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Melanie Kahl
http://www.melaniekahl.com
Reading his story is difficult but necessary. We need to learn things about our criminal justice system, about the legacy of racial bias in America and the way it can blind us to just and fair treatment of people.
“Fundamental Attribution Error.” The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.”
― Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
― Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
“Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.”
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
“I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.”
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
“We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth—tolerance—to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.”
― Becoming Wise Deluxe: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
― Becoming Wise Deluxe: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
“Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.”
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
― Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Melanie’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Melanie’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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