Another World is Probable

Another World is Probable

By Another World is ProbableReligion & Spirituality
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Another World is Probable episodes

  • The Gap Between Where We Are and Where We’d Like to Be

    In the process of coaching me through transformation, my chiropractor said there is a space between who I am and who I’d like to become. And in that space, I need to breathe in trust and creativity. I don’t need to know how to get where I’d like to go, I just need to trust I’ll get there and remember to be creative. More in this week's post.


    4 min
  • Savoring Simple Pleasures
    I’m finishing up a housesit in Berkeley and typing this outside while birds chirp and the sun warms my face. A leaf just fell on my keyboard. Earlier today, a rainbow prism sparkled in my bedroom and lit up a nature scene on the wall so it seemed like the rainbow could have been part of the picture. I tried to capture it to no avail. Just a moment for me, I guess. I forget it’s the small things, the pedestrian things that fill my heart to bursting.
    4 min
  • Reconnecting to Hope

    I’ve been writing about transformation so much lately because that’s the phase of life that I’m in, but the shadow side is I keep bracing for the worst-case scenario. It’s perfectly reasonable, sensical, even, but that also means my hope for things working out or going the way I’d like is at a nadir. Hope is so tricky.


    5 min
  • The Path of the Pearl
    I’m at the point where most of my friends are talking about getting older, and they’re grieving the fact they no longer have the same sense of possibility about their future like they did when they were younger. The essence is, “The world is no longer my oyster.” But have you actually thought about that expression?
    4 min
  • The Constant Companion

    I keep thinking about a song I first heard more than 20 yearsago called “Eg Ser.” Unfortunately, there’s no publicly available version I can share, but you can purchase the albumit came from. And YouTube offers numerous options, just not the one I’m thinking of. Anyway, “Eg Ser” is a Norwegian song, and the English translation I like best is:

     I can see that you are tired, but I cannot walk all thesteps for you

    They are yours to walk, but I can walk them with you

    And I will walk them with you

     

    I can see that you’re in pain, but I cannot cry any tearsfor you

    They are yours to cry, but I can cry them with you

    And I will cry them with you

    The song is what I imagine God, the Divine Beloved, Higher Power, whatever word you want to use, would say to us.

    5 min
  • The Power of Poetry

    You may already know this, but AI safety researcher Mrinank Sharma resigned recently. That’s not really news in and of itself – people leave their positions all the time. No, the newsworthy part is that he left Anthropic, best known for its chatbot Claude, to study, drumroll please: poetry. Yes, poetry.The context is what makes the whole thing fascinating.


    5 min
  • Keep it Simple Even When You Want to Make It Complicated
    When life gets stressful or complicated, I notice a tendency in me (and in some people I know) to make things even more stressful, even more complicated. I don’t know why exactly, but I suspect it’s because when people are scared, they start scanning for threats and want to resolve them all. It feels protective to try to fix everything. I don’t know about you, but for me, that only makes things worse. More in this week's post about what "keeping it simple" means and practical suggestions for doing so.
    5 min
  • Being the Storm

    You know how people say most of the things they’re afraid of never happen? The opposite is true for me – most of the things I’ve feared have happened. Not the fleeting, “I’m scared I’ll miss my flight” things, but the “I’m scared I’ll be broken into” things. The recurring fears, the ones that cause my stomach to roil and my chest to constrict. But I've learned something as a result.


    5 min
  • Maybe the World Doesn't Need to be 'Saved'
    Something that’s on my mind a lot is the desire for one-and-done. I want the magic pill, the silver bullet, the “do this once and everything is fixed” solution. I see this in myself but I also see it in the rhetoric we use when talking about the world writ large. “Save the world,” we say, as if the planet is in need of rescuing. That’s what “saving” means, by the way, to rescue from impending danger. Here’s the thing, though: When in human history have we as a species not been in impending danger? Seriously, when?
    6 min
  • The Ugly Truth vs. a Beautiful Lie

    Something I heard recently: “No one really wants the truth. Not when the truth is ugly, and the liar is beautiful.” Yeeees. The truth is ugly, uncomfortable. It often asks something of us. It forces us to look at something we’d rather not look at because it challenges our worldview or a belief we have about someone or ourselves. It’s much easier, in some ways, to keep living a lie.


    5 min

About Another World is Probable

From the publisher's feed

I blog every Monday at www.anotherworldisprobable.com and this podcast is me reading those posts.