Growth

If You Want to Live a Richer Life, Explore the Border Between Your Comfort and Your Discomfort

There’s More Than One Hot Take on Life

I do the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle every day.

I don’t try to get a perfect score, I just aim for 90%. I do the puzzle to take my brain’s vitals, the way I’d take my blood pressure. It tells me whether I’m rested or in a funk, and gets the gears turning before coffee.

Sometimes I cheat.

When I get stuck I string together letters into plausible-sounding words, and once in a while, I end up making up a word that actually exists. I feel like a champ when I do that, as though I’ve somehow beat the system. I then look up the word to learn what it actually means, to do penance for the cheating.

One made-up word was ecotone.

An ecotone is a region of transition between two ecosystems — say the edge of a pond and a meadow. And because it incorporates both, it supports more, and more varied life than either.

That holds true for all borderlands.

The mash-up of cultures at the border between two countries is often more interesting than either. There’s a creative fusion that happens across all the things, not just…