Care Deeply with a light touch
Vicissitudes.
I’ve always loved that word. It seems onomatopoeic. You can hear the ups and downs of change and variation in there, and the pain of all that jolting. Just when things are going so…this other thing comes along. It does make sense that we’re so heavily wired for safety and security, and are therefore resistant to change and the challenges it brings. Because survival, right? Be safe, be secure, keep things the same, survive.
Ah, but life doesn’t cooperate with that instinct. It’s right there in the definition of vicissitude in the American Heritage Dictionary: “the quality of being changeable; mutability.”
One choice when the deep drive to be safe and secure meets up with the mutability of all of life is just to say, “F— it, I don’t care,” but the damn thing is, if you’re human, you cannot help caring. And that’s one of life’s massive conundrums.
When we started magazine and , I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was crazy to start a magazine in the internet age (and many others agreed). People protested. “You folks need to do this. Someone will do it, and it shouldn’t be Martha Stewart. She knows nothing about mindfulness.” My arm was twisted right into doing it, along with several others as foolish as I was. It was so very complicated and so very hard. I’d worked on magazines all my adult life. I loved them, but I was never in charge. Each issue has hundreds of little and big elements, and the little ones are as hard as the big ones,
