Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to… - Susan Cain

It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.

Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life — and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy — which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.

"I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion." They were full of phrases like "radical humility" and "quiet fortitude.