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Star in Starting Over

Stories and ideas about resilience and how to actually grow stronger through the difficult stuff.

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The Art of Losing Well

6 min readSep 27, 2020

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A backpacker stands in front of a forest shrouded in fog
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Where can I be / That I will not find loss?
- Miguel Hernandez

Early in lockdown, when the bookshops and libraries were shut, I ordered a small stack of used books online. Like many, I was looking for entertainment and distraction. Art can be a great escape from the serious business of life.

Yet somehow within my selection, I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion — a non-fiction account of the fragmented moments and memories that made up the year following husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death. Not exactly a read you’d choose to help you get away from the emotions of 2020.

I chose it because I’d come across her writing in fragments and wanted to read something from her fully. It’s still perhaps a strange thing to seek out writing about loss and grief.

But as much as art can help us escape, it is also a way that we process, understand, and connect to one another across the full, rich, complicated, difficult spectrum of human experience.

Indeed, a function of art identified by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in In Art as Therapy is sorrow: “One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is teach us how to suffer more…

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Star in Starting Over
Star in Starting Over

Published in Star in Starting Over

Stories and ideas about resilience and how to actually grow stronger through the difficult stuff.

Carley Centen
Carley Centen

Written by Carley Centen

Exploring why we do what we do in love and work for those curious to understand more about themselves, others, and the world. More: http://lnk.bio/aNXQ

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