Star Wars Co-Stars, Gift-Giving and More: Must-Read Links

Every week on The Wisdom Daily, we bring you our favorite reads from sources around the web. Topics on this week’s list include wisdom from a Star Wars veteran, the best tip on gift-giving, what we should know about the data imprint we leave and more. Whatever’s transpiring in your life, may you find the words of wisdom you need.

 

1. Age-Old Wisdom

“I’m the older one, and, you know, I don’t relate to myself as that but when I look at them I know that I am. Not just because of physical reasons. I always want to say to younger people, ‘Pay attention. This isn’t going to happen a lot. And keep a diary.'”

– Carrie Fisher, on working with young co-stars (Wall Street Journal)

 

2. The Gift of Love

“Obligatory gift-giving isn’t surrendering yourself to someone; it’s surrendering to consumerism and the status quo. This doesn’t mean there’s something necessarily wrong with buying a gift for someone. But we needn’t fool ourselves by associating that gift with true love–love doesn’t work that way. [Think] of love as an action verb. If we want to show our love for others, we must do so with our actions.”

– Joshua Fields Millburn, “Minimalist Gift-Giving” (TheMinimalists.com)

 

3. Green Thumb

“Identifying plants, especially weeds, requires a fine-tuned sensitivity to texture and detail, to the serration of leaf edges and the raised cilia of slender stems, all of which is easily overlooked. Though I’m no stranger to Golden Gate Park, it occurred to me that I was seeing (and touching) some of these plants for the very first time.”

– Natalie So, “Taste of the Wild” (Orion)

 

4. Data Check

“Our lives are surrounded by data and data gathering that (when discussed at all) is marketed as being in service to us, but isn’t. The data we constantly produce is mostly hidden from us, and we don’t think about the consequences until it’s pulled out of the sea of big data and suddenly leveraged against us…Even if accurate, it is never the whole story.”

– Ben Valentine, “Data” (SFAQ magazine)

 

5. Home for the Holidays

“Don’t let the small people – even if they’re in your own family – rob you of the experience of being open and free. There’s always going to be siblings or relations who don’t love you because bigness as a person makes them feel small. I think there is something really beautiful about trying, and small people don’t want you to keep trying. They want you to settle for life’s limitations.”

– Hilton Als, “What It Means to Be Hopeful Despite the World” (LitHub.com)

 

6. The Power of Words

“Locked as we are within a given body, temperament, and time, literature can transport us, can transmute textual experience into an expansion of inwardness, an amplification of consciousness.”

– Dustin Illingworth, reviewing A General Theory of Oblivion (The Quarterly Conversation)

 

Image: Video still from Good Morning America

 

 

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