make a world tolerable . . .
Anais Nin on happiness. (The Commonplace Project #3)
The Commonplace Project is a daily post based on Ray Bradbury’s advice to aspiring writers: read a poem, a short story, and an essay everyday for 1000 days. These posts start with a quote and go wherever the rabbit hole leads. Follow The 1000 Day MFA so you don’t miss a thing.
“When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.” — Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 5
From 1947 through her death in 1977, Anais Nin had bicoastal, bigamist marriages. One husband in Los Angeles, one in New York.
Nin is speaking of writing in the quote above, of making art, but I wonder if this worldview — that making the world tolerable for herself made it tolerable for others — eased her mind as she travelled from coast to coast with what she called her lie box.
Neither husband knew about the other until after death. You can read more about Nin’s remarkable double life in Apprenticed to Venus, written by her assistant Tristine Ranier.
What do you do, to make a world tolerable for yourself?
Spend a few minutes today listening to Nin as commencement speaker. She speaks about centering herself to overcome hardship.
This Nin poem affects me. I struggle with poetry, I always have, but I am drawn to the way she can create such a vivid picture and strong feeling with so few words.
Risk
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom.
You can read some of Nin’s short stories here. She’s known for erotica . Her stories are breathtakingly beautiful and often difficult to read.
Journal prompt: What are you willing to risk to make a world tolerable?
Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.