"But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."

--Dorothea speaking in Middlemarch by George Eliot


Periodically I re-read my old journals. One artifact that I dig up frequently in their pages in the period from 2005-2008 is sentences describing life philosophies that I’ve written out for myself.

It’s clear from these journal entries that I do not have a life philosophy—a guiding principle that gets you out of bed in the morning and steers you through your day to its satisfying conclusion—but that I love the idea of having one.

During this period, I thought up a life philosophy that appeared to feel very convincing on June 3, 2005, and then a new one, different and equally convincing, on March 8, 2006, and then a third one over a year later.  By 2008, I’d concluded that life philosophies were things that found you, and if you were lucky, you’d become conscious of what it is that is guiding you, as Dorothea is. So I stopped looking for a life philosophy but remained intrigued by people who have them.

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Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com