Spiritual Affirmations

This category makes one promise before any of the words: open to all paths, specific to none. Every line was designed that way. I can name it in the way that feels most true, or leave it unnamed, and the line works whether what you sense points to a religious tradition, an ancestral one, or nothing more definite than the ordinary strangeness of being alive.

The pull toward something larger, whether you call it awe, connection, the sacred, or nothing in particular, is a common thread of human experience. It turns up across belief systems and among people who hold none. These lines don’t try to settle what that pull points to. I am open to more than what I can currently perceive stays honest about the not-knowing instead of resolving it into an answer it can’t give you.

That openness runs in both directions. Someone who holds a specific faith and someone who holds none can read the same line and mean two different things by it, and both readings are intended. I am part of something continuous, something that existed before you and will continue after, doesn’t require any metaphysics to be true in the plainest sense. It only requires a family, a history, a place in time.

What these lines offer is steadiness. Naming a sense of connection, however you name it, tends to feel grounding for the people who reach for this category. Some days a line will speak to you right away; on others it will wait until you’re ready. Nothing here asks to be believed on a schedule.

Sources: Keltner & Haidt, Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion (Cognition and Emotion, 2003) · Yaden et al., The varieties of self-transcendent experience (Review of General Psychology, 2017).

You don’t need a doctrine, a practice, or even a settled opinion to use this category. You need a moment where the ordinary feels slightly larger than usual, and a line ready for it. I find the spiritual in ordinary things is meant to be read in that kind of moment, not scheduled around one.

Let the line stay as unnamed as your own sense of things. If I feel supported by something I can’t fully name is as far as you’d honestly go, stop there. The line isn’t asking you to go further, and neither should you.

If a line prompts a question rather than a feeling, let the question stand instead of chasing an answer. I hold my questions about existence with curiosity instead of dread describes the whole practice: staying with the question a little longer than usual, rather than resolving it before you move on.

These lines pair well with stillness rather than explanation: a walk, the few minutes before sleep, a window with something to look at. A home-screen widget can keep the line quietly in view for that kind of pause, without turning it into one more thing to accomplish.

Under a night sky, or any view suddenly larger than your usual field of attention, the moments that make I feel how vast the world is true before you’ve even reached for a word.

In the middle of an ordinary task, washing dishes or walking a familiar route, when it briefly and unexpectedly feels like more than the task. There is meaning in ordinary moments exists for that flicker.

In the harder moments too, uncertainty about where your life is headed, grief, waiting on news, when I trust that my life is moving even when I can’t feel it moving offers something to hold that doesn’t require knowing how the story ends.

In the presence of someone you love, in an unremarkable moment that somehow isn’t: a shared meal, a hand you’ve held a thousand times. The connection I feel to the people I love and to the natural world is itself a form of the sacred gives that moment a place to land instead of passing by unmarked.