On Being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation.

The Templeton Foundation harnesses the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind.

Learn about cutting edge research on the science of generosity, gratitude, and purpose at

Templeton.org forward slash discoveries.

Maria Papova has called brain pickings, her invention and labor of love, a human-powered discovery

engine for interestingness.

What she really delivers to hundreds of thousands of people each day is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort presented in new-fashioned digital ways.

She doesn't merely curate, she cross-pollinates between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the scholarly and the experiential.

And now she's written a magnificent first book, Figuring.

We revisit my 2015 conversation with her

on what it means to lead a good life,

intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.

You know, we never see the world exactly as it is.

We see it as we hope it will be or we fear it might be and we spend our lives going through a sort of

modified stages of grief about that realization and we deny it and then we argue with it and

we despair over it but eventually and this is my belief

We come to see it not as despairing but as vitalizing

We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Being.

From a weekly email to seven friends in 2006, brain pickings became a website, a

Twitter feed, a weekly digest, and much more and has been included in the Library of Congress permanent web

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