themarginalian.org · 20 hours ago

How to Say “Yes” to Life – the Marginalian

When a piece of clay refused to center on the wheel, Maria Popova stopped fighting it - and watched it become something she could never have willed into existence. That moment of surrender became a meditation on how much of human suffering is, at its root, a refusal to accept life as it actually is: "all things not pliant enough to bend will break," she writes, and the insight holds whether one is shaping clay, tending a relationship, or simply facing the morning. Drawing on Baldwin's observation that "the great difficulty is to say Yes to life," Popova traces a quiet revolution in her own thinking - away from control and toward collaboration, with material, with change, with loss. The vessels she made from this practice she calls "yessels," and the poem that emerged alongside them asks nothing heroic of the reader: only to look in the mirror and say yes.