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Serving

Leo Tolstoy
September 1995 (Vol. VIII, No. 8)

It is within my power either to serve God, or not to serve. Serving, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

~ Leo Tolstoy
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Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others... you could expand... to so many other forms of art, including the unheralded art of living our everyday lives, and the creation and maintenance of connection. What does it look like to cherish other people? To cultivate our empathy for one another, even when our own experiences are so disparate? If a burning world is our lived reality, how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?

...But we do have to figure out how to create narratives — amongst people who hold very similar beliefs, but also with those who do not... All of those ideologies are, at heart, antidotes to the deep sadness at the heart of everyday life. We need better ones.
~ Anne Helen Petersen from “The World Has Always Been On Fire. What Now?" in her Substack newsletter; May 28, 2025
 

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