Hindsight is how we connect the dots that figure our lives. To look back on even a single year is to see clearly the contour of who we are in its points of attention and priority. “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is how we spend our lives.” How we spend our minds is our primary purchase on our days.

In the annual hindsight ritual of distilling the “best” of The Marginalian, here is a Venn diagram of the most read pieces and those I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide — a lovely reminder that we read the same way we love: with ideas about what is best as different as the minds that carry them.

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An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

Read it here.

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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

Read it here.

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Love Anyway

Read it here.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Read it here.

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But We Had Music

Read it here.

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Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

Read it here.

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The Universe in Verse Book

Read it here.

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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Read it here.

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A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Read it here.

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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

Read it here.

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The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

Read it here.

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A Lighthouse for Dark Times

Read it here.

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Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge

Read it here.

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The Pleasure of Being Left Alone

Read it here.

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Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Read it here.

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Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

Read it here.

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Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent

Read it here.

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How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Read it here.

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Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World

Read it here.

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Let the Last Thing Be Song

Read it here.

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A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

Read it here.