#Gentle Persistence

Welcoming Bold Beginnings with Gentle Persistence

Sappho’s line pairs two virtues that can seem opposed: boldness and gentleness. To “welcome” bold beginnings is to say yes to the moment when something new asks for courage—an idea, a relationship, a voyage, a poem.

Answering Fear with Kierkegaard’s Gentle Persistence

Kierkegaard urges us to meet fear by acknowledging it plainly, not by staging a heroic refusal. In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), he describes anxiety as the 'dizziness of freedom': a vertigo that signals possibility rat...