{"id":12180,"date":"2026-01-03T20:13:54","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T00:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-poem-for-beginnings-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T20:13:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T00:13:54","slug":"a-poem-for-beginnings-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-poem-for-beginnings-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem for Beginnings \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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By Maria Popova<\/h3>\n
\n

You know the feeling, its scorching urgency, its icy impossibility: to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience and snip out the wrong turn, the wrong word, the wrong investment of the heart. <\/p>\n

It can\u2019t be done without bending the universe, without undoing the second law of thermodynamics<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Our relationship to time is the single most important relationship of our lives, the substrate upon which all other relationships graft. To keep it from being one of bondage, it is useful to imagine how time might work on other worlds<\/a>, because these thought experiments give us scale models of different ways of orienting to time in this world. It is useful to remember that we can always begin again. (\u201cOur very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning,\u201d wrote the poet and philosopher John O\u2019Donohue, whose time ran out too soon, in his superb meditation on beginnings<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

And so, a poem:<\/p>\n