or decades
in a pool of silence
blue and lonely as a heron
but it will be there,
the small green stone
lying at the bottom
lustrous with a peace
       larger than joy.
When you rise,
kiss the tombstone
of your past
and step barefoot
into the garden of the future,
the garden of infinitely forking paths
in which any flower can be yours,
       any one at all.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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