Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us,” Mary Oliver wrote in contemplating how habit gives shape to our inner lives. “Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar,” William James asserted a century earlier in his foundational treatise on the psychology of habit. But if our habits incline more toward vice more toward virtue, what does it take to reconfigure our scarring patterns?
That is what William Shakespeare — another seer of elemental truth and keen observer of human psychology — examined three centuries earlier in Hamlet: the work of weighing not merely to change or not to change, but how to change. In eleven exquisitely insightful lines of blank verse, he frames the central premise of what would come to be known, a dozen generations later,…
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